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 

http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/tools/windows/level_editors/wvis_final.zip 

that should probably be moved into /upload/files/tools/windows/misc/ instead of /upload/files/tools/windows/level_editors

that's actually why i posted the wrong one earlier, i wasn't looking in level_editors, just misc. 

i am making a quake 1 map and when i test it using the darkplaces engine, i do not see any problems. i loaded it up in quakespasm engine to test compatibility with other engines and i get this hall of mirrors effect when i walk past a certain point in the map.

i tried to find out if the map has leaked by typing pointfile in the console but it says no pts file could be found. i checked qbsp.log, light.log and vis.log and the files do not mention any leaks. when i fire a rocket at the HOM, it ricochets and eventually the trail of particles appear at the opposite side of the map.

here are two pictures of the bug i am seeing:
http://i.imgur.com/S4oS4h.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ChU2Dh.jpg
http://imgur.com/a/E1xv0

any tips on how to get rid of this bug? it does not occur when using darkplaces engine to test the map.

i am using the compile tools found at this page:
http://user.tninet.se/~xir870k/
i am using the wvis_final.zip WVis 2.31 version of Vis.exe 

Does your map exceed 4096 units from the origin in any direction? That would explain it, this is a limitation of most quake protocols, exceptions include the darkplaces protocol and the RMQ protocol. 

That's the 4096 effect. Move the whole map until it's inside the 4096/4096, -4096/-4096 square. 

it seems that this is correct, looking in the editor, the HOM is appearing at the 4096 line on the x-axis in the editor. i had started at the origin at started building north from there. moving the entire map down to fit in this 4096 limit has fixed the bug. thank you for helping!