You bastards, wait until September for this epicness! I can't join in! Ever! I've always missed the gamenights- I refuse to miss the one my map is part of as well. Lol.
Also, lightmaps: wtf. Got some basic ones imported via aether. First there was all this random red- confused the hell out of me. Until I realized it was max telling me that every red place was a glitched render spot. - _ - So I fixed the red by turning the glitch test off, but then you can just see all the glitches. And tool's fail lightmap uvs are now incredibly apparent- shadows start on one lightmap, and just stop on the next one, shading fades in and out from object to object, it's bizarre. So I decided screw it, I'll render every lightmap at 2048 by 2048. I'll be back tomorrow explaining just how much the game hates me now.
Edit: Okay, after some frustrating trial and error, I'm finally getting the hang of this. I managed to render one lightmap without any red errors, but the shadows are still doing odd things. Still, it's progress. We had a short-lived and laggy playtest today, which basically confirmed that the new layout seems to work well enough to forward with it. I'm leaving for 2 weeks on vacation with my family, but I'll be back after that, and ready to work on finishing up the bsp with the last of the poly space, and getting those lightmaps fixed up. I've talked to Inferno about fixing the phantom geometry as well, so that shouldn't be an issue for long. Let's finish this damned project, shall we?
Edit Edit: Before I leave, I wanted to make sure everyone understands that although the lighting looks great in Max, I have no idea how good it will actually look in the engine. At the best it will be lower res- at the worst it will be all pixelly and fugly looking. But I'm going to do my best to make sure it looks as good as possible. If that means rerendering a bunch of times to get the settings right, and reuving half the lightmaps, so be it. Also, it looks like a few of the lightmaps still have errors- I'll have to fix that after I get back. Still, better than before.
Edit Edit Edit: Okay, this is getting ridiculous. More people need to post so I don't have to do this so as not to double post. :P
I was heading out the door when I realized the lightmaps had finished rendering- took a screenshot from generally the same angle as one of the renders on the last page. Should provide a pretty good comparison from render to current ingame lighting. It's pretty darn rough, but tool uv and rendering errors aside, it looks better than Halo's lighting did.
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