[LVL ED] Boxlights

[CarnivorousJelly]

Could someone explain to me these things:

1. The purpose of a boxlight.

Give the entire area a base ambient light so that you don't leave black-holes-of-darkness all over your map from pointlight abuse.

2. Where a boxlight is used appropriately

Pretty much every map you'll ever make. A better question would be "where would a boxlight be inappropriate?" - I still don't have an answer to that because I always use a boxlight on my maps.

3. How a boxlight would be used appropriately

Make it just slightly larger than the entire map you've created then change the colour so it matches the rest of the lights on your map but is about 10-15% as bright as the brightest one (window/candle/fire/ bright spotlight). In other words, if your brightest light is pure white (1.000 1.000 1.000), then your boxlight would be between (0.1, 0.1, 0.1) and (0.15, 0.15, 0.15)

4. And what would be notable colours to focus on in certain rooms.

Nice question! I love it when you guys ask good questions like this
Basically, it depends on the source of your light:
External light from sun/moon - blue for night/dawn/dusk/sunrise/sunset and yellow-white for daytime
Open Flames - Try a reddish brown. You don't want it to be too red or the walls will look like they're covered in blood. If it seems to red for you, bring the green slider closer to the red slider and it'll yellow out a bit.
Any sort of atmospheric attempts - I've used dim, purple-grey boxlights before with cream-coloured lighting because it made a room look really cool (I was going for a dawn simulation but I liked the purple too much); sewers/overgrown areas tend to be green to yellow-grey; dreams sequences tend to use white lighting (pure grey boxlight) with white fog.

Thanks for asking about boxlights - a lot of beginning mappers mistakenly believe that boxlights serve no purpose and leave them out, causing their maps to be completely black with little islands of lights where they threw in pointlights or windows. There's a really awesome tutorial for lighting already on the wiki (http://wiki.frictionalgames.com/hpl2/tut...tutorial_2 ), but if you have any other questions, you can ask me