What I've been trying to do, is control the height that the surface light casts out to. It gives such a glorious colour, and interacts in such a natural manner - whereby blue metal turns violet when at an angle (like it would) and turns red at the bottom, as if its heating up, like it also would. I also get this gorgeous red light bouncing on my columns - but the effect is too strong, and there's just too much red. So I've fiddled with wait/delay/intensity/colour/deviance etc, and the light either goes too high and saturates everything in red, or ends up in discrete lights that are obviously lights, and *gasp* often both of these things at the same time. 

http://shoresofnis.com/post.php?postID=2

Except, you know, with tyrutils and not mhlight..... 

You know, I've never really understood the delay thing. You would think that no matter what the delay is light at the source should remain the same, only the distance it drops to a give value would change. But that is not the case.

64 units from the source, with the same exact value for light, delay 2 is far, far brighter than delay 0 (no delay). Delay 5 on the other hand, with the same light value, is noticeably dimmer at 64 units than the default, yet appears be be attenuated even less than delay 2. 

another way to tweak lights without touching their settings is with the colour! just make the colour darker while not affecting the hue. 

Yeah I've tried changing colour to incredibly low values in small steps right down to 0.001 - I have a lavaexperiments.map project just for tweaking this xD It's actually almost the same as changing light, as the intensity is actually the brightness. It's hard to correlate because changing attenuation means you need to change the number entirely - as Rick has begun to notice :). Only difference is, as it states in onetruepurple's link, that light also controls the radius. Unfortuntely you can't give _surface_offset a negative number - as that would pull the light down and might solve the issue (it will still cast through the lava, as it is treated like water). I'm not sure how others aren't having this problem.

If you use delay 0, then you end up with an effect that looks like it's painted red, as natural light is not attenuated linearly. Also, you end up with a sort of wave pattern which truly makes it look spray painted on (i.e. bad) xD Delay 1 is just useless, in that it casts very very far and doesn't attenuate fast enough. Delay 2 and 5 are of course the natural inverse square light, which looks the best - but as I say, set too high and they cast such intense red light that it's overbearing, especially with a red sky too - and set too low, you get discrete blobs of light that looks even worse. If one changes the colour to a darker red to offset this problem, then one ends up with something that is then too subtle near the lava (i.e. not very red), and fades perfectly. The opposite :/

I think a delay 6 might be best, which attenuates AND is additive, so that you can get an intense red right at the bottom, which quickly fades out to a lesser red, which itself then has a long smooth fade out. Or just a light that you can control its z attenuation independently to its x and y. Or just allow a negative _surface_offset.

Anyway, I've got a set-up now that I'm quite happy with (using delay 5), but it still means I'll need to put discrete red lights in some areas, to fill in the blanks.

Anyway anyway, I'll shutup about surface lights now and let the jamming continue. I also want to end this large post by saying that tyrutils-ericw is the best lighting I've ever seen in Quake 1, and is just phenomenal, even on standard settings with just _sunlight2, where it compiles stupidly fast. So thanks to tyrann, ericw and ydnar (not present; for q3map2) and others who worked on it.

PS. I was secretly trying out a combination of long fadeout red light and fast fadeout intense yellow light - as you can apply more than one light to a surface. I must say that this combination looks very good, but sadly you end up with discrete yellow blobs of light in many places. It can be seen working on the right hand column in my earlier screenshot: http://imgur.com/FMJtZcb (screenshot is out of date btw) 

Useful info for us who have not looked into it as much. 

delay 6 does not exist in tyrutils ;). if you use an invalid delay you get delay 0 (linear).

I would advise against lowering the brightness by scaling down the colours right now. I should fix this, but if you do it right now, the .bsp lightmap and the .lit file will have different brightness levels, and some engines don't allow that (MarkV) and will give you artifacts in the lightmap.

Instead, I believe halving both "light" and "wait" will give you the same effect.

Make sure to play around with "r_lightmap 1" in Fitz/QS - of course, you have to judge the final look with the texture in place, but this can be really helpful to see what's going on when you make subtle lighting changes.

I can allow "_surface_offset" to be negative in the next build, neat idea.

glad you're enjoying the tool unbirthday :D 

Try putting these in your autoexec.cfg

bind "key" "toggle r_lightmap"
bind "key" "toggle r_fullbright"
bind "key" "toggle showbboxes"
bind "key" "toggle r_drawviewmodel"
bind "key" "noclip"
bind "key" "notarget"

There are probably more that would be useful. I just realized I don't have a bind for drawflat or showtris. 

eh, hit submit instead of preview - should be r_showbboxes 

@ericw the paragraph referring to delay 6, was suggestions for an improved tyrutils-ericw xD And yep, I've been using r_lightmap 1. --- I think controlling z attenuation independently of x,y would be awesome, as it could be used for other interesting lighting and not just for surfaces. 

I have basically a big cave and surface light from the lava is just about unusable with delay 5. Using light 100, delay 5, wait 8, and -gate 15 switch, It looks like I still get too much light on the ceiling (over 1024 units above).

I need to check with no lights except the lava though, because I have some other lights using delay 5, and delay 5 goes on forever.

I think I'll try delay 2 because it'll be brighter down low, close to the lava, but it looks like it gets attenuated faster than delay 5. I don't want the lava to be a light source, just want a little glow from it.

The default setting (no delay) isn't terrible but the abrupt light cutoff looks pretty bad. 

If you're using low settings and the light near the lava is low but the ceiling is too bright are you using -addmin ?

Try turning it off and seeing if it's any better. 

No, wasn't using it. The more I think about, I need to just take out all other lights and then adjust the surface light from the lava. There are other lights using delay 5 and I'm thinking they're part of the problem. 

After experimenting with surface light from lava last night I've come to the conclusion that delay 5 and delay 2 lights just reach way too far.

light 50, delay 2, wait 5, gate 50

and I still see perceptible light over 600 units away but the light right at the lava surface is not that bright at all.

Some kind of delay with fade that was about halfway between 2 and 5 at the beginning but had a more definite cutoff, similar to delay 0, farther away would be much better.

Next, I guess I'll try stacking two different types of light, maybe a delay zero at light 100 for close in glow along with a light 50 delay 5 wait around 8-10 for little more range (but not halfway across the map). 

I finally got (sort of) the effect I wanted.

http://quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/lavalight1.jpg

That screenshot uses light 100 for the bright part, light 50 delay 5 wait 6 for the dimmer part, and -gate 15 on the command line. _color is 192 64 16 for both lights which seems to match the texture pretty well.

Looking at the lightmap, the dividing line between the two light sources is a bit more obvious than I'd like, but isn't all that noticeable in the textured view. Offsetting the delay 5 light 16-32 units higher might help that. 

Offsetting the delay 5 light 16-32 units higher might help that.

Their position doesn't matter at all if they're surface lights. 

some more wip as I've been experimenting with different ways to create rock formations

http://imgur.com/a/1rewA

Basically just create an octagon and then make a few different height variations, and start copy+pasting all over the damn place. The way the shapes intersect creates a very pleasing final effect and I'm pretty happy with it!

Today I am trying to get the layout mostly complete and am starting to add monsters and logic etc. I am trying to avoid noticeable teleporting in of enemies by populating parts of the map while the player is somewhere else to make things feel more natural. We'll see how this goes! 

Looks pretty good so far. Didn't you say that you were gonna stream again sometime? 

The surface light has a _surface_offset key, I tried it and it seems to work. The separation between the two brightness levels seems a little smoother now. When I add -extra 4 and -soft back to the batch file it should look pretty good.

If surface light didn't have the offset key, there is at least one hacky way to do the same thing.

I ran the new light utility on a different computer today and it acted a little weird. I was looking in the thread about it to see if anyone else had noticed it,and ran across some posts where the problem of excess light from delayed surface lights was discussed. I wish I'd seen them sooner, I probably could have saved a little time. Some of the suggestions there were similar to what I came up with. 

Try using _anglesense 0.3 or lower to get more glow. 

I'm finding these settings work ok on my lava surface:

_color = 1.0 0.0 0.0025
delay = 5
light = 25
wait = 1.375
_anglescale = 0.35 

Time to whine a bit. I'm not used to think in terms of single player, it's been painful. I was planning some survival / adventure gameplay based on traps and a sole super-shotgun on player's hands, but I would need much more time to come up with something worth playing. I'm delivering a stripped version, which is frustrating. Day comes and goes and I still don't have a final fight and will probably drop it. Everyday seems to take forever until it's 6 PM and I run home to map... no, wait, to lunch, to wash dishes and talk to wife, mapping from 10:30 PM until my sleepy head hits the keyboard. But I'm not giving up. 

You're over reaching. Seriously. Just make a simple map that fits the theme. Worry about unique gameplay when you're doing a mod or something. 

 

I have one big cave with a start and an exit. I'm just going to add a few more rooms and some monsters and consider mine done. I should be able to do that this weekend.

That leaves next week to add any embellishments I can fit in. If I don't find time to work on it and all there is at deadline is 4 rooms and 3 scrags, then that's what I'll send.

There will almost certainly be no final fight or boss fight. I find those tedious for the most part and usually skip them and consider the game finished. I'm more of a explore and discover type person.