AQ2World.com

I kind of agree with bail. Lighting in a map plays a huge role in how its played. When people change their setting so that all shadows and lighting dissapear, they get an advantage and a gameplay feature is taken away.

But pretty much all level designers for AQ2 know that some players do this, so we often avoid creating too dark spots in a map. Also we tend to spend less time setting up the lighting. I think this is a bit sad. For me lighting plays an enormous role giving the map life, a certain feel and makes it beautiful.

beautiful?, why the feck are u playing aq2.. its prolly the most ugly game ever made/played.. upgrade ur 800mhz voodoo2 comp and try to download a new game.. its not because its 'beautiful' we play aq2.. the game looks retarded.

Woot! No shadows?! You gotta have some shadows! Makes the map look smooth and slick. Adds to the gameplay as well as others have stated. Monastery or Kumanru wouldn't be the same without shadows ;-(

KriBBa wrote:beautiful?, why the feck are u playing aq2.. its prolly the most ugly game ever made/played..

Quake 2 was probably the most technically and gorgeous game ever made when it was released. But you weren't even born then so how would you know...l0l0l <;--D
Jokes aside, people who still play AQ2 do not play it because of the good graphics and all that. We do it because it's all about the gameplay. Same goes for todays games.
But! Even though this game isn't the prettiest game out there doesn't mean that we shouldn't at least try to make it look pleasing. Look at NRGizer and WizardExt's (plus many others ;) work and you'll see that you can in fact make AQ2 look pretty decent.

Update

I fixed the lighting/sounds, check out the screenshots above. The download location has been updated. you can also download here

http://myfreefilehosting.com/f/b4e44e662c_4.72MB

Looks better than the first version in my opinion :-)

Well the shadows still look very unnatural, I don't know how you have handled the lightning in that map but it just looks wrong. There just isn't enough shadows. It doesn't seem that the light comes from a single point (sun) but from everywhere since only the deepest parts of the caves have shadows. Still a good site to visit: http://arghrad.planetquake.gamespy.com/

The map looks quite simple which is of course understandable considering that r_speeds would go way too high if you add too much detail to such an open map. But the textures also made me first think that do I have gl_picmip turned to 8 instead of 0 or something? Because the textures just seem to lack detail.

Well, about the gl_modulate thing. Yeah, 3 for opengl and 1.5 for 3dfx has been the norm here in Finland (and the whole scandinavia?) almost since the beginning. It was forced with something else than TNG first but now TNG (or q2admin) handles the job just fine. So IMO you should use gl_modulate 3 for testing maps. The best way of course is to let some other people to test it with their own computers too since brightness and contrast settings might vary quite much.

heh SoD's map got dissed by the guy who made cliff2ae