Quick question ... where would one grab the latest and most proper QuakeC compiler for Windows? 

FrikQCC on Inside3D, I guess. 

OK, thanks. Yeah, this must be better than what I was using in the past because it found 3 bugs in my existing source. :P 

In my searches for QuakeC stuff, I came across an amazing quote:

"I consider things like autocomplete to be lazy. and I don't like feeling lazy when I code. I don't use an IDE... I use windows explorer, and win32pad for zeh typing."

I hope the meteor didn't hurt him too badly when it slammed into the earth, wiping out his species. Geezus... 

due to excessive carpal tunnel syndrome. 

"I consider things like autocomplete to be lazy. and I don't like feeling lazy when I code. I don't use an IDE... I use windows explorer, and win32pad for zeh typing."

Aspergers is a hell of a thing. 

Willem, there's also a compiler called FTEQCC which has a few more features than FrikQCC so depending on how technical you want to get it's worth a look. The main additions I can recall are c-style macros, field name aliasing and inline assembly support so it's for the esoteric kinda stuff. 

Thanks Preach. I'll stick with the basic Frik for now. I'm not looking to do anything nutty, just making my life a little easier in places. 

wait... CAN you use an ide for quakec?? i've been using textpad because i had too but... damn man, a real ide that loads all the files up and lets me search through the entire thing, jump to function defs etc... would be awesome... 

the shadowsense setting works a lot like the anglesense setting for lights.
it affects how quickly a face becomes dark based on the angle the sunlight2 is hitting it.
this only has an effect if there are many faces that are on slightly different planes (ie: tri soup terrain).
on a flat floor, with walls around, shadowsense has very little effect.
ex:
shadowsense 0.0
shadowsense 0.9

regarding less shadows from main sun, yes, i agree it is an issue.
the problem is that the fake GI is too dark in general, which means i had to use brighter sunlight2 settings which hides the shadows.

maybe some more tests with higher number of suns with even lower sunlight2 or something may yield better results... 

You should totally make a catalogue of screenshots documenting how settings change the looks. That would be so super useful. 

i've been thinking of doing something like that. i'm just a lazy bum. :( 

necros

Yeah, you definitely can! I set it up as per these instructions ...

http://ouns.nexuizninjaz.com/dev:programming_introduction#working_with_the_code

I think that's the right link, it's not loading at the moment for whatever reason. But basically it's using the Code:Blocks IDE and installing a QuakeC plugin. I still compile from outside the environment but it gives you stuff like syntax highlighting, searching through the entire project, intellisense, etc. 

thanks for pointing me to that! i had no idea! :D 

been out of the loop for a while. Does anyone know any ways of tricking Vis into thinking an area is not visible even when it normally would be? For reasons that are fairly fiddly to explain, it doesn't matter if it causes a whopping great HOM. 

Only two things I can think of are:
* Using the version of vis that lets you set a maximum visibility range - afraid I can't remember which one this is but if you're interested I'm sure someone can supply it.

* Using skip brushes to obscure it, but then that does actually create a physical block as well as a vis block.

In theory the quake bsp format should support this kind of weird vis behaviour but I don't know of any examples in practice. 

i would use a real directional sun in addition to the global illumination -- the latter is just for filling in light that would be coming from the rest of the sky. if you have a lack of shadows it's the lack of a real sun :) 

It would help if you described better exactly what it's for. I would say there's little you can do to trick VIS. Skip works if you don't mind a HOM (or grey/red void view for those who use gl_clear), but this sounds like a very hacky solution, unless you're maybe thinking about using it in a hint brush sort of way, masked with a func_illusionary or something like that.

Has anyone every experimented with that maximum visibility range thing? Does it even work? 

Tried to use it, its inconsistent at best, random at worst. Cant use it like q3map2. Afair hvis has it. 

necros: that link to the multithreading vis doesn't work...

negke - hard to describe. I just wondered if i could sticky-tape up some bullshit I did caused by years of working with engines where you have to do all the geometry culling manually. It's no biggie - I can easily rework my layout to play nicer with Quake. 

Cheers for the info. max vis distance sounds interesting but i can't really think of it being useful in my map. 

try this one: http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/tools/windows/wvis_20100117.7z

sorry, i didn't check when i posted it. 

nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

That one has a bug, http://www.quaddicted.com/files/tools/wvis_20100119.7z is the right one. 

negke was bugging me about how I keep buggy and outdated files to which I replied that I do and that someone should write a nice guide on http://www.quaddicted.com/tools/map_compilers instead 

i knew the date was wrong (17 instead of 19) but i figured it wasn't anything important. :x