I need urgent help. There is only 8 more days left of the contest and I can't compile! I keep timing out on the lighting stage. What is up with this? 1 time i got to the illuminaterawlightmap stage of lighting and it just sat there on 0 or 1 for like 10 minutes. What is the deal. I only have about 1400 brushes. It's not a very big map. The bsp and vis go by extremely quickly. I wonder if it has to do with the amount of detail brushes. All of my terrain generated in Gensurf is detail and all of my brushes not touching the void are detail. I dont know how that can affect lighting speed though. I also have 2 entity suns. Can anyone help me here?

10 mins isn't much.
what are your compile options?

try letting it run overnight, it should finish in that time.

I don't think detail brushes affect lighting. They only affect the VIS stage. Funcs affect lighting, because they don't cast shadows even if they do themselves get a lightmap.

Your lighting does indeed sound quite slow if it takes 10 minutes to get from 0 to 1. Do you have a huge amount of lights and light emitting shaders in use? Those are, of couse, along with the compile options the things that mostly affect your lighting.

Does your computer work otherwise with optimal speed, or do you have some trojan eating up the CPU time?

If it looks like the problem persist, you might want to post a question also at Map-Review forums. Gothix might also spot your post here, though, so wait and see...

Garr i wish the Admins of levelforge aren't going on vacation. How inconvenient of them! Anywho. I don't have to many light emitting shaders. I didn't think that would have a whole lot to do with it but here's basically the setup:

2 entity suns
15 light emitting shaders
40 or so regular lights

Like I said. Not a whole ton of enitities yet. I dont know why its taking that long and it is only on the light stage. It takes the vis a total of about 2 minutes and that is to wait for it to zoom through the whole portaling process etc.

I hope I can get this done on time...

well, first off, from what I know, vis & lighting times are not related since it saves the bsp in between each stage.

It would really help to know what compile options you're useing.

As well, what _lightmapscale do you have set?

ok gothic. I dont have a lightmapscale set cause the only time I use it is when I get the funky HUD. I really don't know what it does I just know it fixes the problem. Should I set it to something?

please dont hurt me when i am going to say this. But i should first do a brush cleanup, then check the lightning very well (bad pointing etc.) then i should try it with a batch file and run it overnight.

Well i dont have any brush problems (compiling would point that out in the bsp) so I have no need to run brush clean up. And what do you mean by bad pointing need help?

temporary set the _lightmapscale to 2 for test compiles. Your compile should 4 times as fast.

And you still haven't posted your compile switches.

Oh sorry I forgot to post the compile options I am using.

I always use the regular bsp-meta -vis -light -fast -filter -super2

Anywho I think the problem may lie in the 2 entity suns like suggested at map-review.

http://www.map-review.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=15546#15546

Thanks for all the suggestions.
-Xizor

Oh, no, that's not the problem. -Super 2 with -filter is what's causing this one. Use -light -v -fast -patchshadows -samples 3 -gamma 2 -game ja, with for a final compile, -fastbounce, bounce 4 and -dirty added.

Thanks gothic. Ill be sure to do that for final compile. I took out all my ent suns though. It seems with my fog the sky shader will be just right now that i put it back in as light source.

edit: btw it has been compiled now.