The most important effect of the falloff change is that walls receive sun light better, as suns are frequently close to straight looking down, which is perpendicular to wall normals, which makes walls not receive their light since it was inhibited by the strong angle attenuation.I'm giving a try to using Valve's halflambert ramp for light angle attenuation in q3map2 (for those who don't know what this is: q3map angle attenuation would be lambert attenuation, lambert is also used for lightingDiffuse in quake, HL2 uses what they call halflambert for models, I'm unaware if they use it at all in the map compiler or not. More info here and more specifically here).
Test build binaries (windows only):
http://www.warsow.net/dev/jal/q3map2n-lightanglehl.zip
Code changes: here
To enable the lighting change add -lightanglehl 1 to your -light cmd line.
The lighting change can be very subtle, close to invisible depending on the map light. If you want to verify the switch was activated you can look in the build log for: "Enabling half lambert light angle attenuation".
Example shots:
Comparison (old/new):
[lvlshot]http://www.foopics.com/showfull/d955611 ... e72d7bd28e[/lvlshot]
[lvlshot]http://www.foopics.com/showfull/b86d537 ... a21c231e69[/lvlshot]
Comparison (old/new):
[lvlshot]http://www.foopics.com/showfull/7e56f7e ... 139f7379e3[/lvlshot]
[lvlshot]http://www.foopics.com/showfull/9a1ca5a ... a7107ba60b[/lvlshot]