Glad I was able to help someone out for a change. :) 

Something I don't know, -light (as used in worldspawn), -minlight, and -gate, numbers are talked about, but I don't remember ever seeing what the range was. For example, if -gate 5 is set, what does that mean? 5% or 5 on a scale of 0-255 or something else?

Confusing because -gate default is .001, that seems like an awfully tiny amount. I've used as high as 30 without seeing much difference. 

gate means that when light goes below the level specified, it is set to 0.

this is to stop delay 2 and 5 lights from going on forever.

make a box map with a regular light with brightnes 200 and try different gate settings to get an idea. 

I am a virtual noob when it comes to Quake map making (I made a few DM levels back in 96/97 and tinkered around a bit in 2002 or so and that's it).

So I did a little test thing where I wanted to make a rising staircase with floating platforms. I used func_door and set the lips and all is well, apart from the first platform. This one should rise up out of the floor by 16 units so that the underside of it is flush with the floor. But setting it to lip 0 does not work, instead it uses the default of 8 and thus starts already half out of it's starting hole.

I figured out that setting the lip to 0.01 works fine and looks flush as well.

I was just wondering what is going on here? Is this some kinda of bug? 

When you leave a value unset in Quake, two separate parts of the system assign it a default. First, the engine changes all blank values to zero. Then the QC script tries to detect unset values to apply a custom default, but it can't distinguish between the field being unset and it being set to 0 explicitly. So it's a big storm of unfortunate design, and your workaround is about all you can do... 

Thanks. Good to know. The 0.01 thing works pretty well. 

-0 the workaround for this? 

Wont work. 

So far, no one knows about the range(s) for the light values?

I had that problem on some steps in Wish 13, I assumed it was a bug. In my case, the player can't see the actual size of the steps, only the upper 16 units, so I just made the first one 8 units taller than it needed to be. 

I use -gate 10 on all my maps without seeing any difference other than tyrlight finishing faster, so at the very least, '10 light units' is really really dark...

I don't really know what light levels really are in a numerical sense, I just set my lights however they look nice :D 

Pretty sure it's 0-255 because that's the range of values in a Quake screenshot taken with r_lightmap 1. Although the compiler default cutoff of .001 doesn't make much sense in that context. 

So, I made a texture which has all the colours in order (apart from the fullbrights, those do not matter here)

Textured a wall with it and plopped a light in the room with delay set to local minlight.

Then I put in different light values to see when stuff changes. I took screenshots and compared it to the colormap.lmp

The colormap basically has 64 steps (63 really since the middle 2 steps are the same.)

I did this test using Winquake, because that is of course more accurate when it comes to the original colours. I did some initial tests in Quakespasm, but even in 16bit mode the colours are pretty off and not accurate to the actual palette ones.

So here are my results of the extremes.

0-5 BLACK
0-239 NORMAL COLOUR RANGE
240-255 ORIGINAL TEXTURE COLOURS (FULLBRIGHT) (technically the later range is already in the overbrights here)
256-487 OVERBRIGHTS
488 and beyond BRIGHTEST OVERBRIGHT

This is just for evenly applied lighting though and the stepping seems to be kinda wonky, must be some weird maths in there.

Once you throw actual lighting scenarios and different attenuation models into the mix things of course are a lot different. 

In the latest QuakeSpasm in a certain area of my level this "Backup Past 0" gets spammed to the console. I've never seen this before in my life and it has me puzzled :P

No errors, crashes, glitches or anything, just this message getting spammed in one area of the level. 

Post 580 on coding help. 

So quick question from the more experienced mappers:
Is there any way to have a func_train fire a trigger when it gets to a certain path corner?

Followup: can I set a trigger to fire when a monster touches it?

Thanks 

nope.

yes: http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=37116&start=11&end=11 

excellent.
Thank you :D 

Is this impossible? I have one flickering light (style 10) that I want to turn off, but I can't. It has a targetname and there's a trigger_once that targets it. I've tried regular targeting and killtarget, but it just keeps blinking. If I make it a normal light everything works as expected. I must be missing something. 

Impossible, although I think it can be done with custom qc (not confirmed though. Has any mod ever done that?) 

it could be done by making a normal switchable light that is continuously targeted by a trigger_relay

light
targetname: flash

trigger_relay
target: flash
targetname: flash
delay: 1.0

trigger_once
target: flash
starts the flashing

trigger_once
killtarget: flash
stops (permanently) the flashing 

Jimbo, if it moves automatically and can't be blocked, you could used a timed trigger. 

Where is the rock_brown texture originally from? 

So quick question from the more experienced mappers:
Is there any way to have a func_train fire a trigger when it gets to a certain path corner

New blog post: https://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2015/08/15/func_train-locational-triggers/

Actually, while writing that I thought of an alternate approach involving spikeshooters and logic gates, with the "cage" being changed to a "blast shield" which blocks the path of the spikes until the train reaches a certain point. So if the posted way is no good and you'd like me to elaborate, let me know... 

Although not an editor/entity/how do I do this type of question, I still need some opinions on what I can do here. ie. I need help with my map =P.

I have made a small courtyard type area with a small wall skirting it and clipped so you can't go further, but I can't think of any decent ideas how to finish it off visual wise. I've tried a cliff face up but that looked a bit dodgy. (I may have messed up a few things as that build also gave a ton of errors) A void type idea also seems wrong.

Any feedback is always welcome.
Test shots : http://imgur.com/a/yIWkK 

nb: the screenshot thread is actually for this kind of question

anyway, you could try putting cliffs there, but pushing them back from the wall by putting a river or something.