It is however possible to have complete dark areas, even with some minimum light value set in the worldspawn.. Just use antilights, and compile with -nominlimit during lightning processing, in huge map it is necessary ;) 

and only 95 monsters.... 

you should do the opposite: 1000 monsters and 95 lights :P 

i'm aware of them, used them before. i didn't mean select dark areas though, i meant all those little shadows & corners that otherwise wouldn't get touched by light. flooding them all with flat dim light sucks so much potential atmosphere out of maps & makes them look ugly, imho (that was actually my main gripe with 5rivers)

and it's never 'necessary', no matter how big the map. just lazy :p 

I have learnwed that minlight is a bit crappy - it was used well in "The Bile Plant" alongside some light fog, but generally alowing maps to have areas wich are black is good. So no minlight !!

Used these instead:
{
"classname" "light"
"light" "60"
"wait" "0.18"
}

Usefull to light up areas whcih are completely black but you don't want them to be.... 

What does the wait key do in a light? Obviously it's for a specialized lighting program but what does it affect? Fall off? 

It determines a light's fade distance. Higher values makes it fade faster. 

Hey Well I just started mapping.. what do i do with that code you gave me? also how do i apply fog, make breakable glass, etc.? 

what code who gave you and you need to use a mod for breakable glass.

"60" lights sound pretty dark to me, there is nothing wrong with making bright areas bright (200-max (255?)) actually. 

I assume your name isn't "to ricky" :-)

Well when you make a map, the output of your editor is always in .map format. You can open this file in wordpad or notepad (I use notepad, although there are apparently better text editors). Try opening a map file in a text editor, and scroll to the end of the text (of which there will be shitloads!) The end of the map file is where all of the entities are put.

In more practical terms, in my case I use Worldcraft, whenj I put a light entity into the map by default the light has a bunch of "keys" - these are the settings or parameters of the entity. If I look at the properties of my light entity in Worldcraft it gives me the option of using "smart edit" - sometimes I use "smart edit" but to add a "wait" key to a light entity I need to turn it off. Then click on "add". This sends me to a window where I can enter the "key" and it's "value". So in this case the key would be "wait" and the value would be "0.18" without the quote marks.

As for the wait key on lights, well it works with Tyrlite and AguirRe's light tool - ot makes the light travel further or less distance!

values > 1 = the light travels LESS distance
values < 1 = the light travels MORE distance.

I like to put lights like:

{
"classname" "light"
"light" "450"
"wait" "6"
}

close to sourced lights, but along side that I would put another light which is less bright but travels further like:

{
"classname" "light"
"light" "60"
"wait" "0.2"
}


and maybe another like

editor is always in .map format. You can open this file in wordpad or notepad (I use notepad, although there are apparently better text editors). Try opening a map file in a text editor, and scroll to the end of the text (of which there will be shitloads!) The end of the map file is where all of the entities are put.

In more practical terms, in my case I use Worldcraft, whenj I put a light entity into the map by default the light has a bunch of "keys" - these are the settings or parameters of the entity. If I look at the properties of my light entity in Worldcraft it gives me the option of using "smart edit" - sometimes I use "smart edit" but to add a "wait" key to a light entity I need to turn it off. Then click on "add". This sends me to a window where I can enter the "key" and it's "value". So in this case the key would be "wait" and the value would be "0.18" without the quote marks.

As for the wait key on lights, well it works with Tyrlite and AguirRe's light tool - ot makes the light travel further or less distance!

values > 1 = the light travels LESS distance
values < 1 = the light travels MORE distance.

I like to put lights like:

{
"classname" "light"
"light" "450"
"wait" "6"
}

close to sourced lights, but along side that I would put another light which is less bright but travels further like:

{
"classname" "light"
"light" "160"
}

which is just a normal light!

You can have loads of light entities in a very small map! This way you can make a more realistic lighting effect IMHO! It has to be done right, and it's never completely simple. I always have to change things a few times to get it right..... 

You can map for Quoth 2!

If you make a brush (of what will be glass) into a "func_breakable", and then give it a "alpha" key with a value of "0.25" then that would behave like breakable glass, but it would only work in engines which suport alpha on brushmodels, like AguirRe's modified GLQuake, or Darkplaces or whatever........ 

only the Quoth mod.

You can have glass in normal Quake, but not breakable...... 

Oops! heh - just ignore the stuff thats in there twice...... 

Ahh OK. In ToeTag, if I wanted a hot light with a large fall off I would do something like:

"_light" "250 64 150 300"

A little easier to do and better for control since you can input the exact radii that you want to use. Above, that would be a 250 brightness light for 64 units and then a 150 with fall off for the next 300. 

Ok thanks guys. One last question.... Can I make my own textures? 

Yes, it is possible: all textures are generally 8-bit indexed (that uses quake palette: see there http://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/wad_conv/palette.html
) and texture dimension must 16x16 multiples (e.g 16x16, 16x32, 32x16, 64x64, etc... etc...)

Enjoy ! 

http://www.telefragged.com/wally/
http://www.celephais.net/stuff/texturefaq.htm 

http://members.home.nl/gimli/PALSIZ.BMP

Don't forget Wally for converting them.
http://www.telefragged.com/wally/index.shtml 

Thanks guys but how do I turn an image that I have INTO a texture using wally? 

and paste it into wally. If you create a new .wad file in Wally, you then right-click in the .wad files window, then click on "paste as new"
It converts it to the correct pallette automatically and even creates the incremented mip-maps. 

Thanks again guys!! I think I got everything covered now thanks to you. I just have one last question... I have both worldcraft 1.6a and worldcraft 3.3 quaked.... I also have a wad to hlwad converter... do you think I should use 3.3 or 1.6a? 

That's really up to you, and also you'll get different answers on who you ask. RickyT23 will tell you to use 3.3, whereas I use 1.6a. 3.3 does have things like Enhanced texture positioning and faster rendering. But it also has its share of problems, like for me, its far to dark to see anything and there is no brightness adjuster.

Although using 1.6a involves a bit more work with texture aligning, you need to make the effort. Some of the greatest Q1SP maps were made from 1.6a.

My opinion, try them both out and see which one you feel most comfortable with.

And even if your not satisfied with either, there are other editors and well like Quark, BSP, Radient, ToeTag (Mac only) etc.

Experiment a little and see which version feels best. 

"quakeadapter"

Baker made a program which sets everything up for you! 

Hey. Is there some type of entity spawn for a player to spawn on a specific side of the map meant for his team? So like if you are playing a map with 2 bases and it's a team deathmatch, can I make a player on one team spawn on his base and all the other players spawn on their specific base? 

As far as I know, this isn't possible in standard Quake. (It'd be possible with a mod, but there's no way to do it nicely without a mod).

It's a shame because it's one of the things that makes Quake team deathmatch fairly, well, shit.

I did see one workaround in a map called Rocket School (r-school.bsp). It wasn't a team deathmatch map, but it had a setup where you'd spawn in an isolated box room which contained teleporters to 3 different areas of the map. I assume there were many different copies of this spawn room, each with its own info_player_deathmatch, because I never got telefragged or shared a spawn room with anyone, even in a full game.

The problem with this is that it's open to exploitation - if a team was leading by just 1 or 2 frags and there wasn't much time remaining in the map, they could all hide in the spawn rooms and not exit, and win in a cheesy fashion.

You could possibly counter this to some extent by having a trigger with a small delay on it (3-5 seconds maybe?) which automatically teleported the player after spawning if they had not already moved out of the spawn room. This might work, I'm not sure.