There are some basic tips to follow like - if you have gratings make out of brushes, func_wall them because each hole in the grating is a portal and VIS will need to process it and all of it's children. Very nasty.

The same goes for railings, cages, barred windows, etc. 

The only drawback there is if you were counting on cool shadows to be cast. In that case, well, suck it up and eat the VIS time. :) 

That said, I'm surprised that someone hasn't come up with a version of light that would cast light from func_walls (optionally, of course). If you aren't going to be removing the func_wall at some point through a killtarget, it seems perfectly reasonable to use it as a shadow caster. 

Something for you to do next weekend... 

Good job on the tools Willem. Multiplatform ftw.

This is my understanding as well. If anyone has any concrete information about why vis should be run before light, I'd love to hear it.

Some of the light programs use vis information to do quicker lighting. I think Lord Havoc's tool does this. Not sure on bjp's.

Some tests seemed to indicate that bjp's vis does more effective culling than others, btw. 

That said, I'm surprised that someone hasn't come up with a version of light that would cast light from func_walls

This has been on my compiler wishlist for a few years, along with other stuff like self-shadowing bmodels, global illumination, minlight on bmodels, light contribution caching for fast re-lighting after small lighting changes, "manual vis" (as used in medal of honor), portal-based vis (a static variant of the portal visibility used in doom3), hard-edged shadows, cubemapped lights, shambler clip brushes (hull2 only), nonsolid brushes (hull0 only), etc. I have hacked up the compiler sources a little bit over the years, but never enough to produce anything finished enough to release. (seriously, not even finished enough that i could use it for everyday mapping.) 

Even if that were true, lighting is very rarely the bottleneck. I suppose it could be cool if you were wanting to do fast iterations on lighting or something though... 

I'm not familiar with how editors work with multiple WADs so as I add support for them into ToeTag, I'm going to have a few questions. Heh.

OK, so if you load up 2 WADs that have a texture inside of them with the same name, what happens? Say you load WAD1 and WAD2 and they each have a texture called BLAH -- what do level editors commonly do about that? Hold them both? Only use the first one they see? 

will show all of them in alphabetical order, and it will show two of any textures the same. So when I have a load of IDbase wads loaded there are often two or three of each of the common textures in a row on the display...... 

Excellent info, thanks!

OK, so how does the UI work for Worldcraft?

How do you load multiple WADs? How do you unload a WAD you no longer want (or can you)? Are you just editing the worldspawn key/values or is there an actual dialog box for it? 

Which brings up a dialogue with several tabs ranging from 2d diplay options, your build programs, and one of them "is textures". Here you find a list of your current wads and the options to remove any you have highlighted and to load other wads. You can load as many wads as you like,and they will appear straight away in your textures. Removing a wad from the list requires a restart.
You cant actually see any textures from here.
You get to see all of the textures whenever you enter "texturing mode" (or whatever they call it). If you enter texture mode via a button on the left margin of the screen. If you press the button with brushes highlighted then all of the faces of those brushes become highlighted. A 90 degree right angle symbol appears in the middle of each face to make it easy to see what angle it is at.
A small dialogue appears near the right of the screen with a picture of the current texture on it. Beneath the texture are all of you alignment buttons (left, right, mcenter, top, bottom, fit) and your integer fields for x and y scaling and x and y position, and angle. There is a button beneath the picture of you current texture to open a window where you can see all of the textures you have loaded, and select another one. You can narrow the textures being shown to you by typing letters in a sort of search field.

As for the worldspawn, you never have to worry about that, WC just adds the correct paths into the worldspawn whenever it exports its RMF format into a MAP file. Along with a nice annoying key "mapversion" which it gives the value "220" and you have to remove it manualy (unless you have the utility "nomapversion.exe") :P 

Oh OK, so it's a global setting and not set up per map. Alright, thanks! 

Suppose this won't work, but asking anyway:

A push that only works when being touched from a certain direction like regular triggers with an angle field? Perhaps with a movedir/angles combo, or bastardized use of trigger_push_touch? 

I was making some custom wads lately with the same textures in them and the BSP editor i'm using shows just one of them (a 2 frame animation). I was wondering though, has anyone been able to load a 512 by 512 texture in their editor? The biggest i got to see and use are 128 by 512, and 256 by 256. The wad i made with a 512 by 512 texture shows correctly in a wadviewer i got, but shows up as a 32 by 32 white texture in BSP. 

This is just as a heads up for anyone still using Worldcraft 1.6 (myself) and who has the latest nvidia drivers. Apparently, if your driver version is anything higher than 182.50, your 3d view in WC will look something like this:

http://qrf.mine.nu/~orl/misc/wc.png

However, enabling the hardware acceleration option will fix the 3d view problem, unfortunately that also raises the other problem of not being able to select any object within the 3d view.

Again, anything higher than version 182.50 of the nvidia driver will result in WC's 3d view going crazy, and essentially useless. 

you can make triggers only work from a specific angle!? 

Negke's tall map - Skinny Norris I think it's called. Have to take the puzzle route.

To have an angle trigger make the angle something other than 0. 

Find the openGL.dll that I posted earlier in the thread and put it in your wc folder. It might fix the problem. 

Or simply: the start map ("this hall selects.." triggers) 

Wow, I NEVER noticed that the start map triggers did that. All these years, so weird... 

Sorry, but I can't seem to locate the openGL.dll you had mentioned. I checked this Mapping Help thread, but found nothing. Care to point me in the right direction? 

czg's curve tutorial, does someone have a link to it with the pictures intact?

Wouldn't this and the hiprotate tutorial be something to archive at quaddicted? 

Try this gb:

http://shub-hub.com/files/misc/Curve_tutorial_files.zip

I think that's the one. 

.

That's it, indeed. I can never remember this stuff :-P 

maybe a dumbass question. working on a sm, tested it out - a door moves. perfect right? added some more stuff, now it doesn't trigger.
its a lowering platform, and a setpiece that I need to keep. any ideas whats going on here?