Something i've done is to use the transparent illusionary trick above and to use a non-liquid version of the liquid texture (ie without the *) and stretched to maybe 4x4 scale.
If your liquid is placed below the illusionary by 1 pixel, you can set the illusionary to have alpha about 0.5 and water to be about 0.3~ i think and this makes the water look like it has a lightmap on it.
doesn't work with all kinds of waters, but most of the stock water textures look fine. 

Maybe I haven't been paying attention. I can set the alpha of a func_illusionary and water in a Quake map? This is a plain old bsp file type map running in Fitzquake. 

Almost all engines today support alpha transparency on water, it was introduced with glquake, the official 3d accelerated engine, and so any engine not based on software quake has it. The support is limited though: critically it's controlled by a cvar, not directly in the map, so you need some kind of mod to ensure that the value is set to transparent. Otherwise you're relying on the user to set it correctly for your map.

Most source ports of quake support the addition of the alpha field for entities, making them appear transparent. It's one of the few extended features to be implemented consistently across so many engines that it can almost be treated as standard (skyboxes would be another, fog almost so). In engines that don't support alpha, the entity renders fully opaque instead.

Fitzquake supports both of these features, so it would work fine in that engine(minus the proviso about needing to set the cvar). I'd recommend a slight tweak to the setup necros suggests to provide better fallbacks in less functional engines. If you put the func_illusionary slightly below the waterline then:

* In software quake you get opaque water that's not lightmapped but animates (which is probably better than lightmapped-but-not-animated water). No worse than usual.

* In engines without "alpha" key support, you get animated, lightmapped water which is opaque - an interesting trade-off you'd probably opt for if this lightmap idea is important to your map.

* In engines with both you'd get the full effect. 

I was aware of r_wateralpha.

The support is limited though: critically it's controlled by a cvar, not directly in the map, so you need some kind of mod to ensure that the value is set to transparent. Otherwise you're relying on the user to set it correctly for your map.

That's what I was thinking which is why I asked about setting it in the map.


Most source ports of quake support the addition of the alpha field for entities, making them appear transparent.

That's something I didn't know. I'd seen this effect , but I guess I just figured it was done with custom code, though now that I think about it, I remember at least one map where it was used that was just a normal bsp.

Thanks guys, for all the info and ideas.

Most of the too bright water in my map was fixed by using a super dark water texture. There are a couple of places where pitch black walls are adjacent to lit water that don't look so good, but I can probably live with it.

I tend to spend days fixing trying to fix small things like this, that most people will never notice. If I keep doing this, the map will never be done. 

But if I notice even one instance where I know the author took time to get a tiny detail right, I enjoy the map that much more. 

trying to fix small things like this, that most people will never notice.

but they will notice if it's not fixed. :P 

The details are everything.

If there's one misaligned texture, people will think you're sloppy. If there's one overlapping-brush-2-brush-flicker, they'll think less of the map as it ruins the Sustainment of Disbelief.

Even the smallest detail (to chamfer or not to chamfer) can make a big difference in the overall fluidity and coherence of that area.

The details are everything. 

It's easy to get obsessive and waste a lot of time getting everything perfect.

A good release stands on its own, warts and all. 

It's easy to get obsessive and waste a lot of time getting everything perfect.

I'm trying for not too many warts.
It's getting closer. 

Do I just put the brushes in an empty map, run bsp and light and then place it in a different map using info_notnull or something like that? 

Do I just put the brushes in an empty map, run bsp and light and then place it in a different map

yes, be sure to place the bsp in your progs folder.

using info_notnull or something like that?

i use the Quoth mapobject_custom entity, has mangle and such.

At least thats what i do, not sure if vanilla progs handles this so easy.. 

yes, be sure to place the bsp in your progs folder.

you can use progs/map.bsp or maps/map.bsp and both will work for the model path. only sounds are hardcoded to be in sound/xxxxx 

in fact, it's generally good practice to put any external bsps in a subfolder so you can keep things clean. unless you want to use a pak file in which case it matters less. 

Okay, thanks. Now, how do I place the external bsp into my map? 

how is the newest remake going? 

Trying to open some .map files saved with WC in Radiant but keep getting.

parse error at '[': expected '#number'

The maps are also BSP2 sized.
GB, you have experience with this? 

WC uses a different .map format from Radiant.

I don't know if WC has other limits that could possibly be BSP2 related; the only thing I think I have heard is that it can't properly display maps that are bigger than 8192x8192.

There is a converter program by a person called Scrama, I believe, you might have some luck using the quakeone.com forum search. It is somewhat obscure though. You will also have to convert the texture wads between WC and Radiant. :-s

If it only needs to be done once, using some converter is acceptable, but daily WC <-> Radiant conversion in any halfway productive environment, eg in a team setting, isn't very good for the workflow. I have lovely memories of this problem from RMQ. 

I thought the only difference was .rmf
yay! 

It's for something of a spinoff map... 

I'm not 100% and can't check right now, but I think TB will load this map fine and save it as a standard .map file. Although the texture alignment info will be fucked, naturally. 

Actually, I just remember I did use TB for exactly this in the past... must have been some hazy late night troubleshooting, haha. I'll try that! :) 

That is good to know. 

Actually, it's still not working in Radiant, exact same issue... like I said, I was probably only half awake, lol. 

I search "worldcraft" I get a dozen of useless pages about World of Warcraft. Sigh. 

thread: http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-help/servers-coding/3997-half-life-bsp-q1-5.html

dl: http://scrama.3dn.ru/load/0-0-0-24-20