I've migrated my batch files to Vluzacn's HL Tools and compiled the first halfquake sunrise map (the tutorial level). Pretty cool :D

I've read through all the changelogs and I think func_detail is still the most interesting so far, but there are also a couple of really neat fixes that have troubled me in the past, such as the "Leaf portal saw into leaf" warning. And man, the lighting is definitely improved now and will change the look of HQS and HQ1 at least a little bit. Don't think HQA will be affected much, only ambience really.

Compiling is so much faster than it used to be on the PC I had back in 2010 (most of HQS was developed on a laptop). That alone makes this new release worth it, because compiling feels so good now. (It still makes my CPU fan cry in fear just a little :D).

I continued compiling all of maps of HQS, and started playtesting them to see if they're alright.

So far I've played until hq3_3 and I noticed a few things that need to be fixed:

Some lighting issues occur now. I'll probably remake this entirely because it didn't look good in the first place.

You can't read the text on the "fell for it" sign. Not sure what to do with those yet, but better lighting is definitely a plus.

Here are actually two things: the top blue circle shows lighting mismatch, and the lower circle shows that the rounded quarter of a pillar doesn't actually go down to the floor :D

But here's the biggest issue. In this section I got stuck. And interestingly I got stuck in another section before, but I attributed it to random HL bugs. But this section shows that the hullsize of the player is simply incorrect. The new compiling tools allow custom hullsize, so maybe the default hullsize changed or something.

So, next time I'll have to investigate this hullsize issue in a test map, but I'm sure it can be fixed pretty easily. :D