Author: Me!

This tutorial is rated 2 (**) stars, not because it isn't easy, but because it requires some time to get used to and not everybody thinks it's that easy.

Lightposts, this is just something I'd like to bring to public attention: lighting. Lots of maps these days feature custom lighting, which is great. In the old days, most mappers made online maps without lighting or amateur maps and the maker tried to use the lighting... But it didn't work out that well... The only problem is that few people actually know what to do with it, even now. TS maps can be disco fever à la 2007, or they can have a nice atmosphere to them, loyal to the FMV's. this is why I always advise people to edit lightposts in maps. Well, many people already know this, yes I'm posting the obvious, but that's the case with many other tutorials.

Lightposts have several attributes:

LightRedTint=  0.001 - 0.45 ; the amount of red lighting the lightpost should emit
LightBlueTint=  0.001 - 0.65 ; the amount of blue lighting the lightpost should emit
LightGreenTint= 0.001 - 0.55 ; the amount of green lighting the lightpost should emit
LightIntensity=  0.005 - 0.025 ; the brightness of the light
LightVisibility=  500 - 7500 ; the radius in which the light should be emitted

Explanation and general information about the tags:

- If both the red and blue tint tags read 0.001 or something low like that, and the green tint is something like 0.45, the lightpost emits green light. if Both blue and red read 0.10 and green reads 0.001, then the lightpost emits a faint purple light. Just to make this idiot-proof.

- I advise you to keep your values in the range I noted. Then again, these are guidelines and a little bit more may be required sometimes.

- Keep the visibility high, but the intensity low. This is to prevent separate cell colouring. This means that if you give it a very strong light effect, but only a small radius, the light looks blocky over the tiles and we don't want this.

Some separate tips:

- Always place at least some small (weak?) invisible lighting sources around tiberium spawners, but not fields without a blossom tree or blue tiberium spawning crystal close by (no matter how big they are). What if a player harvests it all? No more tiberium but loads of lighting. And no, that is not residual radiation, that's merely a false excuse.

- Tiberium mold (the green and blue goo) and algae (swampy stuff on water) are all persistant and will remain on the map forever. Adjust your lighting when placing them down. It counts as tiberium.

- Fona is destroyable, so if you have fona without persistant stuff (tiberium spawning tree or crystal or mold), then don't place down any lightposts.

- Around green tiberium mold ( goo/sludge ) place down an invisible lightpost, no colors, not even yellow, just 'au naturel'   , it's green enough.

-Around blue tiberium mold, place down an invisible blue lightpost and an 'au naturel' one.

-During an ion storm, all colored lighting reverts to colorless lighting, this is what makes tiberium fields light up when the weather anomaly is raging. The overall ion storm ambient lighting settings determine the tint of the lighting on the entire map, so be sure to treat that normally as well.

- Negative light posts should never be placed in tiberium rich areas, because tiberium always emits a slight bit of light. The light can only become more intense, it will not lessen.

- Keep everything normal. In cities there will never be giant colored lightposts, this is not Las vegas x 1000.

- This is TS, look at the FMV's for clues about nice atmospheres, or invent your own. Just keep this in mind: nothing should be extreme, too much of something good is always baaaaad.

- Always edit lightposts, the vanilla settings for the lighting are ridiculous and just like we're back in the 80's. The only lightpost that is slightly okay is the normal invisible and visible light post (colorless lighting)

- Never ever look at Westwood's standard maps for lighting advice, most of WW's maps were made with a RMG (random map generator) of which we can still find a downgraded version in TS nowadays. Their maps were also horrible when it came to atmosphere.

- Water itself doesn't emit light, it merely reflects some of it, so you can place down colored lightposts that slightly edit the atmosphere around it, but never make it emit light (unless there are some algae colonies). I'd also avoid yellow lighting over water. Blue is okay, though and actually advised. However, if the general color of your map's ambient lighting (in non-ionstorm mode) is nothing like blue, or forms an uneasy and unwanted contrast when you have blue lighting on your map, don't place down anything on the water. Negative lightposts are okay on water, just know that water does not absorb all lighting.


Hope this helped the new mappers a bit.