Letf 4 Dead: Capturing Atmosphere help n Created 14 years ago2009-05-19 01:45:32 UTC by naserve

Ello, i'm having trouble capturing the atmosphere needed in a left 4 dead map. Obviously I want it to be kind of dark and scary and such but it still seems to bright, no matter how low I set my lights. Does anyone have any tips regarding creating atmosphere or lighting, or props related to lighting.

Try making the skybox a dark one, then setting the environment lighting to some sort of mid to dark blue, with the ambient a slightly lighter colour maybe even a purple. Play around with the shadow_control (or whatever it's called) entity too.

Make all your lights come from specific sources: you might have street lights, car lights (used a lot in the official maps), Shop window displays, apartment lights, floodlights. Vary it up a bit too, maybe light from a fire, light from a siren or alarm, neon signs or just signs with lights on them, traffic lights...

Also don't use the normal light entities for everything, use light_spot instead, I used to place one aprox two metres off the ground facing down and another aprox 1/2 metre off the ground facing up, made some good effects.

Then again if you do use lights use the fade distance (I think it's called) the thing that has a 0% and 50% value in the light properties. Try those with different numbers and you'll work out soon enough how it works. (Sorry if any of this is wrong haven't opened hammer in a year ) Good luck!

Ok, how would I make a light go dark, like via what input?

I believe there's a standards map included with the beta tools that offers the most basic lighting and fog settings for a Left 4 Dead map.

also no mercy map 1 is included in mapsrc folder. take a look at how valve did it. it's quite a mess though.

jezus its one hell of a mess ...

I know I looked at that, sighed, cried a bit and closed it. I don't understand how they did that. Hell, even the standards map overwhelms me.

Seeing the whole thing in it's finished state is crazy, yes. Once you learn all the basics (particularly all the optimization brushes) and see your own map slowly come together bit by bit though, it's not so bad.

In the standards map there's a bunch of entities stuffed in the corner of the starting room. They all control the basic outdoor lighting, the fog, the colour correction for each team, shadows... things like that. I'd suggest just copying them and playing with their settings to begin with.

Any old map that you didn't work on will obviously seem daunting to you since you don't know anything about it and how it was made.

I was also going to suggest just copying Valve's light entities but please, please don't use that overused dark blue sky.

Am I the only one who would like to see a L4D map which takes place in the day?

Some people are doing that. There was a compo on Interlopers and joe_dirt976 ported his day time map to L4D.

http://www.interlopers.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=28319

There's also l4d_yama which I'm looking forward to.

Am I the only one who would like to see a L4D map which takes place in the day?

Nope. But check halfway down this page.

Edit: Zoiks, Habboi is faster.

Yeah but your link is better. I couldn't find that. You should also check this out then since I might as well not waste this post:

http://www.l4dmods.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=453

Someone on here should make a nav tutorial, its giving me problems, mainly having the mobs come from multiple directions and the special infected not failing.

You might want to play through the L4D commentary...just to give you an insight into what they were thinking when they made different parts of the game