Strahlemann wrote:Apropos base-specific lighting: Would you mind trying to use a red skybox for the red base ?
I'd really like to see it (ok, maybe it'll look like crap but maybe it won't. Please give it a try once )

I don't think it's possible to have several skyboxes at the same time. I once slammed together 3 maps into one .map file (connected with teleporters) and only one skybox showed up.

Ed wrote:- Arena mode seems strangely broken in this version for me. The files are correct (the version numbers have been incremented and that's it) but on loading the game it says it can't find the previous arena version and removes it from the database yet I have previously removed all older versions. Doing g_maplist doesn't list it and in fact doesn't list any arena maps. Something odd there. Possibly with my game config. Will have to try a fresh install and see if that does it fine.

g_maplist must always hold 2 valid maps, because of the way the detection for broken maplists works. So you need to set it to "arena_bloodprisonctf arena_bloodprisonctf" or start the map and set "samelevel" to 1 (that'll also reduce the time for level changes).

I fixed the minor misaligned textures. They've been a recurring problem in the blue base that is hard to fix in one go. This is where peer review works!

I've also changed the light entities so that they are coordinated more across the two bases. It's subtle but most people should think it's better.

I've tried as Strahlemann suggested to change the light textures to be blue/red coordinated. For blue this is easy as there is a standard texture for this that was already in use. Red doesn't seem to have worked. There was no standard red light texture so I created one (and the _glow) in the GIMP directly from the blue ones just by switching the channels round.

Although the texture has appeared in radiant (along with the glow map) and it appears in game (along with the glow map), q3bsp2 does not seem to have taken it into account when lighting the level so whereas the blue lights have a blue lit area around them (different from glow, this requires building to support it) the red texture has no lit area round it despite glowing. This makes the red base appear darker than the blue base just because the world is not being lit as it should be.

I noticed that the blue texture has a tinylightblue2k equivalent which I had looked for in the data pk3 but it doesn't exist. Is this 2k texture what I need to make a red version of for the world to be lit by it in q3bsp2? What does the 2k texture do?

Here's the original blue texture and glow, and the red and glow that I made:





Have I done something drastically wrong with my new textures? They are a lot smaller than the originals as I've saved them in GIMP with some fairly aggressive settings but that shouldn't influence how they act as a JPEG.

I thought about the two sky idea but thought it wouldn't work either. One way would be to create a sky that goes from red to blue. That could even be a natural sky at sun set.

The arena game mode problem seems to be something broken with my setup. It has recently refused to accept the existence of any arena maps... for some reason.

TIA

An update:
Edit: obsolete link, see end of thread for latest

Fixed in this release:
- Some more misaligned textures (thanks Strahlemann)
- Colour coordinated jumppads
- Changed light textures in bases to be colour coordinated. Changed them to the brighter glowing textures as my new red one was a bit broken and they weren't red/blue enough more pink/violet. No one could think they're in the wrong base now.
- Added playerclip slopes to the stairs. The scaling of the map makes the steps a bit big so bots sometimes do silly jumping to get up them. By laying a slope in it stops this and makes player movement smoother. Their is a bit of sliding between steps but the player can stop on a step OK. There is also a jumping sound sometimes at the bottom, more accurate in a way. The corner stairs by the mortar aren't quite right but will do. See the .map file for what had to be done. These might also help in vanilla Blood Prison if someone wants to port them across.
- Replaced screenshot, it was a bit out of date. New one is of the red base and the off effect has gone as the natural lighting looks nice.
- Added gpl.txt
- Built .pk3 with 7-zip. Higher compression but file slightly larger than previous versions just because there's more data.

This still isn't final but should be the last beta release (I keep saying this). I know 0.5 is on RBI so it should be replaced. Anyone who downloaded a previous version should delete the old .pk3's after updating so that their is only one version in the maplist.

A screenshot for you:

Good work again.

The only complaint is the lighting this time
You have replaced nearly every yellow light with a very saturated blue or red.
If you would have kept some more yellow lights the overall impression wouldn't be so monotone like it is now, cause the yellow light would brake it up a little.
Now the bases are using too intense lighting which can be annoying in the long run.
(well yeah, i asked for base-specific lighting but that's a bit too much imo).

Alternatively you could use some less saturated blue and red colors.

Of course this is a matter of taste but it would definitely look more professional if the lighting is not that intense.

Overall i think if you fix this point and the ones below this map could definitely be included in the next release.

strange light bug:


some misalignments


weird use of textures here:


maybe try to add some additional player-clip steps to avoid the sliding

Strahlemann wrote:Now the bases are using too intense lighting which can be annoying in the long run.

It was difficult choosing what to do. The lights I wanted to use just weren't strong enough and telling what lights to be different is difficult without making it look like a mistake. What I think I will do is make it so that lights that are on the ceiling itself will be back to the pale yellow and that lights that are attached to walls will stay as they are. That way you get decals for the team colour but the effect shouldn't be so strong. The Uzi corridors will stay as they are I think as those areas work well with the strong light.

Strahlemann wrote:Overall i think if you fix this point and the ones below this map could definitely be included in the next release.

Well if it's going to be in a full release then I'm happy to change it to how Alientrap collectively wants it. If people are happy with the change to overhead yellows but colours staying on walls then I'll do that.

Strahlemann wrote:strange light bug:

It's an odd one. I've seen it for a while and looked at it from various angles. I think it's caused by the blue sky and the red lights both being incident on something a bit shiny that is off-grey. It may be an anomaly of q3map2 that this happens, either that or their are too many incident lights on it.

Strahlemann wrote:some misalignments

Fixed.

Strahlemann wrote:weird use of textures here:

Changed this area. Put some metal plating round that area and more consistent wood. It only got like that because of the way the two halves were put together and seeing how nobody mentioned it earlier I kept it because I thought people might have liked it.

Strahlemann wrote:maybe try to add some additional player-clip steps to avoid the sliding

Done. That works a lot better. Something else I've done is put a block of playerclip behind the mortars. It's the only hole there that wasn't doen and after I managed to get myself jammed there (possibly because of the light above) I decided to block them up. Mortar still accesible and gives a flat edge all along that wall.

The main thing I want comment on is the lighting now. What lights should go yellow? Once we have some kind of consensus I'll build it again.

Ed wrote:
It's an odd one. I've seen it for a while and looked at it from various angles. I think it's caused by the blue sky and the red lights both being incident on something a bit shiny that is off-grey. It may be an anomaly of q3map2 that this happens, either that or their are too many incident lights on it.

This might be dupicate brushes in the same place.

tZork wrote:This might be dupicate brushes in the same place.

It's not z-fighting. I checked and there is only one brush there. I've replaced it with another just to see if it was some strange texture problem and on a test build it looked fine. So either it was the brush or something with the scaling/lighting process. I'm going to try a few things with rebuilding it and see if it comes back. This may mean building it with some custom settings to work round this anomaly.

In not talking abt z-fighting. sometimes, due to radiant.. mature nature *cougth*, it dupicated brushes, sometimes many times. whan this happens vis can get totaly confused, rendering a btush as a transparent strucytural one. Obviosly this wasent the case here tho.

Maps looking good, i plyed it a few times on rbi and liked it. nicely done.

I suspected it was a weird q3map2 bug and it almost certainly is. If I compile the map before scaling it's fine, after scaling it's also fine. If I then relight it this anomaly comes in. The way it appears depends upon the lighting parameters used and bounce 8 seems to change it. The way you have seen it before is made from it being bounce 8 but without that you get something slightly different. This error is only in the red base, not the blue base. Seeing how the red base is the original half I looked in the original Bloodprison to see how it is lit:

The same lighting error is there.

I'm going to try other lighting parameters as some seem to effect it and maybe there's one which will stop it. The other problem I found on both is some pixel errors on the curve above where I've put the flags which is a result of the scaling, I could try vising after scaling which might help this.

You may want to try a slightly different scale, too... like 1.25 (this number is less "odd" for a computer than 1.2)... etc.

Ed wrote: What I think I will do is make it so that lights that are on the ceiling itself will be back to the pale yellow and that lights that are attached to walls will stay as they are.

I think that's the right way.
And go back to these yellow lights too


Nothing more to add

edit: that's an recycled old screenshot. too lazy to take one right now

Another update:
Edit: obsolete link, see end of thread for latest

Changes:
- Less coloured lights. The general rule is that lights on the centre of ceilings should be yellow. Ones attached to walls act more as decals so stay as team colours.
- Fixed another load of texture misalignments.
- Changed some textures at the join, more consistent now.
- Replaced playerclip slopes on stairs with playerclip steps. This makes movement more fluid and no sliding, should improve bot handling of stairs.
- Added playerclip box behind mortars. This fixes a corner that it was possible (rarely) to get caught in. Should be investigated and possibly fixed in the original Blood Prison.
- Fixed that strange lighting bug in the red base. It appeared in the same place in the original map and isn't just a small patch of metal, the whole wall is incorrectly lit! This appears sometime after relighting after scaling by 1.2. The fix was easy, scale by 1.25 (thanks SavageX for the tip, I thought it would be something like that), relight and then scale by 0.96. 1.25 * 0.96 = 1.2 so same size. The lightgrid problem is not introduced in this. I think that the lightgrid problem is something related to be 1.2 not 1.25. I would suggest that this same double scaling scheme is applied to Blood Prison as this now shows how this wall should look like. It would be nice to fix this for 2.2 as it is easy but weird.

I'm not going to release a final version as if this is to go in 2.2 I would want that to be the final version. If anyone wants any more changes (the lighting may still be debatable) I can make them. Comments are still welcome.

Sorry for being such a n00b and breaking the texture alignment everywhere. I hadn't really used radiant before and really should have learnt what texture lock was...

You could try the scaling factor 1.1875, that should feel just like 1.2, but has a sane binary representation. The bug did not appear when I tried that.

However, that would mean rescaling the bot waypoints...

divVerent wrote:You could try the scaling factor 1.1875, that should feel just like 1.2, but has a sane binary representation. The bug did not appear when I tried that.

However, that would mean rescaling the bot waypoints...

Rescaling bot waypoints is easy enough as each coordinate just needs scaling. The bigger problem I see is that it loses the original feel of the map. 1.25 was just not the same as although you could still take all of the gap jumps they were a bit too big to expect players to jump every time in a real game.

Using 2 scaling phases seems fine though as 1.25 and 0.96 are scaling factors that also work properly and fix the problem in both this map and the original. I know there are some other maps that are scaled and it might be worth checking whether their scaling factors produce any artifacts. If so then we can probably find two phase scaling factors that would fix it.

The final release!
http://www.rofltech.co.uk/media/bloodprisonctf-1.0.pk3

Changes:
- Some other texture alignment problems fixed
- Changed map compile process. Map is BSP'd, vis'd, lit, then scaled by 1.25, then by 0.96 with no relighting phase. No black weapon bug, no lightgrid size error, no pesky lighting bug in the red base, smaller BSP size so pk3 is over 1Mb smaller. This same bug is in Blood Prison so I'd suggest it's an easy thing to fix for 2.2. I can explain further on IRC.
- New screenshot
- .cfg file added with cd loop "7" so music plays throughout
- Some changes to .txt's. No **BETA** branding and restructured author bit so it no longer suffers from bad text wrapping.

I've seen the RBI stats and it looks like it's working OK. If server admins can update it that would be nice. Older versions should be deleted too.

Edit: I've recompiled Blood Prison to fix the lighting bug but after discussions with KadaverJack on IRC, it might not be something fixed in 2.2. There are some compatibility worries (2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 should be compatible) but as far as I see the geometry is identical. I've zipped it up here, just extract this and dump it in data/maps/:
http://www.rofltech.co.uk/media/bloodpr ... ng-fix.zip

I'd like to know if anyone finds any compatibility problems with it just to prove that it works fine and it's a fix that can be easily done.

Very cool, thanks. I also added a few lines about the map in my CTF guide..

Lighting is broken for me. got black items, both my own weapon which I carry and the items lying around.

Got a ATI card, using Win XP

GreEn`mArine wrote:Lighting is broken for me. got black items, both my own weapon which I carry and the items lying around.

Odd. Can you check that you've got the up to date version that I posted last? A screenshot to show this would be useful. I thought I had eradicated both the black items bug and the small lighting anomaly but maybe it's not quite gone. What lighting settings are you running? Any other settings make a difference.

It looks like this:
click me

I used http://www.rofltech.co.uk/media/bloodprisonctf-1.0.pk3 and the items were black and I did the screenshot. Then I downloaded http://www.rofltech.co.uk/media/bloodpr ... ng-fix.zip and extracted bloodprison.bsp into Nexuiz/data/maps, but the items are still black.

I am running the lowest graphic settings ever, as you can see . Just tell me if you need more info.

iirc that bug was only on windows.. can't remember though if it was deceided what part caused the bug.. engine, q2map or what ever..

GreEn`mArine wrote:Then I downloaded http://www.rofltech.co.uk/media/bloodpr ... ng-fix.zip and extracted bloodprison.bsp into Nexuiz/data/maps, but the items are still black.

That fix is a proposed fix for the original Bloodprison, not CTF. There's quite a lot of explanation of this in other parts of this thread as in remixing for CTF, Strahlemann and I spotted a lighting problem (other than the black item one).

You're the first person to notice this problem since I changed the lighting method and while I don't doubt you, I'm confused. Does it happen on any higher settings? Does anyone else see this at all? It used to be really obvious with the older white medkits as they'd just be black but the newer models are more difficult to spot incorrect lighting on.

I tried with a very high config, (basically a fresh config generated by the engine + enabling all the effects). However, the items stimm got pitch black, and the borders of where is light and where not are very sharp, I mean that my weapon model becomes pitch black all of a sudden when going a step forward at the right places.

Strange. Here's a way to test if it's my second lighting fix:

Try Bloodprison (non-CTF) with my proposed patch and without it. Any difference?

If my patch introduces it then it's my fault and I just have to weigh up minor graphical corruption in red base + large file size vs. black item bug for some players. I just don't understand why it's you and no one else. It should be a lightgrid related problem (in the BSP) so anyone using it should have the problem or no one should. Do you get a lightgrid error in the console on starting the map? You certainly shouldn't do.

I can confirm that your bloodprison "fix" introduces pitchblack items for me once I use it. Using the default v2.2.2 Bloodprison.bsp gives fine items. I don't get any light grid errors on both bloodprison versions when starting the map.

In that case you are not getting THAT black item bug (comes with lightgrid error) but some other black item bug. Way to probably fix it is to relight the thing after double scaling. This would mean a fix for Bloodprison CTF at some point and a second proposed fix for Bloodprison.

I don't see what you are seeing (this second black item problem) so it may only happen for some people. Has anyone else seen this bug? I'm happy to do a fix on the level as there are a couple of item alignments that are wrong but if the black items only affects a minority I can advise on how to fix it (may take a while to compile):

Code: Select all

q3map2.x86 -v -game quake3 -fs_basepath "/home/[username]/Nexuiz/" -fs_game data -light -deluxe -fast -super 2 -filter -bounce 8 "/home/[username]/.nexuiz/data/maps/bloodprisonctf-1.0.map"

If you extract the BSP and .map file there and run this, does it fix your black items problem? This will recompile the lighting so should fix any such problems. If it does and you see no other anomalies on it then I'll implement it in a patch sometime. That is unless it affects many people in which case I'll implement it in a patch sooner.

I'm on windows, I most prolly don't have the time atm to figure all this compile stuff out due to upcoming exams

I've compiled a BSP that may fix this issue for you. This is only a ZIP file so extract it and place the BSP manually to substitute the existing one. Does this fix your problem?

I've noticed all of the CTF ladder discussion and that Bloodprison CTF is being considered. If there are any changes you would like to enable it to better serve as a ladder arena then I will package them up along with this lighting fix (if it does fix your problem) in a patch.

To everyone else: Unless you specifically suffer from the black item bug, you do not need this patch so I'd suggest leaving it alone.