Colored lightning

Colored Lighting is an graphical feature in the Quake series, in addition to the regular lightmaps. Colored Lighting can be created to make some light sources look and feel more natural.

Quake
The original Quake engine didn't support colored lighting. Since the game was based upon software rendering and ran on relatively old CPUs, such graphical features would cost too much performance. Quake later received a OpenGL port entitled GLQuake, which still didn't support colored lighting.

However the later released console ports, featured colored lighting. Quake 64 had most of the levels done with the new feature in order to compensate the missing level architecture and details.

Modern Source ports implement colored lighting support through .Lit files, these can be either created manually by an level designer, or generated with a tool. .Lit files are available for all original ID maps, two versions of these exist. An older one generated circa' 2001 by MH and a newer one generated circa' 2009. The older version has more intensity in the lighting, which can be noted on the base maps. The newer one is more relatively subtle.

.Lit files must be placed inside the id1\maps folder, in order to be loaded.

Quake II and Quake III Arena
Quake II brought up support for colored lighting on its release, being one of the main graphical aspects of the OpenGL renderer. Colored lighting was used to give the enviroment of Stroggos more atmosphere, as such orange-ish and yellow-ish colors are predominant on outdoor areas. It was also used to give light sources different colors.

Quake III Arena retained the feature, now much more advanced than the previous version. With the graphical capabilities of the Id Tech 3 engine, lightmaps are now much more realistic than previous incarnations.