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Light (map compiling)

From Quake Wiki

Revision as of 04:11, 25 March 2013 by Hectate (talk | contribs) (fixing misdirected links)

Light is one of the stages of map compiling. It calculates lighting and shadows for a bsp file previously generated by QBSP.

What Light Does

Using the light entities from the entity lump of the bsp file, it precalculates the lighting on each surface in the level, and saves that data as lightmaps in the bsp file.

Some modified Light tools can also calculate colored lighting for the level and save it seperately in a lit file.

Using Light

Light is a command-line tool, generally named light.exe. You can invoke it from a command prompt, via a shortcut or batch file, or from the "compile" or "build" menus of some level editors.

Command-line options

TODO

Error Messages and Warnings

TODO

Updated Versions

In addition to id Software's official Light, there have been various unofficial versions that improve on the original or add additional features. For a list of Light variants, see mapping tools.