Is there a command to force VIS to cut off at a certain distance (which would be hidden by fog)? Can't find my copy of the tools readme :( 

hmap2 has -farplane 

tuna's fixed version of willem's modified version of aguirre's vis has -visdist #.

yeah, i totally just wanted to type out that line. ^_^ 

And everything seems to be going well except for the old "no textures in game" crap. Yes, I've got a worldspawn key for the texture wad, and I've put the damn wad in the id1 directory, the id1/tools directory (with the compile tools) and in the /id1/maps directory (with the maps) -- no dice. Any flashes of wisdom would be appreciated. 

Which compilers are you using? 

Using Tyrann's stuff at the moment. 

Turns out I just didn't have the entries to the used textures in the wad. Feel free to throw stones or other heavy objects. 

not stones or heavy objects, and not to belittle tyrann's tools, but there's really no reason not to use aguirre's stuff.
they are the most up to date.

http://user.tninet.se/~xir870k/txqbspbjp.zip
i have yet to see a more robust bsp compiler.

http://www.quaddicted.com/tools/wvis_20100119.7z
it has multi threaded vis thanks to willem's and tuna's tweaks.

http://www.quaddicted.com/tools/BengtLightColouredR2.zip
mh tweaked aguirre's light to have colour and multi threading while still keeping all the things that made it great like sunlight2, _anglesense, _softangle and delay 5. 

 

I'm glad you solved the issue because I think I was going to be useless in this case. 

_anglesense controls how much light lights up a surface depending on the angle it is hitting it.

for example, if you have an omni directional light placed 16 units away from a flat surface, only a small area around the light will be lit up with the light intensity attenuating quickly as you get further away.

reducing _anglesense will make the light care less about the shallow angle it's hitting the face on and light up the surface farther out.

conversely, bringing _anglesense up will make it affect surfaces less unless the light is almost hitting perpendicular to the surface.

this is useful if you have, for example, a spot light that you want to make look 'fatter' but need to keep close to a wall. setting _anglesense low will make it light up a lot more area.

it also makes faking nice ambient occlusion shadows easier.

_softangle is a spotlight setting. essentially, you get more control over spots.
'angle' sets the max cone angle of the light, but _softangle sets the area that will be 100% light (not counting distance).
so you set 'angle' to 90 and '_softangle' to 30 and you get a spot that's very wide, but with only a small bright area in the center with a nice smooth gradient, as opposed to completely blanketing everything in light.

these two settings alone make it impossible not to use the tool for me. i find them way too useful! :)