that's the main reason.

Way too much color. 

I use coloured lights in Quake, but I try to do it smoothly. If it's overused, it craps the texture for sure.. But at the same time it's very difficult to avoid red/green/blue/yellow "disco effects" when you try to create a coloured halo around armors, keys, quads, etc...
To my opinion, if well used, it can give some real cool lightning effects... I just keep in mind that other player might simply remove the .lit file to play the game without coloured lights, so I try as far as possible to test the map with and without coloured lights hoping to please most of the layers...
And as fa as possible, I try not to overuse coloured lights... 

no offence, but I thought the use of coloured lighting in your temple map (the first one?) wasnt very good.

I dont know the technical reasons sinc eI'm not a mapper but it didnt look very good IMHO. 

No problem, I can easily understand your point of view.. Hellchepsout (i.e my temple map) was effectively my first map, and regarding what looks my last map (still compiling...) it was not really good...

However the topic I would like to discuss is more general... and I guess others mappers have different point of view about the use or not of coloured lightning... And how use coloured lights to improve map looks like... if possible... 

I got overly excited the first time I learnt how to use coloured lights in Quake and went quite overboard with them. Needless to say, the result was not unlike some sort of hellish rubix cube [my architectural skills were hardly top notch either ;)].

I think there are certain areas of a map where coloured lighting adds to the atmosphere - tinting a slipgate red, for example - but it should be used very sparingly, and not be too bright. Personally, I think an orange light around flames is taking it one step too far, and very few people get the colour right. I also think it should be used in areas the player isn't going to walk through, because the weapons look crappy when they switch colour. 

in an old unfinished tf map I had yellowish torchlights and orange lava glow in a big lava hall... it didn't work for some reason or another. Maybe one reason was that the map was shit otherwise too :P 

imho real quake atmosphere can only be achived through the right use of brightness and darkness rather than coloured lights. this might be connected to the textures/palette.
i have yet to discover examples that prove me wrong. 

the .lit for rpgsp1 rocks! 

I think a key problem with colored lights in quake is that the quake lighting is often unsourced, or vaguely sourced. When all the light in the room is exactly the same color (white) then there is no way to tell exactly where the light is coming from and it all the individual lights mix together. If two lights in a room are different colors, they immediately pop out and look like two overlapping spheres of light, each with a very clear source (that source usually being an invisible point floating in the room.)

That aside, the usual artistic problems are just choosing colors that go together, and choosing colors that work with the textures.

One pretty fundamental rule that i personally use is that the textures should always have more color than the lighting. Exceptions to this are pretty rare (jail4.bsp for quake2 was a beautiful map with mostly grey textures, but arguably it could have been better if it had followed this rule.)

I also suspect that some/most of the quake textures may just be bad for colored light. A lot of the better quake textures have highlights painted into them that are a different color than the rest of the texture -- especially some of the metal textures have a bluish tint to the highlight on an otherwise brownish texture. This has the result of faking subtle light color even under white lighting conditions. When these highlights are tinted again by a conflicting lightmap color, i think the result is a clash of colors that makes the eye stop believing the illusion. 

colored lights may be used in base/industrial maps when they have a brush/texture source. I remember a cool red lamp in the beginning of HL. While in medieval maps it looks outa place most of time imho. 

THIS ISNT QUAKE2 GO BACK HOME

no, really, colored lights, like all other aesthetic technology, is best when used smartly: not overwhelmingly *there*, and in sync with the rest of the level's atmosphere.

the biggest pitfall of this would be when a player walks through a room, and goes, "oh, there's a colored light"... that means the effect you were going for wasnt done well enough! :) 

the biggest pitfall of this would be when a player walks through a room, and goes, "oh, there's a colored light"... that means the effect you were going for wasnt done well enough! :)

the idea is to make the coloured lighting as transparent as possible. the player shouldn't really be conciously aware of it. sadly, many mappers put in coloured lights in the hope of attracting attention to it. 

i agree with you 

http://www.planetquake.com/speedy/screens/proxmap4.jpg

I dont like the green one, should have donr it some other way

I really like using _subtly_ colored lights - yellow and orange and the green-cyan, you know the one that HL uses alot - for luminiscent lamps.
Fact is, in real life the light is rearly pure white 

the .lit for rpgsp1 rocks!

Thanks. :) Although looking at it now, I think the torch lights are terrible, and the red light from the lava could use a bit of work. In general it was used sparingly, though, which I guess is why it's tolerable. 

This screenshots are in fact good examples how to use smartly coloure lights... except for the green lights (sorry), which completly ruins the textures... but is there a method to add colored lights without "destroying" the textures around (and don't answer: don't use coloured lights... :P) 

the thing with coloured lights is that they effectively limit the range of colours which a texture will use.

the only solutions i'm aware of is to either keep the coloured light extremly localized, or make sure which ever colours you choose are very faint, approaching white. (again, with the subtlty thing) 

Things need to be subtle. No exceptions. Alert light are not 255,0,0 (fully red). Neon signs DO NOT saturate the area in light.

It's all about subtlety. It's much like washing powder.

Did you know that most products don't get your clothes 'whiter-than-white', but they're actually a slight blue, caused by a microbe in the powder? They do this because the sun casts a yellow-tinted light. Really light blue, when viewed in a mostly really light yellow lighting situation will look 'whiter-than-white'.

It's this subtlety that you NEED to take advantage of in you maps.

Otherwise, it's just going to look like Unreal. 

 

 

 

agree with what's already gone - if you notice a coloured light then its been used badly, it should be a smooth transition between all lights and all should be part of the overall map style. lighting is how you create the aesthetic of the map, if you've got high contrast reds and blues alongside each other then ok, but if they don't fit in with the style you've created through the architecture and light sources then you're just including something for the sake of it and not because it will improve the map.