Didz

The main issue is just likely to be reduced performance and increased network traffic consumption.

Here's a comment left in the source code by rww (Richard Whiteouse) explaining why he didn't increase the limit to 2048:

//rww - we do have enough room to send over 2048 ents now. However, I cannot live with the guilt of
//actually increasing the entity limit to 2048 (as it would slow down countless things, and
//there are tons of ent list traversals all over the place).

rww had also planned to increase the limit to 1053 entities in this same section of code (to ensure MP could load SP maps that were close to the limit), but he commented all that change out for some reason.

I agree with the : "make the content in this map open source." If you really want help the community in any way, open source is the way to go, add the map file in it, maybe an explination file explain shaders, and such. As you suggested, agreed work becomes open source, instead of belong to JKhub. When it's open source, it technically belongs to no one and everybody is allowed to twist and warp it as they please.

I am not a lawyer, but here's how I believe copyright works.

Content creators retain copyright on their work even if they release their content as open-source. Creators can use open-source licences to grant others specific privileges on things that they are allowed to do with the work, such as derivation, distribution, reverse-engineering, etc. The work still belongs to the creator (because copyright), but the creator is giving you a licence that grants you extra freedoms to do certain things with the work.

There's basically three options for managing the copyright on work intended for a community project:

• Every contributor keeps copyright ownership on the work they create, but they release it under an open-source licence so the community project can use it
• The community project owner must require all contributors to disclaim their copyright on the work and hand it over to the community project owner before the work can be accepted into the project
• The community project owner must require all contributors to release their work into the public domain, so the work is no longer copyrighted by anyone

For a fun community map project like the one that's being suggested, the 1st option is probably the best one as the work is open-source, but the contributors still own the copyright for the work they've done.

Creative Commons have a great page explaining what copyright licences do and also describe the licences they offer themselves: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

Sorry for derailing the thread a bit there, I just wanted to explain that open-source doesn't mean copyright is surrendered.

I don't even know how Steam/Valve got into this conversation..

Raven could redirect all requests for masterjk3.ravensoft.com to master.jkhub.org if they wished. I don't know if they'd have any motivation to do that though.

On your end, you're making use of mapextras.pk3 which is bundled with GtkRadiant. This pk3 has a bunch of textures for map development, including some textures under textures/colors. The base asset pk3s contain some of these colours, however the yellow and white textures are only in mapextras.pk3. Some colours also differ between these pk3s even though they have the same filename.

Test your map without the mapextras.pk3 file and you'll see what's not vanilla.

Yeah, the q3map_surfacelight setting affects an entire surface (as the name suggests). You need to separate your shaders (and brushes) into a wall shader and a light shader.

I guess you can count screen tearing as being something that decreases graphics quality too. So if your "highest graphics" target is intended for actual game playing (not recording or screenshotting), use r_swapInterval 1 (vsync) in fullscreen mode to prevent screen tearing. There's reasons not to have vsync on because of some quirks regarding movement in the Q3 engine, but it's a tradeoff you need to consider.

r_lodCurveError doesn't have a cap, it goes up to the practical maximum limit for a floating point number. I think 99999999999999 is a bit excessive though. Stand far away from a curved surface with r_showtris 1 and fiddle about with r_lodCurveError, and you'll see there's no changes after 3000. It's safe to say 100000 is a good value if you absolutely always want curves to be high quality and never be optimized for speed.

r_simpleMipMaps 0 is a good bet. You'll pay a small time cost while loading a map, but it'll mean that mip maps are generated using linear filtering instead of a more rough approximation.

I don't think the lightgrid is the problem here, because your own player model is being lit properly and that uses the lightgrid. Screenshots with r_showNormals 2 will help us know if it's the lightgrid causing the problem though. (EDIT: Seems this only shows light values in Wolfenstein: ET, not JKA)

Apart from that, I can't see an obvious problem. Maybe try lifting the model so that its origin isn't submerged into the floor? Are there any custom parameters in worldspawn that are affecting light calculations? Is the model scaled differently to other ones? Is there a clip brush or something surrounding it?

EDIT: Check for any console warnings when loading the map too

You should only have one fx_rain entity, and it can be anywhere in your map.

You need to encompass the entire bounds of your 'outside' brushes with one big 'weather zone' brush (textures/system/weatherzone). Make sure all the 'outside' brushes are within the weather zone (leave at least a 16-wide padding), and be sure to make it a misc_weather_zone brush entity.

The weather zone is optional, but it's used to reduce load times.

/*QUAKED misc_weather_zone (0 .5 .8) ?

Determines a region to check for weather contents - (optional, used to reduce load times)

Place surrounding your inside/outside brushes. It will not check for weather contents outside of these zones.

*/

Ensure these settings are set:

• r_gamma 1
• r_textureMode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR
• r_picmip 0
• r_texturebits 32

You could also try fiddling with r_ext_compress_textures on and off.

Can you attach a pk3 we can use to test the model, or just the actual texture file?

Well, I'm not really a big fan of Win8.. I'm using regular JAMP with JA++, so it's a bit like using Win7 instead of Win8.  Anyway I find that I'd use OpenJK once a stable built is released and it's made compatible with modder-maps. I'm not really an experienced map editor so I have no idea how to fix texture errors on OpenJK caused by use of '###'. I dislike that that compatibility was removed, doesn't really support much user-friendliness.. considering many servers opt to use custom maps instead of base ones.

I'm guessing you mean issue #271, but this issue should no longer happen as @@ensiform reverted the commits that added the changed shader parser I think?

Well it's not just JKA-JO down, but Elite Force, SOF and SOF3 master servers being down as well. Out of interest, assuming they go down forever, the old method of /connect as well as use of JKhub master servers will still work, correct? I figure this won't be an issue for game hosting companies, as it'd just be a case of directing the servers to a new master servers list, and they don't really care if they're seen or not, so as long as people can connect to them and are usable.

Yeah players will always be able to do /connect themselves. You can also add the servers to your Favourites list if you don't want to save the IP addresses down yourself. Game servers already support up to 5 different master servers they can configure, so if one goes down, players can still check other ones.

Well I can't tell if the problem is:

• Player model not being lit
• Player model seeming to have less level of polygonal detail
• Texture quality poorer
• Edge aliasing
• Something else

We need to know exactly what looks worse in-game. I can't tell if the player model being black is the problem he's describing, or just a problem with the lighting on that map.

It might help if the screenshots were from a map with better textures for comparison (maybe BlueIce Nightfall), and taken from the same view point.

Yeah the difference here appears to be solely anti-aliasing. The first one looks like it has around 16x AA, but the second one looks like it has 2x or 4x AA. Try upping it all the way up in the Nvidia Control Panel.

Screenshots would help with diagnosing the problem! Make sure you use the /screenshot_tga command or take a print screen and save to a PNG file, so we know the problem isn't lossy artifacts in the image format itself (like JPEG does).

You can also use the Nvidia Control Panel to force on anti-aliasing for the game, and this smooths out the edges of all objects, instead of the jagged edges you get by default. Usually a setting of 4x is sufficient and you'll see very noticable improvement, but you can go higher if you want

Ravensoft's DNS servers aren't affected, so you can still resolve the correct IP address for the Ravensoft master server. However, the master server itself isn't accessible on the IP address.

No idea what the goal is.

All I can think about when it happens is this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRNlUjQ3Dvk
(I don't mean any offence to Russian people with this video. It's funny to me because it's in a foreign language I don't know, so the subtitles are comically believable.)

Yes, lightmaps have much better quality than vertex lighting.

Lightmaps are like custom textures detailing the lighting values for a surface. Meanwhile vertex lights only give lighting values to the vertices of a surface (corners), and these are blended over the surface to give a very rough approximation.

Try playing on different maps with r_vertexLight 1 (then doing vid_restart) and you'll see just how low quality it can be.

The JKHub Master Server is currently down because of a technical problem. You can keep up-to-date with the thread here.

Server hosting companies shouldn't have any issue at all, servers have been using multiple master servers since the 90s Notably the GameSpy and QTracker master servers.

Server owners don't need any mod to make it work, they support multiple master servers out-of-the-box.

You can also use a mod like the All Seeing Eye on your client to use the JKHub Master Server as well

EDIT: Clarified this in the OP

My strong points aren't building hardware, but I recently helped a friend build his own computer and I used this guide extensively: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/08/ars-technica-system-guide-august-2014/

I really recommend reading this guide beforehand so you get an idea of what you'll need, how each component compares, and get a sense of what kind of alternatives you can use.

They have 3 different tiers of computers, "Budget Box", "Hot Rod", and "God Box". Despite the name, the Budget Box is still a really good spec for gaming and music production and I mainly followed this tier for my friend. These guides suggest buying SSDs for your computer, but I wouldn't bother myself. You can mix and match most of the components in the guide, just make sure your motherboard is compatible with your CPU as they have proprietary sockets. Also, you can never have enough USB ports (USB3 ports on the front are a bonus for newer flash drives/HDDs)

I think you should definitely go for Windows 8.1 as the OS if you're a Windows user though, because it'll be easier to upgrade to Windows 10 when that comes out. The OS is much better under-the-hood than Windows 7, and you can get rid of many annoying things it introduces (boot to desktop instead of Start screen etc.). I've unpinned all the useless metro apps from my start screen and pinned regular programs like Office, all my dev tools, Steam, TeamSpeak, etc. there instead.

We've long planned for the closing down of Raven's official master servers so we have alternatives in place. Raven Software have been contacted, but it's the Christmas holidays so they won't be working. The official master servers will likely be up again in a few days when everyone returns to work.

The IP address of the JKHub Master Server has changed. It will take up to 24 hours for all online JKA/JK2 servers to refresh the master server IP address, unless those servers are manually restarted. Until then, the server list will be slightly sparse.