I've been making a map lately, which is purely for bringing all my medievalish looking assets together. Its a huge valley (mostly unplayable scenery) at night, with a huge castle built into the cliffsides. You start in a small clearing in the valley, near a small stone building, and you can go into an underground set of tunnels that will eventually bring you out into the castle grounds. Thats as far as I've got so far, and to be fair, the map IS pretty big, but its not THAT big, so I cant see why lightmass insists on failing every time I try to build, regardless of quality setting.
If I disable lightmass, everything works fine, but obviously, the lighting is UT2004 quality, not UDK lightmass quality, so its not something I want to have to stick with!
Heres some screens so you can get an idea of the size of the level:-

Outside Castle

Ancient Building

Underground Passages
Its nothing complex, theres only 1 BSP brush, only around 8 unique meshes (copied to different shapes/sizes), a few standard point lights, and 2 moving dynamic lights (the players torch, and the wavering firelight in the underground passages. The lightmass importance volume encompasses the entire map (I made sure of that). I also tried shrinking it down so most of the unplayable distant scenery is ignored by lightmass, but it still failed, regardless. If I try to build the light at any level higher than "medium" (obviously without lightmass), then UDK just CTD's on me.
Any ideas whats going on here? Thanks in advance!
Replies
-The task failure count is non-zero
-Task killed locally, counted as failure
I dont know where the lightmass logs are hidden, but I'll check them and post a the results once I know where to look for it (seems like its nowhere in the UDK folder group)!
Edit: Okay I found where the Swarmagent logs where hiding, and here are the contents of the log:- After the final line at "exception details" the log basically just repeats itself, so you get "server stack trace" and all its contents, followed by "exception rethrown at [0]" and all its details duplicated about 15 times.
It looks like its saying it failed to connect, or I failed to allow it to do something, but I wasn't given an option to make any kind of decision like that, and my firewall is set the same way its always been set (which works fine for lightmass in other maps).
Does anybody know WHY lightmass insists on connecting to the internet? Why does a lighting engine even NEED you to be on the internet!? It makes no sense. If I didn't have a modem, would that mean I cant use lightmass at all? Thats insane LOL! Is it telling Epic about my map or something? Why is it trying to phone home?
Edit: I tried changing my firewall to a mode that alerts me if any program tries to connet to the internet (even ones I previously set to "permanently allow"), but Lightmass fails before it even asks. On other maps, if I build lighting, there'll be a 2-ish minute gap of nothing, then my firewall will say "Do you want lightmass to connect to the net", then I say yes, because if I dont, the light wont build, but for some reason it fails before it even gets to that stage. Theres about 50+ rules for UnrealLightmass.exe in my firewall rules screen, and every one of them is set to allow. Theres so many because for some reason my firewall regards lightmass as a new program every time it runs!
I just tested the light on 3 of my other maps, and there were no problems!
Anybody know whats causing this?
You need to set avoid local execution to false. See here for more info:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Swarm.html
You should also make sure your local swarm client is running and not blocked by firewalls of any kind.
Drive failures and 3dsMax taught me to never trust a single file for anything important.