i hope you don't mean you always use -level 4.
i was only saying that it was possible you might not see much with -fast, but -fast is sometimes all you need for testing.

in some ways, using -fast will show how much a vis blocking tunnel or wall will help.

if the area is disappearing with just -fast, you have a great vis blocker and your -level 4 vis time will probably be really fast.
if it's NOT disppearing, -level 4 will catch all (or most) of the stuff -fast misses, but at the expense of a lot of calculations. (this is where you hear about those 3 week long vis sessions) 

Previously i used just vis without any switches.
I often used fastvis for my q3 maps, but my current machine handles normal vis in a few seconds (for now at least), so i tend to use it until it takes too long for fast test's.

Btw, just took a look into ne_ruins.
Great map, i especialy liked all those cool stuff like breaking vases, the coins inside, the swinging silver key door (amazing!)
Is this all added through QuakeC?
I guess i should take a look into the coding section too then! 

oh ok. -level 1-3 vises are not logical though, i mean, it's not like 1 is faster than 2 is faster than 3. in fact, some tests indicated that level 1 is vastly slower than 4 as well as much less effective.

and yes, ruins stuff is all quakec. qc is very powerful :) 

do func_train entities have a maximum distance in units they can travel? in my map, the train disappears or goes invisible after travelling about 3,520 units. i am still standing on it and it keeps moving, but i cannot see it. the train goes back and forth between a destination. on the way back, the train reappears and becomes visible again. i think this is happening when the train crosses the origin 0,0 of the map. my map is within the 4096 unit limit. 

All brush models start with their origin at the centre of the map, which can come as a surprise because usually the origin of an entity is close to its centre of mass. If the initial path corner was far enough to the left of the map, then as a train travelled left to right its origin could leave the map on the right just after the brushes went past the half way mark.

As a test of this hypothesis, try moving the entire brush model for the train to the origin of the map (the path corners should work identically, the only issue will be lighting on the train). Then recompile and see if this fixes it. 

thanks, moving the train to the origin fixes the visibility problem!

i had the train positioned at the south most part of the map heading to the north most part of the map so if the train's actual brush model origin was 0,0, then i guess the game believed the brush went outside the map after reaching it's halfway mark. 

Sounds cool. 

http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/guides/lighting-basics/

let me know if you see anything wrong. 

Such a cool article on Q1 lighting, I am glad you wrote that, thank you :) 

 

very useful indeed! 

 

 

thanks! 

Add screenshots and it will be quad bettered. 

nah, too lazy for that. :P
i already had that typed out, i just CnP'd most of it. 

very good reference. I've found I have stopped using -soft though, as it tends to smudge and flatten dramatic shadows too much (like light coming through a barred window), making things feel a little bit too uniform sometimes.

I also make heavy use of low-intensity "filler" lights as a way of creating the illusion of bounce lights - e.g. a bright delay 5 torch in a brush holder would otherwise have nasty black shadows underneath the holder, but it starts to look real nice with 1 (or sometimes as much as 4, depending on the surrounding geo) low intensity, low wait fillers around it.

I've never found a use for minlight yet, not even the local minlight. 

I've found I have stopped using -soft though, as it tends to smudge and flatten dramatic shadows too much (like light coming through a barred window), making things feel a little bit too uniform sometimes.

yes, thank you for reminding me. i find there are times where -soft is detrimental as well. in general, i find it's great for outdoor areas, but ONLY if the sun is not casting long shadows.
if the sun is low in the sky, i feel it looks better without the blurring.
i'll have to add that in, that it's not necessary to always have -soft on.

about filler lights: that's cool, i had no idea other people did that! i like making arrays of lights in spherical shapes, with the lights near the center having about 5 and the ones near the edge having about 1. makes really cool fake volume lights and gives more interesting shadows because they are being accumulated from many different points.
for these, i actually use delay 3 (no attenuation).

maybe i'll write a post about these things later...
i'd be interested in hearing if anyone else has subtle lighting techniques like that. 

anyone else use antilights? I'm using them to do silly things like a sort of fake HDR (haha, it's a bit grandiose calling it that) where I have a bright light outside coming through a barred window to cast dramatic window bar shadows in the gloomy interior room. I set it up with a bright spotlight coming through the window bars, but in order not to have a big bright blob on the outside wall, I cancel it out with antilights on the outside - this gives the illusion that when you are outside, the light source doesn't seem that bright because your eyes are accustomed to it, but from the inside it seems bright outside. 

i never had much luck with them, but i have not really done much testing with them. the few times i've tried using them, i ended up with poor results so i try to avoid them.

how exactly are you cancelling out the spot light... as in, what values are needed? do you guess it and tweak or can you just figuring it out based on the current values? 

how exactly are you cancelling out the spot light... as in, what values are needed? do you guess it and tweak or can you just figuring it out based on the current values?

I should have mentioned - make sure the spotlight uses a different style to the surrounding lights, then you make the antilight use the spotlight style and it will only cancel light of that style (i.e. the spotlight) - this is a mega useful property of antilights.

with it only affecting the spotlight it makes it a lot easier to to just make an educated guess for the antlight values, eyeball it, adjust, eyeball it, adjust...I don't have a formula for this but I've found it doesn't take too many iterations until it's "good enough". 

I stuck the antilight off to the side of the window, so it flooded the wall with antilight of only the spotlight style, but the angle was such that no antilight came through the window. 

ohhh interesting. didn't know you could use style like that for antilights. that makes it much more useful.

btw, like the fake hdr idea. that's a great way to make interesting light without relying on sunlight to do the job for you. 

you can often use antilights to mackle up some passable blob shadows to make a func integrate better into the world geo. 

btw, like the fake hdr idea. that's a great way to make interesting light without relying on sunlight to do the job for you.

Indeed - I alway go for a rather dim "twilight" sun effect these days - Quake was never supposed to take place during the day :}