What are you working on?

[ceriux]

This week: playing with spotlights and general lighting. "Its too dark!", "Its meant to be!"

iv had the same problem when mapping before... they were complaining (its too dark make it brighter!) and i felt the same way..

[Dirge Inferno]

dirge: surprised it's q3 rather than doom3 tech, nice job. The room geometry is probably simple enough that mirror is no harm. BTW, even q2 tech had a func_reflect (brute mod force) via Lazarus/ psychospaz back in 2001 that Pentium could handle, so don't sweat it.

Thanks. I also mess with sky shaders:

Code:

Code: Select all

textures/skies/CrackedSky2Lightning
{
   qer_editorimage textures/skies/CrackedSky2
   skyParms env/space1 512 -
   surfaceparm noimpact
   surfaceparm nolightmap
   {
      map textures/skies/crackedclouds2.tga
      blendfunc GL_ONE GL_ONE
      tcMod scroll 0.1 0.1
   }
   {
      animmap 1 textures/skies/zdh_lightning1k1b.tga textures/skies/empty1.tga textures/skies/empty1.tga textures/skies/zdh_lightning1k2b2.tga textures/skies/empty1.tga textures/skies/empty1.tga textures/skies/zdh_lightning1k3b.tga textures/skies/empty1.tga textures/skies/empty1.tga
      blendfunc gl_one_minus_src_color gl_one
      tcmod scroll .01 -.01
      //rgbGen wave noise 0 1 0 1
      rgbGen identity
      rgbGen wave inverseSawtooth 0 1 0 1
   }
}

Textures

[goldenboy]

Re: Map too dark or not: I wrote something about lighting in Quake 1 as a response to this. It got too long though, so I posted it at my blog instead. It is here:

http://spawnhost.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/quake-1-lighting/

[qbism]

Re: Map too dark or not: I wrote something about lighting in Quake 1 as a response to this. It got too long though, so I posted it at my blog instead. It is here:

http://spawnhost.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/quake-1-lighting/

Regarding narrow light/dark bandwidth, overbright is an option with many engines to push the upper limit. Although this can be easily abused. Overbright might be appropriate in a brightly skylit area, or in the reactor core, but not in a torch-lit castle.
I liked the point about white light being brighter than an equivalent strength colored light, a potential issue for .lit files.

[ajay]

Re: Map too dark or not: I wrote something about lighting in Quake 1 as a response to this. It got too long though, so I posted it at my blog instead. It is here:

http://spawnhost.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/quake-1-lighting/

Thanks for this, really informative. I find lighting to be just about the hardest thing to get right; I'm not sure that, although I've improved in other areas of mapping, I've got any better at it.

[toneddu2000]

really really precious informations. Already bookmarked!
thanks a lot for sharing

[mh]

Lighting's a bitch. I must write up my own thing about it someday soon; I've already covered most of what I have to say in various blog posts but it's quite scattered and needs to be consolidated and focussed.

gb's covered the "dark but not dark" thing very well; my obsession is with brightness. The various places it gets clamped, what the possible solutions i've tried are, what ones I've rejected (and why), how high can you go anyway (it turns out to be surprisingly high), preservation of fidelity when going high, etc.

[ceriux]

someone should write up a howto on lighting outdoor maps, i find it kind of hard. esp in quake.

[leileilol]

that ain't hard at all. use a proper light compiler with sun support

[goldenboy]

Yes, use sunlight. Unless it is nighttime. Well, even then you can have moonlight - it is never 100% dark at night.

Different light tools have different implementations of this.

In Bengt Jardrup's (aka AguirRe's) light tool and its descendants, you put certain keys into worldspawn, the most important one being _sunlight (this is pasted from one of my maps):

"_sunlight" "255"
"_sunlight3" "60"
"_sun_mangle" "130 -60"
"sky" "purple_"
"_sunlight_color" "1 0.8 1"

I believe you can only have the colour value in newer versions (MH's? BSP2 version? not sure). _sky loads a skybox; make sure sun_mangle is set in accordance with the actual sun in the skybox. You don't want the sun in the east with the sunlight coming from the west...

In hmap2, place a point light to serve as the sun (or several), target it at an info_notnull (? I forget, it's been awhile) and then IIRC there is a key or something that tells the light tool to treat it as sunlight. It's in the documentation, sorry I don't use hmap2 at the moment.

Edit; the bit about functional lighting still applies, even in an outdoor setting. Light should still guide the player. See here:

http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/15 ... -04-13.png

http://img119.imageshack.us/img119/786/pripyat38za5.jpg

http://guidesmedia.ign.com/guides/48046 ... pyat_3.jpg

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/51 ... t20al1.jpg

http://www.cheats.ru/uploaded/e/enemyte ... s02254.jpg

Not always easy to do. If you can't use light to mark important spots, then you'll have to make do with ambient sounds, silhouette, or the good old minimap.
I'll add this to the other post I guess.

[ajay]

Updating the doors in equake.bsp to rotating 'real' ones. As for now they just open on player touch, I am considering a button press though. Changed the lighting on the pub from uplwards spotlights, which, while in keeping with some pubs I know, looked rubbish in the game. Blame youtube for the darkness, its nothing like as dark as it seems.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnwCdlMSVKc&hd=1

[goldenboy]

I've been pondering to reactivate the use button in RMQ for a while.

In a way, you could argue that it's not "gamey", but DOOM requires a button press to open doors and no one ever complained...

[ajay]

A nice long, self-indulgent blog post.
http://earthquakemod.wordpress.com/2012 ... 03_2012-2/

[Spirit]

I've been pondering to reactivate the use button in RMQ for a while.

In a way, you could argue that it's not "gamey", but DOOM requires a button press to open doors and no one ever complained...

In Call of Duty you have to aim over Iron Sight and no one ever complained...

Please stop stomping on all the essence of Quake and calling it a remake. My heart is bleeding.

[Dirge Inferno]

Trying out this shader editor for Quake 3.