Thoughts on lighting: Setting the standards?

[NIN-Kitsune]

I remember way back when I very first started out with just altering lighting in existing .bsp maps with the help of mapmixer utilizing arghrad and always fiddled with my gl_modulate values to see how things would look, and now much later, I had become quite adept at knowing how to place lighting and do it reasonably well in my own maps made from scratch these days even though I'm not quite a pro still, but one thing remains a bit less obvious to me that I wonder what other mappers are doing in regards to, and that is determining how the maps lighting should look for many different players who tend to have very different brightness and modulation settings. These days I have fine tuned myself to having no other settings different from the defaults of stock Quake 2 other than having a modulation setting of 3 (and especially no gamma, I think that looks horrid both for judging a maps appearance, and playing), because gl_modulate 1 and 2 do tend to look too dark and contrasted in most monitors I have used, while 3 seems to strike the perfect balance of realistic looking lighting, and anything higher than 3 tends to make maps look overly bright and lose any defining shadows and subtle lighting differences. Also, I tend to use light emitting textures in my maps with their default brightness values, I rarely change them.





As can be seen, the first image of one of my older maps has modulation of 1, it looks much too dark according to that default setting, while the next image has a modulation of 3 and has the map exactly as I think it should appear, although if it is set on 1, I hope it still remains acceptable enough for those players who choose to play maps that way. Have I struck a good balance? I chose 3 after a very long time of playing many maps both stock Quake II and made by other players including those made by the most talented of all mappers who are here, whom I'd value an input from as well ^w^. It just seems from all my time messing with the settings, I think gl_modulate 3 seems the most fair to set lighting standards with in my future projects?

[jitspoe]

My thoughts:

I detest the gl_modulate setting and really wish custom engines would do away with it. It multiplies the lightmap brightness by the specified value (but the values are still clamped at 255). This means if you set gl_modulate 2, half the potential brightness values are thrown out of the window. Anything above 128 is just lost. If you set it to 3, 2/3 of the lightmap is thrown out. Anything above 85 in brightness is pitched. Color is preserved to some degree, so sometimes there is still variation in lighting due to color changes, but gl_modulate 3 and higher tends to throw out a TON of shadow detail.

I had to deal with this a lot on my map, since I wanted to make it have a bright outdoor setting, but gl_modulate tends to destroy bright lightmap data.

As an example, this is with gl_modulate 1:



The shadows are pretty dark and pronounced, but everything is a bit darker/bleaker than I intended. I had to do this to counter most gl_modulate settings.

Here's gl_modulate 2:



This is about what I was targeting. Shadows are still pronounced, lighting looks like day time.

But what happens if we kick gl_modulate up to 3?


Poof! Everything is gone! Well, not everything, but shadows in bright ambient areas are gone. If you look closely, you can see a subtle color difference. The area that used to be shadow has a slight pink tone to it. That's because the stones were slightly brown, and the reflected light in the shadows was retrieved from light bouncing off textures with more red in them. Of course, it just looks silly without the brightness value to accompany it.

Here's an alternative approach I used in my engine for Paintball2: apply a 2x (or in the case of Quake2, with its super dark textures, 3x) multiplier when blending the lightmap and texture together, rather than applying lossy brightness scaling on texture load:


If you still need more brightness, I've got a less lossy lightmap gamma option. Here's with gl_lightmapgamma 0.7:


Dark areas get lighter, but shadow information isn't completely lost.

Here's an extreme value of 0.45:


Everything is way brighter, but there are still shadows visible.

As for Vanilla Quake2, I'd say: make things a reasonable brightness at gl_modulate 2, so players using this setting can still see OK, but not so bright that things are mostly washed out at 3.

A big gripe I have with the brightness settings is that people crank them up, then later say, "I wanna make a dark map", but they make it dark on their already cranked-up settings, which made formerly-dark maps light, so now players have to crank up their brightness settings even more to see normally in this new, darker map, then another player thinks, "I wanna make a dark map", and people keep spiraling down into darker and darker lighting with brighter and brighter settings.

[Null]

That looks much nicer.