Has anybody ever done a completely antilight "lit" level? Start out with a high minlight, and use the technique he describes to refine it?

Of course, it would probably be a stupid idea to do it arse-backwards like that, but hey, you never know till you try. If nothing else, you could do it just to say you did it! :)



Awesome idea... It'd be worth a try as an experiment anyway.

I agree that minlight sucks, but it's great when you're speedmapping (or I guess, just lazy). If you have more time though and want a similar effect, low level lights with a huge range work better I find, eg light 50, wait 0.05. Put one of those lights next to a normal 200 brightness light (which you placed near an actual light fixture hopefully) and you'll get subtle light that extends into the darkness but doesn't look bland. 

I did use antilights in a few places in rubicon, but since then I haven't becuase they are very hard to use in a natural way. It always seems to look like a bite was taken out of the lighting or something. Maybe I haven't found the optimal way to use it (i think i was using it to darken spots in a sunlit room, which might be the problem. Maybe in a room where the positive light isn't so flat, the negative light would fit in better. 

to create some interesting results if approached conceptually like with dodge and burn painting in photoshop and gimp. You normally start off with a canvas at a medium point (128,128,128 - gray) and from there your dodge setting creates a light contrast and your burn setting creates dark contrast.

Say you start with a min light of 255, and you use antilight for darker contrast and additive light entities for brighter. At the very least, it would eliminate the problem where vertices with slight angler differences create a huge light/dark contrast that look unrealistic and you have to place ambient lights to soften the results.

Thanks, Mr Fribbles for this idea. I don't know how realistic it is to go this route as of yet, but it is something to think about. 

I took a chunk of a current map I'm working on, and created a gray texture using a color from from the mid grays of the Quake palette, as well as a gray sky texture. I replaced source lights with anti-lights under the beams above the stairs. Minlight was set to 255.

http://mortisville.quakedev.com/quake12.jpg

One obvious problem you'll see on the side walls, the anti-light created shadows create their own shadows, but it is likely a problem that can be minimized with some tuning of the entity settings for falloff. 

i agree with lunaran on this. i used minlight on all of my early maps and the major complaint with them from everyone was usually the poor lighting (sometimes my penchant for horde combat though :P).

my later maps i used less and less minlight until i did one without it completely. i found the extra contrast you get from not using it is very desirable. it's more work, but it pays off in the end because it looks so much better. 

same scene but done with -extra4 -soft and the addition of two lights in the fore using FitzQuake instead of WinQuake. What is interesting here (at least to me) is the softening effect where the vertical line blends and where the faces receive multiple lighting/darkening sources. It's worth exploring as a potential lighting paradigm. 

but headthump that shot looks very cool. 

the glquake bug where all lightmaps are inverted when gl_texsort is 0 in 32bpp mode. (or was it gl_texsort 1?) 

...XeNoN did the lighting in one of his levels using the high minlight - antilight combination. I think it may have been his "outside of competition" 100 brush level Centurion. I may be completely wrong of course. 

Yes, I know about eyes adjusting. :)

At dusk when the sun is at a low angle you're getting a lot of scattered ambient light from the upper atmosphere. So, yes, there isn't much contrast between what's in direct sunlight and what's shaded from the sun, but to reduce all the other light contribution to the scene other than the sun to a single universal value is too broad an assumption to jump to. Nooks, crannies, and gaps where geometry meets other geometry, and areas farther from the sky, will all be darker than areas that are more exposed to open air. You get a lot of soft gradation between the two, soft enough that any minlight contribution will throw it way off. Having it makes a scene really pop with realism. Replacing it with a flat value will ruin it. 

would ambient occlusion be possible in a quake1 light compiler? o.o 

(that probably most here know) at sunset is that the stuff in the sun is orange (direct sunlight) while stuff in the shade is blue (scattered sunlight from the blue sky). You can notice this in the real world if you play close attention. 

How much minlight did you used to use? 

Its by no means finished, but I want some feedback.

Finished version will incude:

Some sort of perimeter for the complex
Music!
Extended start
Start map

Anyone wanna test it and make me aware of any other issues than those above?

BTW, The lighting prob needs some adjustments too!!

Ask me to mail a copy. 

How much minlight did you used to use?

Personnally in a range of 25 up to 35, depending of the ambiance I want to have... And also with sunlight set into the 100-150 range..

And I don't forget to add -nominlimit/-nominlight in light tool command line ;)

Well, you have to experiment to find your way: it is just a question of taste... 

would ambient occlusion be possible in a quake1 light compiler?

I don't see why not. I wanted something like that in q3map2, which would basically do an occlusion test against skybrushes to get exactly the effect I described, but q3map2 is nearly impossible to compile since ttimo decided to add nearly functionless dependencies on very specific releases of all kinds of random source libraries (like PNGLIB ...) 

i don't have my really old maps, but my first ones had pretty high minlights... probably around 40-50 or something.
i think i lowered it more and more every time until i got to nesp09, which has 35.

marb and deadcity had 0 though.

as for ambient occlusion, would it be easier just to test how close a face is to other faces and just give a light value based on that alone? might not work well with huge faces vs small ones though.
i don't really know the first thing about light programs though, just tossing it out there. :P 

I still don't understand why anyone uses it. As Lunaran pointed out, it makes shadows less shadowy, and washes out the whole visual experience of playing the level.

It sucks. 

just realized I never posted the second shot intended for #3883

http://mortisville.quakedev.com/fitz0000.jpg

same scene (using minlight at 250 and anti-light entities as subtractive value) but done with -extra4 -soft and the addition of two lights in the fore using FitzQuake instead of WinQuake. What is interesting here (at least to me) is the softening effect where the vertical line blends and where the faces receive multiple lighting/darkening sources. It's worth exploring as a potential lighting paradigm.  

It doesn't trace against skybrushes though, simply nearby geometry. Look at -dirty, -dirtscale, etc. It also have skylight, which is very similar to what Lun describes.

So I dunno what he is bitching about. Unless it's the q3map2 source, which seems all kinds of fucked up. 

thanks Nitin, and Metlslime, I recall that error as I managed to generate it one time when screwing up a tutorial posted on Quakesrc. 

Neither of those are quite what I wanted. I don't think skylight gives you attenuation control, or something. I know I panned it, I just forgot why. :) 

http://www.suspenlute.com/fr3nrun1/becauseican1.jpg
http://www.suspenlute.com/fr3nrun1/becauseican2.jpg 

lighting still looks flat, dont know if its lit properly yet but that's one area in most your maps that seems to be consistent.

otherwise, nice texture choices. 

really interesting texture combination, I like! I agree with what nitin said about the lighting, but presumably it's just not done yet.

Architecture looks good and the overall look is very neat, but maybe a bit boxy in the first shot, there's a lot of right angles. Good work so far though.