Yes. Yes. Yes. CaLight
is inherently slow.
First of all, have you read
http://www.ca3d-engine.de/wiki/doku.php ... :compiling ? This is another text that's not quite up-to-date (e.g. the CaLight.cfg file does not exist any more), but explains the basic tool options. Best is however if you run CaLight without options to get a short help message. This message is accurate and up-to-date.
Also note that 6 hours to 3 days are not uncommon with CaLight for good quality lighting (you can make it much faster with the command line options, though).
If you have not run CaPVS before CaLight, please do so - it's crucial for speed! (CaLight also warns you about this if it didn't find any PVS information.)
Second, Razor is of course right about thrashing: If your harddrive LED is permanently on, better stop it...
You can also estimate how long CaLight will approximatly run by looking at the BestUE value in it's output. This number is getting smaller over time, and when the StopUE value is reached (1.0 by default), it will stop.
On Windows, you can also press the SPACE key to prematurely abort as soon as the next interation is complete.
Oh, and while the new version will indeed take 32 times less memory for one of it's major data structures, please don't count on it being faster - the algorithm remains the same.
Comparing CaLight with Giles is imho not possible: First of all, it seems that they're using very high-res lightmaps in relatively small scenes, while lightmaps in Ca3DE must cover entire levels (and thus huge surface areas) and thus must be lower-res as Giles'. Then, the images above look as if some tricks were used, I don't think that they really were created by methods that model physical reality - none of the scenes looks particularly realistic to me.
To sum it up: While CaLight indeed is very slow because it models physical reality with great accuracy, and while (for now) nothing can be done about it, there are several options to make it faster as described above.
Hope that helps.
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)