Looks good, seems like it might be even more atmospheric with fog and a skybox that has green mountains that would appear to merge with the map edges.

One day I will have time to map again... GB just posted a ton of shots on the Quakeone.com forums which makes me want to map even more... 

EricW's AO appeared at just the right time.

Been messing with lights, fog skybox and various options to get the nicest look, something I don't usually bother doing.

Next up, foliage. 

gb asked about getting _sunlight2 in my modded tyrutils, and I made some progress on that this weekend with more code borrowed from q3map2:
https://runeofearthmagic.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/yoghurt-sunlight/

The second shot is my modified tyrutils using a 200-light dome, and unlike _sunlight2 in bjptools, they're regular additive lights instead of minlights, so you get some nice gradients in the shadowed areas. Also at the same time I added a penumbra feature that splits up the primary sunlight, giving it some nice soft shadows (neither screenshots is using -extra or -soft, light time for my code was around 20 seconds).
Need to polish a few things, write docs, etc, but will have a beta up for this sometime soonish :) 

Dunno what any of that means but the 2nd shot looks well good, lighting wise :) 

That is a huge improvement! 

Now do it again with not-the-worst-possible settings in the first shot...

Not saying the new way is not great but that is not exactly a fair comparison, is it? 

What's the unfair comparison? 

You have my sword etc. 

isn't the first one without all the soft and 4x4 shebang? 

I think the second one is too, actually. The softness is only the penumbra, if I understood ericw correctly. 

The second one is what I'd expect the first one to look like with just the improved light dome effect.

Extra4 would just make the edges of the shadows smoother, and is the sort of thing it'd be hard to discern at that distance.

What you've got in the second one (appears to be) more sunlights producing a more contrasted effect overall and the additional shadow casts, which are the much, much softer edges.

I'm mouthing off because right now I'm trying to achieve the same thing by hand, and the effect is very similar... but nowhere near as nice. 

looks pretty nifty. I dunno if it looks better than slapmaps fake GI lighting.

https://slapmap.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/outdoor-lighting-and-fake-g-i-in-quake-with-examples/

Infact I know it doesn't. I think once you add all the fancy new features in then it'll look real nice. I'd love to play with this. 

surely with AO turned on, it'll look just as jolly? 

I think with AO turned on it will look good. But probably not as good as fake GI. The thing with the fake GI is that it's less uniform, has brighter highlighted areas.

I think you'd have to spend a bit of time making it less uniform. It would be nice if there was a way to add a bit of a gradient (brighter at the top and slightly darker near the bottom).

Still though, these extra features are always welcome. I assume someone will add radiosity at some point too ;) 

And of course I expect someone will get around the problem of adding phong shading ;) 

Spirit, neither one is using soft or extra4, it's just that the second one has lots of suns to give the soft edge on the purple light. I maybe should have left that feature for another comparison, but oh well.
Here's another test where the sunlight deviance angle was raised to 25 degrees: (cloudy day diffusing the light?)
http://i.imgur.com/zJ3nqFt.jpg

The main thing I wanted to show is the effect of using minlight for the light dome (first shot) - this is why the shadowed areas look flat - vs regular additive lights in the light dome (second shot). I think the light domes have a similar number of lights actually.

Fifth, yeah, good point. Could just be a question of tuning the parameters, not sure. 

fuck that looks good. 

back in the elder days when i made maps, I remember various quake engines drew the skybox at different orientations, turning the highly sophisticated idea of sun direction matching the skybox artwork into a bit of a "why do I even bother" situation.

What I'm trying to say is - have the various engine peoples sorted that shizzle out yet? 

i think so. 

thanks! also I remember on your website, you were saying it would be nice if you could split up a light entity into a bunch of smaller lights in a ball- i've got that working as part of the same patch, it looks handy! 

how are you doing the fake GI? When I did it, I just spawned a bunch of suns in a sphere and divided the light level by the # of suns. I had to convert all the light variables into floats though because each sun would have like 0.5 light intensity. :P

I also find it is *insanely* slow because each sun is now impacting onto the entire map. 

that's all I'm doing. It's a dome for _sunlight2, and for regular _sunlight I just jitter the angle a bit on each sun to get the penumbra effect.

It is slow, but none of those screenshots took more than about 20 seconds to light (and I'm on a laptop, though it's an i7 quad, so 8 hardware threads.) It'll be a lot worse for -extra4, but even if it's 4 or 5 minutes for the final light compile, that's not bad. 

"Elder days," I hope you come back one day.

With all this lighting discussion, I am hoping for some help from some of you with a question I have, "WHY SO UGLY!" I have a map whose architecture I think is reasonably okay, but it always looks like shit in-game, and I think the lighting must be part of it. I have looked at it enough to feel stupid even trying to figure it out. I hadn't even mapped this year until a week ago, and I may be living in a tent this summer while trying to finish my Phd (lol)... but nevertheless I am going to annoy some of you (and/or anyone who volunteers) with this question of WHY SO UGLY, posed in .map form, soonish. 

I assume you are accounting for how there will be more suns near the poles of the sphere? my problem was I forgot to do that, so there was a much larger percentage of sunlight coming from straight up and less from the sides. 

Yeah so you need some texturing, good skybox, bit of fog maybe, looks like a neat village layout for Quakey exploration...