Adding An Ambient Light

For this tutorial you will need the following:

>> A full copy of Quake 2, complete with the latest official patch

>> Quake II Evolved version 0.65 Beta

>> A popular level editor compatible with Quake 2 (GTK Radiant 1.3 etc)

Ok then, lets begin with a little information shall we?

What is an Ambient Light?

Ambient lighting is a lighting method that's just like your standard light, only with a few modifications. Ambient lighting casts no shadows at all, and makes no change the specular map. It does make a change to the bump man, but non-directionally (ie: lights comes from in-front the surface). It does, however, mostly change the diffuse map. This is very useful for blanket lighting, lighting huge areas with little performance hit. Using a combination of ambient lighting and point lights, you can create a very nice looking outdoor area with little performance drop.

Adding Ambient Lighting To Your Level

Once again, with this tutorial we will build off what we have previously done using standard lights.

Load up the first tutorial file, as it contains many things already done for you. Now, I want you to make a new shader file for it so it looks like this:

tut_3
{
ambientLight
lightFalloffImage _falloff
{
zeroClamp
map lights/tut_3.tga
colored
}
}

Save the file, and reload. Done. That's all there is to it! Its a simple flag that can be set in the shader to change the light type from a normal light, to an ambient light! How easy was that!

Here is a .pk2 file with an example map. Simply type map tut_3 in the console.

That about wraps up our tutorial on Ambient Lighting. If you have any questions please post them in our forums.