Is very nice. The lighting and shadows are very believable. Maybe we need an "ikebony" type texture set. 

Leveled lighting : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/Misc/FixedLevels.jpg

Really nice ... !! 

that's awesome! Would love to see a whole Quake level that looked like that 

I have to think that perhaps the ikwhite jam maps would have looked about 10x better with these tools *HINT HINT* 

 

eh, the geometry sticking out over the shadowed areas looks all wrong or are those bars actually floating and not connected to walls and floor? 

How did you do that? What compilers did you use? 

Photoshop + Levels adjustment layer I believe. 

Yeah, Photoshop ... 

The shot is me trying to add the sky-scatter that metlslime described somewhere earlier. (taken with r_lightmap 1.) still playing with it.

I want to try it on lava, too, because I lit my jam2 map mainly by trying to match what a feature like that would look like. 

Is yours in the broom closet? :) 

...This was the result of experimenting on one of my scrapped quake maps. 

 

 

Looks inviting :)

What compilers and settings did you use? 

does typing -extra4 take that long? 

But I meant quakespasm.exe, not light.exe. 

People have suggested using an external text file to specify what surfaces should give off light. This is exactly what Valve did for hl/hl2/etc via "mapname.rad."

This is sensible enough as a decision on its own, but one of the pains of the Source engine is that everything is in a different text file with its own syntax parsed by a different command line tool. If you take the Quake engine and add features piecemeal over 20 years, making a lot of small sensible decisions in a vacuum without building toward some kind of more perfect ideal, you're recreating the exact steps for creating the Source engine. :)

So: is there something better we can do? Someone suggested the Q2 map format, which, yes, it does that, but then we all need a level editor that loads Q1 texture wads but has a Q2 surface property dialog and saves the Q2 map format, which is zero editors. It could be one editor, if sleep puts it in TB, but everyone assumes sleep is adding everything to TB and not everyone uses TB anyway.

I'm a fan of worldspawn keys - something I've considered adding to tyrlight is mirroring worldspawn keys on the command line, and command line flags as worldspawn keys. If I decide on a specific set of dirt variables or whatever that looks good with map A, I don't have to have a special set of map A batch files, I can just save the settings into the map. Or, if I want to fine-tune my sunlight I can just relight it with a different -sunmangle over and over at the command line without having to edit the map and do an -onlyents repeatedly each time too.


I personally wouldn't use a surfacelight definition, though, since it's more important to me that every room is tweaked to look its best than a texture emit the same amount of light every time it's used, specifying light per texture name just takes away that ability. With a 16 unit luxel, area lights are never very visually distinct from pointlights anyway, unless you're talking about a significantly large surface, like the sky or a pool of slime or lava. I don't think that's enough to justify light emission on a per-texture basis - do you need two different light levels emitted from two different lava textures? Per-content-flag is enough for that, which is how sun and skylight already work. 

What if you just had light entities (likely placed in a box outside the main level) and you could add a "_surface" key to them that you declared a texture name. The light compiler would then do q2/q3 style light from all surfaces with that texture name using clones of that light entity. This makes it compatible with all editors, and isn't that difficult a setup. 

I could very simply enable the surface flag editor for Quake 1 maps, yes. But you'd have to wait for TB2, as TB1 doesn't support Quake 2 at all. 

You say that yet support has been patched in ;)

http://leray.proboards.com/thread/3529/trenchbroom-simplest-editor-quake2-addon 

But TB2 has full support built in. 

What if you just had light entities (likely placed in a box outside the main level) and you could add a "_surface" key to them that you declared a texture name. The light compiler would then do q2/q3 style light from all surfaces with that texture name using clones of that light entity. This makes it compatible with all editors, and isn't that difficult a setup.
This sounds like a really good way to do it. 

I use Negke's compiling gui and my settings forl ight are -dirty -addmin -soft -extra4. 

how about adding keys to the worldspawn, this would be less work and easier to view/edit later

"_surfacelight_slite1_4" "50"
"_surfacelight_*lava01" "100"