Thanks for the initial testing!

Careful with -extra/-extra4, they do make the compile roughly 4x/16x longer, and this will stack up with -lightmapscale to give you really long compiles. "-soft" should have much less performance impact, not sure exactly, but it does work against the resolution gain by blurring the lightmaps.

"-lightmapscale 0.25" with no "-extra" should be the same compile time as "-extra4" with no "-lightmapscale", as they both have to compute a 4x res lightmap.

Fifth: I think you found a bug with mdl lighting, and I got a comment from MH about the code being missing for that, so I will look into that.

necros: yeah I agree the 16x does look like a bad stencil shadow. scaling the "soft" effect is a good idea, haven't yet looked into that. 

Rather than do a single light entity that will cast stark shadows, which is ok when you have blurry lightmaps, you'd want a few slightly separated lights combined so that you get a penumbra effect to the shadows.

There IS a convenience option for this, which I stole from q3map2, setting "_deviance" "8" on a light entity will turn it into an 8-unit radius sphere of lights. Default if you use _deviance is to create 16 lights, but you can customize it with "_samples". This will slow down compiles of course! 

Also, everyone disregard that pic I posted... I had forgotten to copy my .lit2 files into the right directory (necros, your compile gui doesn't copy .lit2 files for me you scum!!!!), and had made some out of date .lit files because it seems that when you generate a .lit2 file, no .lit file is created so you get out of sync really easily. 

source is here good sir. ;)

but yeah, I should try to get around to that if this is going to become a common lighting thing.

I'm still not convinced 16x is necessary. 2x or 4x with scaled blur effects. Oh and deviance lights, utterly badass. 

Nice thumbnails, asshole. 

easily prefer the 1x lighting. But yeah could be because lighting method/other cvars unchanged. 

Also, everyone disregard that pic I posted... I had forgotten to copy my .lit2 files into the right directory

so post the fixed shot shrimptease 

TRIP REPORT ON 16x RESOLUTION AND -EXTRA4 AND -SOFT

After 2.5 hours, a 337mb .lit2 file was made. Quakespasm crashed with AllocBlock: Full even with "-heapsize 655360" 

lol... and how many lights and faces were there? :P :P :P 

Sorry about that, the "AllocBlock: full" is when you exceed the hardcoded lightmap limit in QS. Even if it did load, performance would be awful because dynamic lights are all rendered on the CPU. The 8x and 16x options are probably best avoided, or only used very selectively.

jam2_scampie looks pretty nice with "-extra -lmscale 0.25", though, and only takes 4 minutes to light.

I really need to code the thing that automatically lowers the resolution on faces with no detail. 

It's jam2_scampie, so it's not excessive, but it's reasonable for a proper sized map.

4x resolution seems to be the max for this level, generating a 23mb .lit2, anything more and the .lit2 is too large to be loaded.

These are comparisons with -extra and -soft between standard .lit and .lit2 with 4x res.

area1, lit, textured
area1, lit, lightmap
area1, lit2, textured
area1, lit2, lightmap

area2, lit, textured
area2, lit, lightmap
area2, lit2, textured
area2, lit2, lightmap

The gains in this map are mostly in the spotlights being a bit sharper... but it's not very noticable when set against these textures. Perhaps a less noisy/dark/ugly set would be a better test? I'll give my Jam5 a go, since 4x isn't too excessively long to compile. 

Yeah it really doesn't add anything to jam2_scampie in those comparisons, even the upward pointing spotlights probably look better in the vanilla version 

To be fair, I also don't rely on shadows that much in my lighting. Mostly because Quake is so blurry (and I suck at lighting...)

As a bonus though, in my Jam5 map I notice I can actually get some lighting on some of the detailed faces I wasn't able to light correctly. The blue crystals and grass bits actually receive lighting on their small little faces much better... experimenting a bit now with the hanging vines to see if I can make them cast shadows, which I opted not to do because they were so blurry previously. 

does "_shadow" "1" not work on func_illusionary? 

This latest build needs the '-fence' commandline flag to do the tracing through fence textures. But without that, a func_illusionary with _shadow 1 should cast a solid shadow 

no... again my bad... I kept saving jam5_scampie.map and not saving as jam5_scampie_16.map which is what I was compiling... *headdesk* 

Added shadows to the func_illusionary hanging vines compared to the released version... the differences here are subtle. It's all in the details, you can get some nice crisp shadows, and in some cases that really pops and is noticeable... but often the subtle nice differences in the lightmap are lost when mixed with textures. Again, -extra and -soft, the .lit2 is 4x resolution.

area1, lit, textured
area1, lit, lightmap
area1, lit2, textured
area1, lit2, lightmap

area2, lit, textured
area2, lit, lightmap
area2, lit2, textured
area2, lit2, lightmap

area3, lit, textured
area3, lit, lightmap
area3, lit2, textured
area3, lit2, lightmap

area4, lit, textured
area4, lit, lightmap
area4, lit2, textured
area4, lit2, lightmap

area5, lit, textured
area5, lit, lightmap
area5, lit2, textured
area5, lit2, lightmap 

Basically... not sure it's worth an extra ~25mb of download for general use. There's some nice treats and bonuses here and there, but unless you're doing some really detailed shadow casting, it may not be worth it?

My maps and lighting style may be a bad example though, I tend to light and make bright highlights rather than cool shadows due to the low res nature of Quake's light maps 

Thanks for the comparisons Scampie.
It's entire possible this isn't really a useful feature for quake's visuals, or at least for most maps.

I guess the main thing it gives you is the ability to have harder edge shadows without stairsteps. e.g. for sunlight casting an angled shadow, with the default resolution, you have to blur quite a lot to get rid of the stairsteps. So the problem may be, the harder edged shadows may not be desirable anyway.

Regarding file size, the optimal way to use this is just enabling it on brushes that need the higher res, and this will both shrink the .lit2 file as well as have less of a performance hit. I'd recommend never using the map-wide resolution setting on a release version of a map, and only using the per-brush setting. 

I will make sure that all my maps are minimum 16x res shadows...

I wont play by your rules!!!! 

would global 2x res be worth doing? Filesize prolly wouldn't be too bad? 

Like I said, don't call this a bust or anything yet. I'd approach my lighting differently if every/most things had crisp shadows, because I'd want to highlight those more often rather than the ugly blobs we currently have and use a bunch of blurring to make look passable. 

are there any quake maps that actually use cast shadows really well? We should test on those. I'm thinking like, dm2 and dm4 have a lot of shadows behind grates and stuff. 

dm6 stairs maybe? 

Don't know that it's the best test case, but dakyne is what came to mind first.