Some Basic Lighting Tips for Kingpin MexicanRadio
Before we start building our lights, let's do some texture conversions. If you've tried to use the light texture surface flag, you may have noticed that regardless of what color the texture is, the light emitted is always white. That's because KPRad doesn't recognize 24 bit textures... it will only properly light .wal files. So the first thing you need to do is convert all of the textures in the common texture folder to .wals. Common is where Kingpin has its light texures. You're going to have to use a program like Wally for this. Bottom line, when you're done, you'll have all the default .tga files in the common directory, along with copies of each file in .wal format. Confused? Good. Let's continue... Let's build a simple light. To do this, we're going to start with a brush to which a light texture has been applied. This is probably a good time to start looking at Figure 1. I've built a flourescent light out of some brushes, and applied the flourescent light texture. If you select the face with the texture, you'll probably end up finding that QERadiant has already assigned the light surface value. Now we have to build the light 'sandwich'. Starting at the top, I've placed a junior. This is the entity responsible for dynamic lighting. If you run through your map, and the weapon models and skins are black, it means you haven't set the juniors properly. You must give the junior entity a light value, same as the light entity. In fact, it's always good to set the light value of your junior a bit higher than the light_entity's light value. Underneath the junior, you'll see I've placed a light entity. This is just to fill out the light from the surface texture. Finally, I've place a target_speaker set to loop one of the flourescent light sounds in the sounds\world directory.
Figure 1
Figure 2 shows what this will look like in the game.
Figure 2
Some more points: If you give your light entity a style (blinking, strobe, etc.), make sure you give the same style to the light's corresponding junior. Some video cards don't work well with juniors. I'm using a TNT, and if I forget to place a junior, I can't tell from looking at it. People with Voodoo cards don't have this problem... just keep a look out. Don't forget to place juniors in outside areas. Usually, in a daylight situation, a few juniors spread out with light values of 600-900 fill out things nicely. You'll have to experiment. -Mex