Advice for lighting?

[Beyond Heretic]

One thing that has usually held me back from investing a lot of time in a big mapping project is how Gtkradiant doesn't show you how your lights look, you have to compile and run the engine to see. I'm sort of used to other editors (Like Unreal Tournament's UnrealEd and Jedi Knight's ZED) which let you see how lights look.

 

Does anyone have any advice on how to make your lighting look reasonably good without compiling multiple times and tweaking it?

[Lazarus]

We are talking about a game editor that is for an engine that is near 2 decades old. Sadly this is the limitation of GTK, it cant project light sources, since most of them are based either on shader or light entities, and the view window doesnt know how to make it appear in game. Honestly I wish it was possible, but sadly not. We just have to skate around this.

[IrocJeff]

Make a test map and put lights at low to high values in a line. Just repeat a comnected room multiple times.

 

Or

 

Compile your map with various light values then pick the one you like.

[Langerd]

The method i suggest - of course if You have very complex map:

-save a lot version of your map : mymap1 ,mymap2 ,mymap3 ..... mymap102 (my cloud city project has ... about 140).
-If your map is very complex to check a lightning in one room for example - just remove rest of the map only for checking this one room
-compile this one room see how your lighting works
-back to gtkradiant to recover the rest of the map and save as the new version

of course this method has some issues .. Like you cant just add the higher quality _lightmapscale value for only this room , check in the game and say - it looks amazing and after that recover the rest of your map and try to compile and see errors.. It is trial and error and sometimes it takes  .. hours.. 
so i would recommend to compile the single room with faster lightning - just to not be confused when later there will be an error or map will be whole dark and bbuggy