Was fence texture raytracing ever re-added? It'd be nice to have, my current map uses such textures quite a bit. 

It's in v0.15.9. It should work automatically (the old version needed a -fence command line flag, which is no longer needed) 

Is it supposed to be reported in this line if it is acting?
Embree_TraceInit: 0 skyfaces 40734 solidfaces 0 fencefaces 0 selfshadowfaces 0 skipwindings


I'm noticing that there are no "fencefaces" reported, which makes me wonder if it is actually working. 

Yeah, it should list >0 "fencefaces" there.
Check that "_shadow" "1" is set on the entity (assuming the fence texture is used in a func_?) 

Now that more people are trying to implement lit liquids, and Darkplaces already supports it, can you turn -splitturb on by default in the BSP compiler?

It has literally zero negative side effects, and the impact on performance caused by the subdivision should be negligible in any engine nowadays.

It's nice that the compiler is already capable of compiling lit liquids, but no one is using this option yet. All of those new maps being released in the last months could have looked a lot better with lit liquids. 

I'd like to see this happen too.

I think there are still a few decisions to be shaken out regarding lit water, but we're not going to get a useful discussion until a sufficient number of people have had a chance to see what it actually does look like, what all the weird corner cases are, and how it interacts with existing content. 

I'm not sure about enabling -splitturb in these tools by default; I don't want to push it on mappers retroactively, which is what would happen if people upgrade tools and don't test their maps in DarkPlaces. In the longer run I think it'll be a feature like skyboxes (or phong shading, bounce lighting, etc) where mappers might use it if they're going for a modern look, and not use it if they're going for a retro look.

But I agree the community in general needs to see this in action to evaluate it; DarkPlaces isn't that useful for evaluating the look because the water surfaces doesn't do the swirl effect. I have only seen it in DP and it looks OK but tends to make water look a bit like a solid wall.. I think the warping will help counteract this (as well as careful setup of wateralpha / minlight on the water brushes, from the mapper). We need a Fitzquake style engine with it. I meant to make a patch to Quakespasm for it some time, at least for making test builds to post here. 

Does Darkplaces have a cvar to disable it? If a map doesn't look good with it, the user can disable the effect.

It's about having options. If lit water isn't compiled into the map, the users have no option. 

DarkPlaces [...] doesn't do the swirl effect. [...] tends to make water look a bit like a solid wall.. I think the warping will help counteract this

Exactly. In Retroquad it looks great because the texture swirls while the lighting doesn't. 

Yeah, I compiled e1m2 with lit water and noticed the "solid wall" effect too, but this was even with the turbulent effect.

Another thing I noticed is that the lightmapping tends to make translucent water less noticeable; it's actually more difficult to fine-tune a good value of r_wateralpha that works well.

The thing about fullbright translucent water surfaces is that they actually blend with the lighting on the solid surfaces below them. This comes back to the statement I made earlier on about translucent surfaces probably not needing to be lit at all, but yeah, it's something that people are only ever going to be able to evaluate once they see it.

Having a cvar to enable/disable options is useless IMO if the cvar isn't exposed to the player somehow. Because most players won't even be aware that it exists. That's a total cop-out; people don't read readmes so you need to pick sensible defaults and unfortunately I suspect that while community judgement on lit water is going to be "it looks crap", people are so drunk on the kool-aid that we're going to end up with a set of defaults that in a years time nobody will want. 

To me the value of lit water is that even if it is a tradeoff of sorts and can have undesirable effects (I still haven't really managed to see it in action aside from screenshots, so I can't say if it makes water look like a solid surface or not), it's still better than having water that glows in the dark.

That's really what it's about for me - letting mappers use water in dark areas without it looking awful and out of place. The way it is right now looks fine in places like this, but not so much in places like this. You can make it more subtle by increasing wateralpha (it's 0.6 in these screenshots), but then you lose some of that murkiness and uncertainty from the water that a mapper might want. And it doesn't solve the problem completely anyway.

By the way @ericw, thanks for the hint about the _shadow key, worked a charm. Too bad my fence textures are too finely detailed and barely let any light through :( 

mh: Having a cvar to enable/disable options is useless IMO if the cvar isn't exposed to the player somehow.

That's why I'm used to implementing menu options for this kind of thing. And such menu options needs cvars.

Lots of engines have options to toggle colored lighting, wateralpha and so on. It's really hard to believe you haven't thought of this possibility.

Anyway, even if nobody else implements it in their engines, even if nobody else compiles it in their maps, I'll just keep doing my own thing. Even if everybody else thinks it looks bad. 

I think Retroquad looks great but i also think it should be a criminal offense that I can't play it ;-; 

Let's say I have a lot of fiddly little clip brushes used to smooth over some terrain (turning the collision into steps basically, not slopes). Should the clip brushes be made func_detail, like the terrain, or should clip always be world / func_group, regardless of how detailed it is? 

But in Source clip brushes don't cut visibility. 

I used to place small brushes in func_wall, but for vising sake it would be func_detail. 

I'm pretty sure it's fine to put them in func_detail, they will behave the same as if they are in worldspawn or func_group.

(Clip brushes are only included in hull1/2, and func_detail is specific to hull0, so the features shouldn't have any interaction) 

Thanks very much, that all makes sense. 

1) If I want to upgrade to the latest tyrutils-ericw (v0.15.9) on Linux 64 bit, can I just download the Linux64.zip archive, extract it and immediately use it? That's what I tried, and qbsp seems to work ok, but light gives me the error message
error while loading shared libraries: libembree.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.
There is a file called "libembree.so.2" in "tyrutils-ericw-v0.15.9-Linux/bin/", though, so I'm confused.

2) When using running light, does it matter in which order I type in the command-line options? E.g. is there a difference between
light -bounce -extra4 -dirt
and
light -dirt -bounce -extra4?
Are they both correct? Or both wrong? Do I need to give "bounce" a value? (I've tried various variations, but I find it hard to know when/if I'm doing things correctly, as I'm not sure what the in-game results are supposed to be).

3) This is not a huge problem (yet), but one brush face in a map I've been working on suddenly stopped being lit, both when running light normally and with "-dirtdebug" (which should light all faces evenly, right? That's what it's always done before when I used it). Is there a known reason for this kind of thing? Is there anything one can do to avoid it, or is it one of those mysterious things that just sometimes happens?

This is using tyrutils-ericw 0.15.8 and an outdated version of TB2 beta (the reason being that when I last tried to upgrade TB2, I seemingly had to first upgrade my then freshly installed OS, or fiddle around with repository settings to get the necessary dependencies updated to the versions required for updating TB2 -- and I didn't have the time or patience to do so. At some point I will update both). I just mention this in case this might be an issue related to the editor rather than the light tool (in which case I'll just have to live with it until I update my OS and editor). Oh, and my engine is QuakeSpasm 0.92.0. 

1. Looks like I messed up packaging the linux binary.
If you don't mind running light manually from the terminal, try "cd"-ing into the "bin" directory and run:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$(pwd) ./light {options here}
Otherwise, I'll fix it in the next release.

2. Order doesn't matter, except the map has to come last. There is no parameter for -bounce (there are separate flags like -bouncescale X though). Only a few commands take optional parameters (-soft can take a number like "-soft 2"). The tool should be strict if there are mistakes in the command line options, and refuse to run. For now the manual is the best reference: here, or the website front page.

3. It would just be a bug in "light". Things that have caused black faces in the past:
- bmodels (func_wall, etc.) that intersect the world
- regular world faces with an obstruction near the center of the face, within 1 unit of the surface.
I *think* I fixed all of these for the next version, I should put up a beta or release soon. Feel free to send me your map/bsp if you want me to check it out though. 

1. I didn't know there was an alternative to running it manually from terminal; that's what I always do. :) Anyway, I tested typing that arcane string of characters and it works, thanks! That'll tide me over till the next release.

2. Order doesn't matter
Thanks for clearing that up! :)

There is no parameter for -bounce
the manual is the best reference
I had already read through the manual and the stuff on the front page a few times, but was still a little confused.

The example of the front page is
-bounce -bouncescale 2
which made me think that it doesn't take any parameters.

But the manual made it seem to me as if do need to specify a value ("n"):

bounce n

Enables 1 bounce, 0=disable even if set in worldspawn. Available as a worldspawn key.

I guess I'm misinterpreting something?

3. Thanks for all of this info. The brush with the unlit face is just a regular unobstructed worldbrush, but it's good to know these things for future reference.

Thank you very much for offering to look at the map. If the problem persists, I might take you up on the offer, but a lot is bound to change in the map, so the problem might resolve itself in the mean time. Plus, the file is a huge mess of provisional brushwork, newbie mistakes, textures that have not been properly aligned yet, etc., and though I know no-one but me cares, I'm still too embarrassed to share it in its current state. 

Hi,
I noticed that color lights have different intensity than the neutral ones. https://flic.kr/p/SQKPAU In the picture all the lights have the "light" key of 150, but the attenuation and the intensity is very different.
If that's "a feature", what can I do to make them look more uniform? 

That looks like a custom engine screw-up. What engine are you using? 

When you change the color, it reduces the intensity of the colors that you don't want. If a white light has RGB color of 1, 1, 1 and you make it pure blue, the color becomes 0, 0, 1.

You could reduce the brightness 1/2 by making the color 0.5, 0.5, 0.5

I don't think the light program compensates for this and maybe it's what you are seeing. 

That's not the problem at all here. Look at the image - that's an engine thing. The light program just can't blow the lightmap brightness up like that.