The integer vs. float thing: Integers cannot (or at least should not) have non-integer values, so that default value of 0.5 is nonsensical. Either use float or use an integer default value. If non-integer values are supposed to be okay, then do this:

_range(float) : "Global light range" : "0.5" : "yadda yadda"

As necros said, default values for floats should be in quotes.

As for the flags thing, what are these flags actually for? Does that specify additional spawnflags? Maybe it's something only JH understands.

Either way, TB2 now ignores such things (and gives a warning), but it would be cool if that FGD were compatible with all editors.

If you want, I'll make you a TB2 build to test with so that you can make all warnings go away. 

TB1 also doesn't like the "color255" types used by JH. 

It might be JH specific. Thinking about it now it might be the part that tells the editor to show the direction arrow in the 3d view for info_* and monster_* entities.

I will change to a float for those two non integer integers.

Onetruepurple : the color255 brings up the colour wheel for selecting light colours in an rgb 255 format. it's too useful to remove. It would be wonderful if TB supported something like this but for now I guess sleepwalkr can ignore this specific attribute? 

TB has a full fledged color picker but I wasn't sure how to replace color255 with it. 

I can't find it. TB or TB2? 

http://i.imgur.com/eVCefz8.png 

I'm not sure how it's set up internally, but if you add a "_color" key to a light in TB1, a color editor shows up when that row is selected. 

i think it is hardcoded currently? _sunlight_color gives a picker, but _sunlight2_color does not, for example. 

TB2 will at some point. Right now, the special semantics of that property are ignored, but it will load and it will show up in the editor. 

it's not hardcoded, but it tries to guess whether a property is a color property by examining it's name. It's flaky, and the color255 and color1 property definitions in the FGD would surely help. I will support those in TB 2.1 

I just tried out this new light utility. I'm have trouble getting lava to look right, but I'm sure I'll get it figured out. One question. Is there a limit to how many surface lights? Because I'm getting some ideas here. I realize it's just one light per texture name, but if I have 30 different light type textures, each can have a different type of surface light emit? 

no problem having multiple surface lights with the same texture name.

The way to think of it is the "_surface" key causes a light to be deleted, and then copies placed across surfaces with that texture.
There is currently a 65k limit on total number of lights, for no good reason, but the light tool will be really slow if you get anywhere near that number of lights. 

Okay, so it's possible to have multiple different style lights per texture name in addition to many light emitting textures. This is pretty cool.

Just as an experiment I lit up a rock formation inside a cave with a func_wall then removed the brush using killtarget on a trigger when the map loaded. Worked fine.

I like that the color of the light is controllable. The Quake 2 surface light color was taken from the texture which probably contributed to its reputation for garishly colored lighting. 

yeah, what happens is the surface lights are already spawning arrays of lights, then each of those lights gets another array of lights. I ran into the same thing, but when you think about it, deviance on surface lights is only necessary if it is a single light (eg: a small wall texture), but not in the case of lava.

i wonder if you could track how many lights have been spawned as part of the surface lighting and if it is over a threshold, do not apply deviance lighting. just some internal tracking, nothing added to the actual map or anything.

because you would want to use deviance lights for small 32x32 lights, for example. 

That would be nice to have. Maybe I was premature to disable combining _deviance + _surface; I could just make it print a warning. 

ericw,

I had to switch to a faster computer for building the bsp because light was getting pretty slow on my editing computer. I now get those jitterning messages I asked about in the mapping thread. First time I've seen them. Not just a few, but screen after screen of it, but it doesn't take very long to get to the progress indication and the resulting bsp is fine, I just thought you might like to know. 

from http://ericwa.github.io/tyrutils-ericw/ 

Stupid me. There's a copy of the 7/13/2015 zip sitting right there in the maps folder. I guess I downloaded the newer version but forgot to extract it, because the exe in that folder (the one I'm using) is dated 5/15/2015. 

is there a problem with reading .wads from symlinks? I can only use a single .wad file, if i try to add more than one, it will only read one of them.

although... maybe it's not related to symlinks as it happens if it is absolute or relative paths. 

So I've downloaded and extracted the tgz archive, but I don't know where to go from here (can't remember how I got the original tyrutils up and running, and I'm sure I didn't do it in the most elegant way).

Also, I'm not sure if downloading the archive was the best first step, as I'd ideally like to set it up so as to be directly update-able from github (the way I've got TB2 set up -- but I needed a hell of a lot of help in getting that up and running too, and understood virtually nothing of what I was doing!).

Could someone give me some noob-friendly instructions, or tell me where I can find them? 

I should add these to the readme. Assuming you start in your home directory,

git clone https://github.com/ericwa/tyrutils-ericw.git
cd tyrutils-ericw
make

If there are no errors this will generate ~/tyrutils-ericw/bin/qbsp, etc.

To update:

cd tyrutils-ericw
git pull
make clean
make 

That was painless :)

Am I correct that the actual programmes are now in tyrutils-ericw/bin? Do I need to cd into that directory every time I wish to compile, light, etc.?

Also, do I need to have the files I want to use (e.g. the .map file from which I want to create a .bsp) inside the tyrutils-ericw/bin directory? I ask because that was the only way I could ever get the original tyrutils to work, but I suspect there might be another way... 

the actual programmes are now in tyrutils-ericw/bin
Yup.

You can run the from another directory by using the full path to the tool, like this, if you had maps in ~/maps:
cd maps
~/tyrutils-ericw/bin/qbsp test.map

--

What I actually do is use this build script:
https://gist.github.com/ericwa/360f35c92a0139961f35

If you want to try that, save it as build.sh, update the UTILSPATH and DEST variables to match your tyrutils bin path and quake/id1/maps path, run chmod +x build.sh to make it executable, and copy it to your mapping directory.

Now you can do:
./build.sh test.map
and it will compile and copy the resulting bsp/lit to your quake/id1/maps folder. 

the actual programmes are now in tyrutils-ericw/bin
Yup.

You can run the from another directory by using the full path to the tool, like this, if you had maps in ~/maps:
cd maps
~/tyrutils-ericw/bin/qbsp test.map

--

What I actually do is use this build script:
https://gist.github.com/ericwa/360f35c92a0139961f35

If you want to try that, save it as build.sh, update the UTILSPATH and DEST variables to match your tyrutils bin path and quake/id1/maps path, run chmod +x build.sh to make it executable, and copy it to your mapping directory.

Now you can do:
./build.sh test.map
and it will compile and copy the resulting bsp/lit to your quake/id1/maps folder. 

What distribution are you on? If it's Archlinux, I could make a package for easy and system-wide installation.