Adding lighting for effect and mood in your game

I have added some lights to this room in order to add a little bit of mystery. Remember: Lighting is very important for your game. Spend the time to learn how to do it well -and experiment. It only takes a few seconds to change the lights and run the game to see how it looks.

Here is the same room as on the previous page. All I did was add some lights. It makes a big difference in the feel and look of the game.

Let's Do it. I won't take you through the steps for each light but I will review for you what I did.

This scene has six lights, you can see them as small x's in this picture.

• 1 Red light directly in the center of the four columns against the wall and up high near the ceiling.
• 4 white lights near the gaps of the column pairs. Each column pair has a light behind and a light in front. These four lights are also up near the ceiling of the room.
• 1 white light in the center of the room and about waist high to a character. This is a low level light that illuminates the room just enough to add visibility to the parts of the room where the column lights don't reach.

Let's Review Light placement and illumination

Make a video game - Light Placement

Select the template mode button .

In the control panel select "template" then in the menu that starts with "block actor" drop down and select "light". A light is an entity and this drop down menu is a list of entities that you can place in your game.

Now click on the light bulb then hit the enter button.

The light bulb is inserted into your room and created as an entity.. It shows up as a blue star in your three views and as a little light bulb in your textured view.
To move it around click on the select button then click on the light.

then click the move/rotate button now you can click and drag the light placing it wherever you want. Now lets modify the characteristics of the light.

Switch to select mode and select the light entity you created.

Now press the entity dialog button . You will see the light properties box.

You can change the Red Green Blue color values of the light. The current setting of 255, 255, 255 makes white. The light setting is currently 150 this is the brightness of the light. Double click on the field "light" and enter your desired brightness. You can experiement with this setting. The higher the number- the brighter the light and the further it will extend illumination in the room. You are doing great so far!

After you have placed and adjusted your lights Save your game

Now run it by pressing the compile button

Be sure that the Default Light Level (RGM) box is unchecked and be sure that the preview button is checked.

Press the OK button and take a look at your illuminated room. See anything that you would change? Go back and manipulate it.

Remember that when you have a lot of entities in your room you can easily access and manipulate them by pressing the entity dialog button then you can pull down the menu and see all the various entities.

Okay, Let's take a break before we move on to the next part

.Having any trouble?

Your game won't run? It starts to run but it comes back to the editing screen? There are a few common mistakes that people make at this point of the process. Look these tips over and check.

• Did you remember to put a DeathMatchStart entity in your room?
• Tinkering around with lights and duplicating lights may have caused to to create a block actor without any assigned properties. This blockactor will prevent your game from running. Here's how you fix it: Press the entity dialog button and scroll through your list of entitites:
• 
• If you see an entity that you don't want such as a blockactor then simply select it then delete it with your delete key or pull down Edit | delete in the menu bar.

Continue on with the tutorial