Lighting Examples

There are several ways to light your map. This tutorial will teach you each method.

1.Firstly, create a good sized room (300x300x300) and place a info_player_start in there.

2.Lets start with the quick and dirty light method. Place a light entity in the middle of the room. Set its value to 300.

3.When you compile and run, you will have a gaudy, overlit little room. So, lets make it look better.

1.Open your map back up in your editor, and delete that light entity. Create a light fixture, such as the baselt from the base levels (this is the tall narrow orangish one). In your editor's face properties dialogue box, select the face of the light fixture brush that has the light texture on it, and tick the box for "light." In the "value" box, type in 1000. What this is doing is telling that face to give off light.

2.Compile and check out the light fixture emitting light. Looks much better, huh? If you are running openGL, you will notice that the light is the same color as the texture. Quake2 automatically uses the most common color in the texture emitting light to cast the correct colored light. Hence, our orangish light texture is emitting orange light.

3.The trick to using this method is in the "value" of the face light. The rule for this is: The smaller the face size that is emitting the light, the higher the number must be, and vice versa, the larger the face size the lower the number must be. Those little bitty 16x16 square lights (the row of multicolored ones in all the ExUx textures) need incredibly high numbers, at least 10,000 or more. A sky brush typically uses about 200-400.

1.The third method is to make spot lights. This is easier than you think! Go back into your editor and remove that big light fixture and replace it with a non-light emitting 16x16 one.

2.Just underneath (or next to, depending on where you put it) the light fixture, place a light entity. Give it a "target" of "spot1".

3. Place an info_null entity below (or beside) your light entity, about 128 units away. Give the null a "targetname" of "spot1" which will tell the light to point at it.

4.Compile the map and check out your spot light. The spot is pretty small though, huh? We can fix that...

1.Reload your map in your editor (again) and select your light entity. Set its "_cone" value to "45", compile, and run your map. You should have a nice wide spot light now.

NOTE: The default for _cone is 10.

You can set "style" to make the light entity behave in a number of ways. Here's a list:

style 1 - flicker
style 2 - slow strong pulse
style 3 - candle
style 4 - fast strobe
style 5 - gentle pulse
style 6 - candle
style 7 - candle
style 8 - slow strobe
style 9 - flourescent flicker
style 10 - slow pulse, almost fading to black