Hi all, my apologies again for slow updates on this site, but contrary to what this lack of updates might suggest, I've actually been doing some work! And it's Quake related work too! (actually, it was quite embarressing when the main PQ newspage gave my work some coverage, but I hadn't updated my page yet!)

The most exciting thing that I've done lately is to add coloured lighting to TyrLite. This is largely thanks to the guys from the Quake Standards Group website, who posted some tutorials on enhancing the standard light tools. Well, I followed their file format, but implemented all the extra features you've come to expect from TyrLite.

All the attenuation formulae work as before, but you also get the option of coloured sunlight and coloured minlight. It's been tested by a few people, and seems to generally work well. I'm still tracking down a few specific problems, but if you want to try it out and help with testing, then you can grab the file here and a copy of the text file is available here. Because this version still needs some testing, I'm leaving version 0.5 on the utils page until I'm sure this one works properly.

I wanted to keep it so that there is only one Tyrlite executable needed to do both standard lighting, as well as coloured lighting, so this version is completely backwards compatible with previous versions. So even if you don't want to use coloured lighting, please give the new version a try so I can squash any compatability bugs that may have crept in.

I'm currently discussing with several groups, the possiblity of a unified format for 'extended bsp' binaries. This could go one of two ways - we could decide upon one agreed bsp format that can contain arbitrary lumps of extended information for lightmaps, shaders (ala Q3), etc. The other way we could go is to produce a standard BSP that is compatible with the original Quake, and another file to go with that which contains only the extended information. The advantage of this is that people could distribute their maps as a bsp file, along with the extended information file, and then anybody could play the bsp. If they wanted, they could use a newer Quake executable and take advantage of the extended bsp format. The downside is more files in your map directory.

Any comments on these issues are welcome. You can send them here.

As far as the mapping is going, the answer is good but slow. I'm really happy with what I have gotten done so far on my OUM map, but progress is pretty slow. I expect this to speed up as a reaquaint myself with th IKBase texture set more, and I'm getting the hang of those rotating entities too. My deathmatch map has come to a virtual standstill. The layout feels killer, but the texture set just won't gel. I'm thinking of starting again from scratch, working with the current layout as a reference, but with a completely new theme.