a copy of the other map's contents will have appeared where the func_instance once was

Are they aligned by their center coords? If this is the case, I would probably try to make func_instance a brush entity of the same size as the prefab, like a bounding box. That would help keep things on grid. 

Ah, thanks for the question, I'll need to clear this up in the documentation. The instance contents are not positioned based on their collective center, no. The center of the point entity and the origin of the instance map are lined up. All objects in the Filename map get offset from the func_instance by the same distance they're offset from their own map's origin, so it's reasonably straightforward to predict where things will be when all's said and done.

The Source engine tools' version of instances does have a func_instance_origin that lets you define a custom origin, actually, but VMFII doesn't yet implement that, so it won't work with Quake maps until that changes.

I should have a News post written up in a few minutes, so if it's accepted we can take further discussion over there. Hang tight! 

When using func_detail, you have leaves (subdivided volumes of the map, including func_detail) and clusters (volumes ignoring func_detail). The vis speedup when using func_detail comes from vis only looking at portals between clusters.

What it was doing before was writing a copy of the visdata for a cluster for each leaf in that cluster - I just changed vis to write a single copy of the visdata for each cluster, and then all of the leaves in the cluster reference the same visdata offset in the bsp file.

All this really does is shrink the bsp file (telefragged.bsp is 10mb smaller) and maybe load a tiny bit faster as a result, but it seems like a nice optimization. Seems to be safe with old engines (winquake.exe) too. 

 

Does light use the pvs data (if present) in any way to speed up traces? 

i believe that was true in quake 2 light compilers, but not quake 1. (unless somebody added the feature to quake 1 light compilers) 

czg, my light tool doesn't use vis data. I experimented with it a while ago, but the code was messy and I couldn't get much speedup from it. I could have been testing the wrong map (was trying telefragged.bsp). It probably would help if there are a lot of delay 2 or infinite lights, but also good vis blocking.

another idea I had is to shoot a bunch of random rays from each light, and use the furthest distance hit as a bounding sphere for the light, sort of a rough guess at the pvs. haven't tried this, though. 

is minimum intensity contribution as bounding sphere already implemented? once a delay 2 light drops below a half percent intensity or so it might as well be cut off anyway, right? 

That's implemented, the -gate option. I think "-gate 1" means to cut off lights when the brightness would be 1/255. 

I think enabling the multithreading a few years back was the most significant speed boost to light. 

Warren, yeah, for sure, the threading is amazing.
Lunaran: lol, you prompted me to take a closer look at the "-gate" switch, and seems it was broken in�tyrutils (was calculating a bounding sphere that was too large). I was wondering why using like "-gate 25" wasn't speeding up maps with lots of delay 2 lights. I think I fixed it.. 

 

I've been using -gate 10 forever... are you saying it's done nothing forever!? :( 

I asked several times in the past about what exactly the "gate" number referred to and what was the range. I never really got a good answer. My working theory is that it's the rgb value of the lightmap, 0-255. So if you set -gate to 20, everything below that is pure black? Or am I totally wrong. What always threw me off was that many references state the default value is 0.01 or some other nonsense. 

Gate -10 seems to light faster than gate -1.
A tiny bit. 

-gate 10 versus -gate 1. 

I think it's been broken since it was added to tyrutils in 2013. If you have a map with lots of delay 2/5 try the devbuild in #158.
On jam6_ericwtronyn I get a huge speedup, like:
No gate: 60s, gate 5: 7 seconds 

Wow, yeah, map I'm working on went from 18secs to light to 8 seconds (only option was -gate 10) nice! 

...though it seems -gate 10 is a bit high of a setting now that it actually works, lost a lot of detail in my lighting :D

Still, nice that it actually works! 

2 times faster now with -gate 10. 

so, what does the number after gate actually mean then? 

When you specify "-gate X": for each light, the util calculates the distance at which a surface would be lit up by that light to an intensity of 'X'. The intensity units are the same as the bsp file, so 127 is full brightness, 255 is 2x overbright. The distance calculated is used as a bounding sphere, so beyond the sphere the light casts 0 brightness. 

Scampie + mfx, awesome it is giving a speedup for you guys!

If you just have a delay 2 light in a large box room, "-gate 10" should give a visible seam where the brightness changes abruptly from 10 to 0. Might have to turn up the quake gamma to see it clearly. It's possible I still messed up the formula so i might try rewriting it in a more straightforward way. 

I found -gate 3 worked well for my situation. Still a large speedup and I keep some of the subtle lighting effects I was doing. 

i remember -gate 1 got a great speed up on old rigs in aguirRe's tools. like from 10 minutes to ~10 secs. Was is different now?