The Cthulhu eye texture fits very well. 

I decide that we take a vote:

Is negke a fuck?

AYE X

NAY 

I checked out MyHomeAlpha.zip and found it exceptionally well made for a "my home" map. Very creative, surprising and fun. Got stuck in the zombie cavern, is there a way out? 

is a huge cock. 

Of course I'm going to finish it - can't wait to see Daz get lost in search of the key doors! 

Mmmm veiny. 

http://i.imgur.com/zwuQv4j.jpg

Spike and I (mostly Spike) have been working on a .lit2 format that can do custom lightmap scales per-face.

It's looking promising: it'll be backwards compatible (light will generate regular lightmaps, .lit, and .lit2), and I have some tool support already (you can set "_lightmapscale" on a func_group/etc. to modify those faces, same as q3 I think). 

I am imagining all the amazing lighting effects I can do with more detailed shadows. Been after something like this for years :D 

That's awesome! Can't wait to see sexy new maps sporting this extra quality! 

Nice!...misaligned texture... 

it's classic id style... 

I have a folder full of crappy box maps like that for testing compiler features. 

so that's pretty damn amazing??! so you basically end up with a .bsp, .lit and .lit2 and your engine will just ignore the .lit2 if it doesn't support it? that's awesome! 

yep, that's how it'll work! pretty excited about this.

There are some downsides though. The more surfaces use higher resolutions, the longer light.exe will take, the .lit2 file will be bigger, and rendering dynamic lights will take more CPU.

It'll work best when used selectively, but I understand the same is true of the�source engine, which has pretty much the same feature? 

i see you mentioned there will be a _lightmapscale setting for func_groups?

so you will be setting lightmap scale based on faces, however, would it not make more sense to set lightmap scale per light instead?

i think 90% of lights would be fine with their old resolution, but for key lights (eg: those shining through cool transparent textures) a higher resolution would be desired.

so could you not just output low res shadow onto a high res lightmap by default and then when a light specifies it, do the extra traces for the high res shadow? 

If you do it per light, what about cases where you want the sunlight casting strong shadows in just one particular area? You set your sun as a high res light and you end up having an enormously inflated lightmap size just for that one transparent chainlink fence texture casting shadows into the courtyard, whereas with per face you can just set the courtyard faces to be high res. As ericw said, the method he's proposing is basically the same as the Source engine, and per face works very well there in my experience. 

The way it's currently set up in the light tool, that'd be a bit awkward because the tool needs to know each face's lightmap resolution before starting the light tracing. I think you would need whole lighting pass just to figure out what faces a "high res" light is hitting. 

A global lightmap scale setting would be very nice also. 

"i basically want the global lightmap to be the highest" 

I have to ask ... why ever opt for standard lightmaps? It isn't like machines today can't handle it or that memory is scarce. Jack that bastard up and let's roll! :) 

 

ericw is doing .lit2 as an external file to allow other engines that don't support it to play the map, albeit at lower res. I think this is a good thing 

I find it amusing that you can have real-time lighting and shadows etc in dark places (and I guess you could make some really nice maps using this) and yet it seems the community is still in love with baked lighting :P 

Real time lighting without bounce isn't all that useful. Stencil shadows only go so far...