Here's a lighting idea...

(Grand Nagus) #1

I dunno how much people would benefit from this, but let’s say you’ve worked on a map for quite some time and it looks great to you. But, when you send it out for a public beta, people complain that it’s too bright or dark!

Now for my idea… Would it be possible to program in a switch where you can reduce or increase the intensity of a map’s light entities without having to play around with all of those intensity values? Like this:

q3map2.exe -light -fast -filter -patchshadows -samples 3 -bounce 4 -lightfix .90 %1

where ‘%1’ is where your map’s located. That new switch, ‘lightfix .90’, would light your map where the overall intensity of all lights would be 90 percent of their original values. If you were to put 1.10 here, the lighting in the map would be brighter by 110 percent.

If that wouldn’t be too hard to code, that would be an awesome feature!

Keep up the good work! I still can’t believe that it takes less time to compile a map than it does to eat dinner (where it used to take all night). Thanks for such an awesome compiler!

PS: You’ll have to forgive me of my poor grammar, it’s 02:00 AM and I got up really early the previous morning. I can’t see straight! :smiley:

(system) #2

Some people will always complain about the brightness or darkness of a map.

I’m mapping for the default gamma settings.
If you have a CRC or TFT screen the map will look different althought the settings are the same.
If people think your map is to bright or dark, tell them to raise their ingame gamma. :wink:

So if it looks good lightened with default lighting you are on the safe side :slight_smile:

(MuffinMan) #3

problem with your idea is punkbuster, it won’t let you play with an own compiled version, apart from that the compile would almost take as long as the original compile i guess

(Emon) #4

…just change your gamma settings…

(ydnar) #5

The switch(es) are already present:

-scale N – scales all light sources (except ambient/minlight)
-pointscale N – scales point (entity lights)
-areascale N – scales area (shader/surface) lights
-skyscale N – scales sky (suns, q3map_skyLight) lights

y

(Grand Nagus) #6

Awesome! I’ll definitely take advantage of those light scale switches. I’m mapping for Elite Force on a Windows 2000 machine with a GeForce4 vid card, and that combo won’t let you brighten the gamma (and the ‘ignore gamma’ console switch in EF doesn’t work well either). I think it has something to do with the version of Quake 3 engine it uses, 'cause I don’t have this gamma problem with Quake 3. As a result, the maps look fine on my machine but Win98 users see my maps as ‘really bright’.

Thanks for the tip, ydnar! That’s gonna save me a lot of time.