Opinions on good lighting?

Absolutely Essential. There are some good older wads out there and it makes me cringe when most of them lack even the most basic lighting.
The lighting of Doom Episode1 was very well done... simple and enhancing the maps' atmosphere greatly. To this day I fondly remember the light beam shining into the secret maze of E1M2...

I see a lot of maps defaulting on an ascending gradient in intervals of 16 to achieve a smooth lighting effect. You don't necessarily have to form your lighting as such. I find in dark areas, it's best to use 3 to 4 lighting sectors plus the light source sector itself. Say your room is at lighting level 96.. I would set up a light as 112-144-176-192 and the light source sector at 255. The first bordering sector is best left at 16 above the surrounding sector.

Also, a lot of rooms I see only focus on the center with overhead light sources used primarily. When you place lights closer to the wall that will affect the wall textures themselves, you'll have a much more striking effect and more or less get more bang for your buck when it comes to sector usage.

very true. It's much easier to draw light gradients on the floor and ceiling but is much more visually appealing when it's shown on the walls.

Indeed, overhead lighting that affects walls has almost become something of a lost art in a lot of modern Doom maps, due to the tendency to just place a couple of concentric gradient sectors around a ceiling light and call it a day. As such, in a lot of new-ish maps, the only things really giving much contrast to the typically-around-144-brightness walls are computer terminals and wall lights.

It's rather straightforward, albeit time-consuming, to either use UDMF sidedef lighting fields or (for non-ZDoom ports) create sectors along the walls to gradient their brightness as well. I found when I was working on Vapordemo that scenes that previously looked pretty good to me really came alive when I put in the extra time to light their walls.

With attention to how your lights work, you can make maps that look detailed and appealing without having to throw tons of lights and computers everywhere. Look how much of a difference it made in this scene from The Shores of ZDoom: there's not really an abnormally high amount of structural detail on the walls, but the lighting detail sets an atmosphere and makes the scene feel complete.

(Lighting is also good to attract the player's eye to important areas, to make it easy to figure out where the main path is and where they should go next!)

I really prefer the "hard" lighting in the iwads to the gradients that have been popular for as long as I've been mapping.

I'm experimenting with lighting some more, and I'm finding the results to be pretty sweet. Needless to say, mixing gradients in the right places with hard shadows in others is really helpful. Especially in hall or room lights, the hard lights work really well. The more cramped the area is, the better. But in, say, an outdoor environment, I think graduated lights look simply awesome.

Ceiling lights seem difficult to me. I'm not sure if I should graduate them, or just leave them as hard lights. If I don't graduate them, a single square, octagon, or other shape in the middle of a dark room or hallways looks... weird. Anyone have some thoughts on overhead lights and how best to pull them off?

I'm trying to take what everyone says into account. I don't want my first map to be a typical newbie map. I kinda want it to be decent :P

printz said:

But how do you do it? Doom only has about 16 light levels available, and about 6 of them are very dark. Even more so, outdoor skylit areas are expected to be uniformly lit by the sun, especially in diffused light (cloudy) weather.

Dawn of the Dead (dodead.wad) has a very good example of outside lighting, on E1M9.

Iceykiller said:

Ceiling lights seem difficult to me. I'm not sure if I should graduate them, or just leave them as hard lights. If I don't graduate them, a single square, octagon, or other shape in the middle of a dark room or hallways looks... weird. Anyone have some thoughts on overhead lights and how best to pull them off?

I've run into this conundrum many times. Another factor that messes me up is if I want some of the lights to blink. I bet with some kind of silly sector referencing or maybe dummy sectors you could do it, but I've never figured out how to have adjacent sectors of different light levels blink to the same darkness (did I explain that clearly?)

I generally just take a look at the lights in-game to decide if they need graduated lighting. If they are in a room that is otherwise not too dark, you can get away without graduating them. But if the room is dark enough that you can really see the contrast, you are right in that it can look a bit awkward.

Iceykiller said:

Ceiling lights seem difficult to me. I'm not sure if I should graduate them, or just leave them as hard lights. If I don't graduate them, a single square, octagon, or other shape in the middle of a dark room or hallways looks... weird. Anyone have some thoughts on overhead lights and how best to pull them off?

You are correct, a lack of gradients for ceiling lights just doesn't look right, especially when the shape on the ground is the exact size as the shape of the light itself. Ceiling lights tend to a bit... simple and they way most people do them doesn't look right at all. A ceiling light with a wall nearby should cast a horizontal shadow on the wall, depending how close the light is to the wall. Since this is not feasible in the Doom engine, especially as a gradient, we tend to move them away towards the center of hallways and such.

Now the real problem steps in. A round light hanging from the ceiling is going to caste a cone shape onto the ground. The bottom of the cone is going to be much larger than the size of the light, but people often disregard this. The proper thing to do is make the ceiling around the light dark. Light isn't being casted onto the ceiling... it's casted onto the floor, producing the cone/fan shape.

Check this wad out: http://www.speedyshare.com/files/29900090/ceillite.wad

It uses vanilla-compatible light-casting to illustrate the effect. In this example though, the light actually should be closer to the floor, but hey, it still looks pretty convincing. :p

Atmospheric lighting that really sets the right mood of the level is essential for me.

I like both smooth gradients and more "hard" lighting.

That would be all.

EarthQuake said:

You are correct, a lack of gradients for ceiling lights just doesn't look right, especially when the shape on the ground is the exact size as the shape of the light itself. Ceiling lights tend to a bit... simple and they way most people do them doesn't look right at all. A ceiling light with a wall nearby should cast a horizontal shadow on the wall, depending how close the light is to the wall. Since this is not feasible in the Doom engine, especially as a gradient, we tend to move them away towards the center of hallways and such.

Now the real problem steps in. A round light hanging from the ceiling is going to caste a cone shape onto the ground. The bottom of the cone is going to be much larger than the size of the light, but people often disregard this. The proper thing to do is make the ceiling around the light dark. Light isn't being casted onto the ceiling... it's casted onto the floor, producing the cone/fan shape.

Check this wad out: http://www.speedyshare.com/files/29900090/ceillite.wad

It uses vanilla-compatible light-casting to illustrate the effect. In this example though, the light actually should be closer to the floor, but hey, it still looks pretty convincing. :p

Here's a link to an album on Photobucket where you should be able to look through some pictures of lighting in one of my hallways. I want to make the entire map really dark, so the player would have to majorly depend on lights and other sources of light to visually navigate and fight monsters.

http://s1109.photobucket.com/albums/h439/Zmedaris/Doom/Showcase/A%20Lighting%20Example/

I'm not sure if that's good lighting or not. Too much? Too little? Should anything be graduated? And is the contrasting darkness too dark? Remember that I actually WANT it to be really dark so it's hard to see without lights and stuff, but if it will just annoy people and not make it more "fun" or "exciting", I probably won't do that.

I'd say you could gradient all of those lights. It wouldn't need to be crazy, just one bordering sector with an in-between light level would make it look a lot nicer in my opinion.

magicsofa said:

I'd say you could gradient all of those lights. It wouldn't need to be crazy, just one bordering sector with an in-between light level would make it look a lot nicer in my opinion.

My only issues is that if I gradient it, and it lights up the ceiling, too, would that look strange? Or would it make sense?

Meh, I think making sense as a goal should be secondary to making it appealing. Plus, in vanilla or limit removing maps you have to be tricky and use untextured surfaces to create lighting on the floor but not the ceiling, which I don't think is worth your bother at this time. If you really wanted to, you could extrude the sector with the middle light level, so that the light doesn't go above the actual light texture.

magicsofa said:

Meh, I think making sense as a goal should be secondary to making it appealing. Plus, in vanilla or limit removing maps you have to be tricky and use untextured surfaces to create lighting on the floor but not the ceiling, which I don't think is worth your bother at this time. If you really wanted to, you could extrude the sector with the middle light level, so that the light doesn't go above the actual light texture.

Ya, fuck that. I'm gonna worry about being perfect later.

Iceykiller said:

Ya, fuck that. I'm gonna worry about being perfect later.

Good call. Also, you replied SO FAST

I was waiting for a reply so I could continue creating my map. So I refreshed the page every minute :P