So its not in sequence? I kind of assumed there would be some deciding (ie. predictable) element to it. 

Yes, Mh did a lot of stuff with RMQe to try and solve this. We, the mappers, were basically a baby throwing its rattle out of the pram. 

Hmm.. good point, it could be the order the lights are listed in the map file, and latest 4 types win. 

What's a standard in one bit of Quake isn't necessarily the same in another - I'm just guessing. 

Alright, I was just thinking I could push a bit harder on lightstyles. I seem to remember long ago as a noob, that warning simply created unlit faces... so since I didn't see those, I thought maybe engines made more lightstyles a thing!... It's not a big deal, I've already moved things around slightly and don't get the warning anymore anyway! :D

The only reason to be cautious is there may be lighting artifacts, because the lightstyle picked to discard is random (at least in tyrutils). It would probably be better if the light tool sorted the lightstyles by average brightness and discarded the one that contributed the least, so it would be less noticable.

That seems like a good and reasonably simple idea to implement, but in my case likely wasn't even needed... I was only slightly overlapping in the far ends of some delay 2 lights, so I didn't even notice which it randomly selected to discard. Likely could've even raised my -gate setting from 2 to 3 and fixed it. 

I put on my map thin brushes of vine textures with transparent background. Before compiling though I heard that a transparent texture has to have { as a prefix for it to work, so with texmex I renamed "swvine" as "{swvine".
I compile it with the "-fence" command in light, run it in Darkplaces, but the transparent effect doesn't occur: just big thin brushes with vines with a purple background. I thought this was a Darkplaces thing, because it couldn't handle Rubicon's transparent textures as well. So I run it in Quakespasm to see if it works here, turns out it doesn't work here as well.
What am I missing here? 

Those vine brushes are func_illusionary ones. 

 

 

 

You have the TGA with the alpha channel in the correct folder inside of Quake? It sounds like maybe it's reading from the BSP instead of externally... 

I need to know more... 

Basically, the "{" tells the game engine to go read an external texture rather than using what's in the WAD file. The texture in the WAD has none of the alpha channel information in it.

I don't know the specifics, someone else will I'm sure, but you need to have the proper TGA file complete with alpha channel somewhere that the game engine can see it for loading. 

you don't need to use -fence, that is a light compile only thing for it to try and cast shadows based on your cutout textures.

alpha cutout textures simply need a few things to work: { prefix on the name of the texture; it needs to be applied to an entity (func_wall, func_illusionary, etc); and the parts which are going to be invisible need to be palette color 255. You don't need to compile specially, the engine is what does the work.

did you grab {swvine texture from the arcane dimension start map (or any AD map that used it)? if so, you should be all set, it would've been named correctly... open the compiled .bsp in texmex and be sure the texture is renamed, I suspect you've likely messed something up there either in the .map or in your .wad. Did you remember to change the brush in your map to the renamed texture? 

 

Oh, this is just pure masking ... OK. 

Make sure texmex isn't doing that thing where it replaces fullbrights with not-fullbrights. 255 is a fullbright. 

Along with its WAD version, your texture must be an external file, a TGA image with an alpha channel where black pixels are transparent and any other shade of gray (better use white) are opaque. This file must be in a <mod>/textures folder.

It works in MarkV and QS. 

another one mistaken here. 

I'm using that texture from the Wad of Daikatana ep1, taken from Quaddicted's wad bank. After checking the vine texture it had the wrong background color (it seems like this is a common problem in Quaddicted's wad bank), so I fixed it and run it. Darkplaces still doesn't recognizes the transparency (is there a commandline that can fix this?), but Quakespasm runs it like it should:
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/02/1452527281-spasm0000.png
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2016/02/1452527283-spasm0001.png

Also lighttorches I underestimate them once again. 2stronk4me.
Speaking of light, fog comes out fine in Quakespasm but is non present in DP. Same thing with the sky texture, it's all black even though I put lights (sunlights still have light and shadow issues with ericw's compiler it seems, or the small sky openings in the cieling make things fuzzy somehow). What the hell 

Does not support alpha textures. That is the reason you need an external tga file