This appears to be some cool stuff. Outdoor areas that seem to have a (somewhat?) simulated radiosity effect without the complication (or time apparently) of actually doing any radiocity calculations). AND even better yet, you can use a worldspawn light ent to cover the inside bits while leting the 2 sunlight sources deal with the outside shadow fade off.

/Spending tomorrow playing around with this 

you rock!

i'm using your utils to finish my qsp now :)

lots of nice features and tyrlite ents support makes it uber great! 

the accolades, partial credit goes to Tyrann for the TyrLite features that I've included.

I'm eager to see what you guys can come up with using these tools. Just let me know if you have any problems or if there's something unclear in the readmes (they're a bit spartan).

Running the tools without parameters prints out helpful info and default values etc. This info is also logged to file if your console window is too small.

Please also note the ability in Light to quickly test various options from the command line without having to rebuild the map.

Finally when satisfied, put these keys/values (even range/dist) into worldspawn for future reference. 

Screen resolution does effect the lighting effect. What is the typical resolution set by players around here? 800x640? Higher? 

Is what I use 

Screen resolution does effect the lighting effect.

Really? What do you mean? Resolution when playing? Compiling? What is "the lighting effect?" 

I wasn't very clear was I.

Say I'm using Tyr-quake in full windowed mode at a resolution of 320x200. I set up the brightness and gamma so the original quake skill and episode select foyers look 1337. Now, I pull down the console and load map Orkan and when I enter the map I can't see two virtual feet in front of me. Next, I up the resolution to 1024x768 and suddenly Orkan looks cool in all it's atmospheric glory. There's now enough light to see gross and fine architecture, and texture detailing is now apparent (where before it all just looked like various shades of black). It seems that the higher the resolution, the more effect light entities have (I know this is the wrong way to put it but I also hope you know what I mean =) at least for software and winquake.

The problem then, involves the four levels I'm currently working on. If I set the lighting up so that it looks good at 320x200, it becomes "flooded" with light at 1024x768 (bland stuff). So I reason that if I can discover what is the most commonly used resolution for play, I won't go too far wrong with the lighting if I use that as the benchmark resolution for testing light placement and effect on a given level.

That's why I thought the question was relevant to the mapping help thread. 

is it possible to make lavalight?
i mean the light that generates by lava surface as it generates by sky, but with delay. 

It shouldn't make a diffence.

If "full windowed mode" is not fullscreen mode, then desktop background colour can affect your perception of the brightness. Otherwise... that sounds wierd. 

what tyrann said.

Fullscreen at any resolution, lighting looks the same. Windowed with a bright wallpaper, it looks too dark. 

Thanx,

It shouldn't make a diffence.

It does on my sys.

Fullscreen at any resolution, lighting looks the same.

Not on my sys.

...and that's probably the problem, my clapped out sys.

Now, if I hadn't just put that new bass on lay-by... 

here's a thought: take screenshots at different resolutions. Carefully examine the screenshots, especaially by zooming in. See if you still notice a difference.

Or if you don't trust that, zip them up and mail them to someone else. 

I guess lava light should be possible using a similar technique, but I doubt the extra coding and processing time would be worth the effect.

Lava is relatively scarce in maps (I'm not so fond of it either) and the lava light would be rather local and diffuse. That makes it very different from sunlight which is more difficult to simulate with point lights.

Hrimfaxi actually had the same suggestion a while ago. He also wanted the lava light to be slowly pulsating. 

Sounds like surface-based radiosity lighting... 

but that wouldnt work with these tools unfortunately 

ok, will put light entities all over the lavapool then ;) 

I tried the new light utility on a map which was made originally using tyrlite. I found that all the point lights are too bright but the outdoor sun areas are too dark.

Do you know if the scaling of 'light', 'wait', 'delay' & '_sunlight' is different to tyrlite? 

i didn't notice any change in light after switching from tyrlite to bengt's light 

Thats strange. Do you use wait and/or delay on your lights?

I notice that aguirRe gives an example above for _sunlight 250. That would be like Marrakech at midday in Tyrlite. I'm not sure if thats the intention or the scaling is different. 

The scaling is supposed to be the same for all individual light entities AFAIK. However, I have default a slightly different behaviour for global light levels (min/max/sunlight) regarding the "-range" option. They're default not affected by the "-range" option while in TyrLite they are affected.

In version 1.23 I added a "-globrange" option to make it easier to switch between the tools if you prefer this behaviour.

All this is of course only relevant if you actually are using the "-range" option. Are you?

Otherwise I don't really know what's up. I haven't noticed any obvious difference in light intensity between the tools and I've run a lot of maps through them.

If you like, you could send me the zipped map+wad (I'll rebuild it myself) and I'll take a look at it. 

Thanks aguiRe. I haven't used -range.

I'll try it one more time tonight & then send it to you if its still the same. The only thing I can think of atm is that I relit an existing bsp with v1.23 rather than doing a new complete compile but that shouldn't make a difference should it? 

a difference AFAIK, that is exactly what I've done with many maps. Unless of course you've somehow manipulated the entity data after (or during) the TyrLite run.

I think there is a "-compress" option in TyrLite that removes light information after usage in order to shrink the entity data size.

Can you run TyrLite once again on the same bsp and get the same result as before (copy the bsp somewhere else beforehand)? 

AguirRe's light tool for about a month and to me there's no difference from Tyrlite, when using delay, wait etc.! But the sunlight/sunlight2 is so much better, not to mention the new soft shadows. 

aguiRe, you e-mailed me a while ago about testing your light proggie, didn't you? I never tested it. Sorry dude. :( 

I thought my email server swallowed a couple of replies - it's acting strangely sometimes ...

I hope there are no serious bugs, if not Glassman has found something.