Balancing light levels between classic Doom and modern sourceports.

[Kyka]

So in the course of working on TNT:Forever, I have consistently struggled to balance the lighting in the maps to have the right atmosphere for both classic chocolate/vanilla sourceports, and also modern sourceports like GZDoom.

 

For example, if I want to make a really dark, scary area, and I make the lighting appropriately spooky and ambient in Chocolate Doom, it is far too bright and loses all its atmosphere in GZDoom. Conversely if I make something really dark in GZDoom, it is virtually unplayable in Chocolate.

 

Any thoughts on how to balance these two lighting approaches, because I have no idea. What would be the general approach to this problem?

 

Thanks in advance.

[exl]

You can force a certain lighting mode in GZDoom through ZMAPINFO, using the lightmode map property: https://zdoom.org/wiki/MAPINFO_options_for_GZDoom's_GL_renderer. Mode 8 should emulate software renderer behaviour, but you'll still have to fiddle a bit and find a happy medium sometimes.

[IcarusOfDaggers]

I did notice that GZDooms "Dark" is as close as it can render to original brightness settings.