Looks like I have trailed off a little . Went off track to expand in other fields. So check this out.






1. Arena is now 50% taller. This was needed because the to-be skybox would be way too low in the current arena. The camera angles go bad two stone blocks below the ceiling.

2. You can see there's a nice high altitude walkway around the arena.

3. If you haven't noticed it yet, check out the lighting! The time is dusk, so why was the arena so bright? Well now I've shaded it a little to give more of a nightish feel. Also there is a sun in the sky, has been for a long time, but until now it has never reflected off the wall. Very nice sunlight in the arena.

BTW the dark area in the arena appears darker in the pics than it really is, it's not quite that dark.

Any suggestions thus far? Don't like anything in particular?

At the very beginning we had a problem with fights being too dark, so I cranked the ZoneInfo AmbientBrightness up to 255.  If you've solved that otherwise without being too hard on the FPS (i.e. with the addition of more lights), that should be fine.

I'll give my final opinion on the ivy later, lol; might be over the edge.

All in all, virtuoso work, man.

like the pictures=) nice work:BEER:

I am partial to simplicity myself.

Well if anything it will probably be darker now.
The thing is, lightmaps don't affect actors, dynamic lights do. So even tho the arena is in parts darker, you would be able to see the enemy just as well as ever.

Another thing is the complexity of the light has jacked up the map size to 1.6MB total. It may peak around 2MB+ once everything I want to do is done.

And about performance, it's just a compressed lightmap, you should not see a performance decrease over the old system. It's not like a dynamic light that has sources, It's raytraced from sources but the final compilation is just texture mapping so that should be all good.

The only problem I can see is the size of this thing. But than it is only a one time download and this map doesn't get updated very often so a 2 meg download per year doesn't seem like much of a hassle.