Seconding real-time lighting preview. Lighting a map is one of the worst workflows in quake level design, due to the slow iteration cycle.

When I think about this feature, most lighting edits are very localized (adding/moving/deleting a light, editing radius/brightness/falloff on a light.) An individual light usually touches only a small portion of the bsp. If you start with a bsp with all lighting calculated, you should be able to mark and relight only the small number of affected surfaces, after each edit to a light entity. Then you could get into a flow where you just go in and make a bunch of tweaks, seeing the results almost instantly, until you are happy, and then save the changes back to the .map file.

The hard part I think is that such a tool requires a bsp renderer, a map editor, and a lightmap generator, which are traditionally 3 different programs and everyone wants to use their personal favorite of all 3. Not sure where this new functionality could/should be added. 

What editors support region compiling?

In some versions of radiant, you just drag a brush out to define a region to compile and the editor then only sends that small subset of the map to the compiler, automatically boxed in, with an info_player_start added where the camera was.

That's a pretty straightforward thing to add to an editor, and would massively help you do quick iterations when mucking around with localised lighting. 

The best approach would be to edit the light entities in the engine itself, save a diff file containing the modified light entities, and make the engine call the external light utility to recompile the lights.

Upon parsing the diff, the light/BSP compiler would check which lights were removed/added/modified, and relight only the surfaces affected by them.

However, Quake's lightmap format still has some annoying limitations that restricts the productivity potential of such an approach. Dirtmaps, sunlights and bounce lighting would likely require the.whole lighting to be recompiled anyway. And the lightmap doesn't keep track of which light entities affected each surface. 

 

He's right I've used it in one of the Radiant's before. Would be a great addition to TB. 

Speaking of editors, I'd like to see JACK being improved. It's sad that its author seems to be very averse to criticism, because JACK is a great editor and could become even better. Now it seems to be discontinued.

I don't understand why XaeroX overreacts when some people talk to him. I don't remember anyone attacking him anywhere. 

But ya I agree. I use JACK all the time. 

If you happen to read this, and who knows if you will --

I want to apologize for being an angry beer-drinking guy.

I had a super-frustrating day coding with several layers of unwanted bad news getting in the way of my ideas.

My brilliant thought was "Fuck it, let's get super-smashed, I'm so sick of winter -- let's go!".

I'm quite embarrassed by the idiocy I did. Even more comical, I thought I was thinking.

Anyway, the important part -- you acted with class instead of telling me where to go --- which you probably should have. 

No apology needed as it was pretty hilarious. Welcome back after your hangover :) 

I hope it was hilarious, but obv that is not how I feel about it.

The crazy thing, haha -- my hangover was zero.

My first thoughts when I woke: Wait? WTF? I feel so relaxed. Why don't I have a level 25 hangover? I drank enough to kill small mammals. Maybe I instinctually drank tons of water, but hell if I know.

My second thought when I woke: "Fuck!!! I posted @ func. God dammit. I know not to drunk post. FUCK!!!!!!!" 

It's Spud. 

In retrospect Snug is a much snazzier sounding handle, though.

@Baker: Don't sweat it. 

 

In 2018, I want to see at least one map easter egg about drunk Baker. 

http://viz.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/21_viz125_bakers.jpg 

@Baker: Don't sweat it.

Thank you. 

@bAKER: Been there, done that, i'm sure you've witnessed more than a few of my own rants :( I hope you're drinking 3.2% cause 17 beers oof!

I tried the menus and they do work great!
some engines in the past put all the options on a horizontal row at the top *bleh!* But yours is just natural; quake-style. And as some have mentioned there's a few spots to buff out. But for the most part nice work! 

I was just thinking about how cool it would be to have a quake/arcane dimensions 8km x 8km map/mod that had a full 200 players per server with little towns to venture to, to fight hordes of monsters or other players with quests etc. hmm maybe like a world of quake-craft but a merge of coop/pvp on a huge map with faithful art assets.

sorry just mumbling over here at 3:13am :D 

Thanks for checking out the mouse menu, R00k.

Yeah, I'm a stick in the mud conservative that couldn't accept a menu with any changes in the appearance.

I was just thinking about how cool it would be to have a quake/arcane dimensions 8km x 8km map/mod that had a full 200 players per server with little towns to venture to"

If you look at some of capabilities in Mark V, I am angling in that direction. It has a mod installer built-in, ipv6, some severely enhanced coop features.

Combined with some of Spike's work in Quakespasm Spiked, this is almost possible now in theory.

That type of thinking is what I ultimately want.

The ability to co-operative play easily in an immersive multi-player environment.

Makarate once ran a Quakeworld coop server using the Undergate level I made. And obv, my work with RocketGuy on RQuake coop and his then popular coop server.

And of course, Gunter who even now runs a Quake co-op server ;-) 

Given that Ter Shibboleth apparently required some pretty hefty code-monkeying to make happen ("...where [ericw] entirely re-wrote the leak code just so the map would compile"), I don't even want to think about what havoc and even larger map would wreak on editors, compilers, and the engine itself... not to mention the player's framerate. 

I try to not mention this often, but the Quake bsp compile tools -- specifically vis -- does a horrible job.

You can find some discussions where mh, me, ericw and probably Spike discuss this in the Quakespasm thread.

It used to be normal for maps to co-op. Like Tronyn's Mask of the Red Death or Sewage Devastation.

czg's honey coops just fine. <----

Co-operative play isn't an alien idea, it used to be normal and expected that all released Quake maps would co-op.

That thinking kind of got lost in part because many maps required bsp2 and such and wouldn't work in, say, Quakeworld.

Coops ... Yes ...

https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/honey.html
https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/quoth.html
https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/ant.html
https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/sewage.html
https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/hdn.html
https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/arwop.html

And probably 90%-95% of all past single player releases that aren't bsp2.

Co-op ability simply used to be normal. There is scarcely a map by czg, necros, tronyn, pulsar, distrans, etc. that doesn't co-op. 

More the size and complexity of the map part, regardless of how many info_player_coops it includes. 

Holy shit Quaddicted works in Waterfox now, neat. 

Needs to be designed for. E.g. a gate closes behind you locking you in to an area, e.g. for an arena fight or a puzzle. Your poor coop buddy gets squished by the gate, resses, runs back only to have to wait for the first player to kill all...crap he died too. Now you have to restart the whole level and cheat yourself back the weapons and ammo you had.

Desigb for coop please. 

I know it's just dreaming but FTE can handle pretty big maps. This isnt a new idea, years ago people were all talking about taking all the id1 maps and combine them into one huge map! I think that is a doable thing. and imagine 200 people playing across all those maps on 1 server doing their thing.. i think either coop of pvp that would be fun to play. and then imagine its not id1 maps but a whole little quake-world.. :boom: mind blown ! :^D