Thank you so much! It seems to be working fine with hmap2 and ezquake.

I'm curious though why Quake has to recognize it. Isn't it really just for convenience moving stuff around in the editor? 

To the editor, a func_group is just an entity with brushes attached (like a door, button, etc.) These are normally treated specially by qbsp (compiled as a bmodel) and the engine (looks for qc code with the classname to set up the entity behaviour).

But since func_group is a special thing just for mapper convenience, qbsp has special code to merge it into the world, and the engine never sees it. 

When I use 254 as seen here http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=4&start=14949 texmex turns it brown like 255, and that's how it appears on the map. 

Of course I meant here: http://quakewiki.org/wiki/Quake_palette 

254 should work. Is it broken in all engines or just some engines? 

oh wait, it sounds like it might be a texmex bug (if the error occurs inside texmex too) 

btw i didn't write the code in http://quakewiki.org/wiki/Quake_palette even though it claims I did. That's not now i write single-line comments :) 

...is how they managed to name all 16 rows without repeating the word "brown" 

 

Hey there, I've heard about the q3map2 option -keepLights that is supposed to stop the compiler from stripping out light entities. Though, it never seems to work for me whenever I try it, what's the most correct usage? 

That is a worldspawn switch 

So what should I do to use it? What process do I stick this thing on? 

What about worldspawn's "_sunlight_color" key? I'm using tyrutils v0.15 qbsp, vis and light, getting only bland white sunlight. It seems to ignore that key. I tried 64 192 255 and it's still white. I'm on Worldcraft 3.3, but that shouldn't matter. What am I'm missing? 

Sorry, I'm mapping for Quake 1. Here's light.exe output:

---- light / TyrUtils v0.15 ----
running with 4 threads
BSP is version 29
Colored light entities detected: .lit output enabled.
4 entities read, 0 are lights.
0....1....2....3....4....5....6....7....8....9...
Lighting Completed.

lightdatasize: 1989
0 switchable light styles
Writing BSP version 29
0.0 seconds elapsed

The level shows sunlight, but it's always white, no matter how I set _sunlight_color 

Make sure to copy the both the .lit and .bsp to your maps directory, if you're compiling in a different directory.
Does your engine have .lit support? Most do, except the original winquake/glquake. 

Guys, think I pulled the trigger too soon. For some reason, when I ran light outside Worldcraft it worked. Sunlight is blue now. My bad. 

In order to eliminate unnecessary files, I was deleting the .lit
Gotta copy the .lit along with the .bsp 

I noticed light.txt doc doesn't say anything about this key, but I see you talking about it sometimes.

Are you compiling your lights using tyrann's light.exe? Anyone setting _sunlight2 and/or _sunlight2_color? 

I made a fork of tyrutils with various new features, _sunlight2 is only in that. I haven't made a proper release, so it's just buried in various forum threads and hard to find :-(

The latest snapshot is from may 1:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1q5giu2leyvvhk0/AAA0UCacYD-tgVpElMSpf5Awa?dl=0 

Does this version have _sunlight2? Because it's doing nothing for my map. Do you happen to have some example map showing its effect? My map has a central yard where sunlight hits. I was counting on _sunlight2 to cast some sunlight on the "outside" walls as well. 

Take this test .MAP:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3Ww0W8WFfq7bFB6NGFhT2t1R0E&authuser=0

It has:
"_sunlight" "300"
"_sun_mangle" "180 -90 0"
"_sunlight_color" "255 64 64"
"_sunlight2" "200"
"_sunlight2_color" "64 64 255"

I was expecting to see a red square in the middle and all the other walls in a blue tint, but only the red square appears. What am I doing wrong? 

Yep, that build should do _sunlight2.
Only "sky" textures emit sunlight, just texture the outer box with "sky1" or any sky texture and I think that will fix it 

ignore that, didn't notice that you already had a sky textured skylight.

I think what's happening is, the _sunlight2 is working, it's just really dim because there it's a fairly narrow opening to the sky. A _sunlight2 value of 200 will light up a surface to a value of 200 only if it has an unobstructed 180-degree view of the sky. Try setting it to 1000 and you'll get some blue light on the walls. (this will make outdoor areas with more of a view of the sky too bright, though) 

Really? I thought _sunlight2 worked more like an "ambient" minimum light to the "outside" faces, ones facing a sky textured face in any angle (maybe inside the same portalled volume?). I mean, there is ambient light for all surfaces and _sunlight2 for "outside" surfs. Did I get it wrong?

If the surface must have an unobstructed 180 degree view of the sky, the floor in this test level shouldn't be affected by _sunlight2? 

Been seeing this kind of explanation:

"�_sunlight2′ and �_sunlight_color2′ to make a sort of outdoor minlight. The light utility creates an array of minlight casting suns in a circle and sort of floods outdoor areas."

I don't get what this "array of suns in a circle" look like. Not sure about the effect I should get as well.