lit file turns light black

[Ubiquitous]

I have returned to quake mapping after a hiatus of about 15 years and am trying to get to grips with coloured lighting, but am having some difficulty.

I have created a simple box test map with a single light entity. To that entity I added a key

_color

with value

1 0 0

I compile the map with tyrutils, running light with the command line

light.exe -extra4 -lit my.bsp

When I run the map in Quakespasm it is completely black as if the light weren't there at all. If I go into my id1/maps folder and delete the .lit file that light.exe created and reload the map then is lit properly (but without coloured lighting).

This suggests that something is going wrong in either the generation or the loading of the lit file. Does anyone know what the cause might be?

[Adam]

Add a 2nd normal (without the _color key) light to your box.
Make it so that the normal light illuminates it all, then move your colored light next to one of the walls and ramp up its brightness till it has an effect.
Maybe also test it in DarkPlaces.

You could try some other _color values too, 255 0 255 for purple etc...

Just keep testing, something will work...
You have an info player start in there too, right?

[Johnny Law]

I vaguely remember that there is some confusion over whether color component values are 0-1 floats or 0-255 ints. Maybe your specified color value is being interpreted as "almost black"... so like Adam said, try some other values.

(edit: If you're using ericw's version of tyrutils, it looks like it will try to interpret either color format; i.e. if all the components are between 0 and 1, it will multiply them by 255. But maybe that's not what you're using?)

[Ubiquitous]

Thanks for the replies both. It was, indeed, the case that _color should have been specified by three integers in the 0–255 range rather than three floats in [0,1]. Setting _color = 255 0 0 resulted in a bright red light as expected.

My confusion had been caused by the fact that trenchbroom's color picker generates triples from [0,1]�.