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... 

Don't put urls in the title please kthxbye. 

porblem? 

 

Oh, hey, instead of just making it clickable here are 3 steps that are super easy instead ... wat? 

Just put the URL in the body. 

http://i.imgur.com/zJ3nqFt.jpg 

Just sayin' it's not the end of the world you know? 

i believe his a great writer 

 

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But nice on Scampie that's solved that. 

 

funny someone else is working on foliage at the same time, well here's my attempt at it:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/129414687@N03/16453403469/ 

I've tried that recently. And by foliage I mean shitty, drippy slime and dopey ass looking plants.