Pumo had made me aware of the fact that Descent 1 level lighting was completely off with D2X-XL - levels were way too bright. While I was fixing that, I decided to fix the entire light brightness and color handling in Descent 1 and 2. The standard brightness values for each light source were buried somewhere in the Descent data files, and while DLE-XP and D2X-XL provided means and ways to change this, there was no way to tweak these values for standard missions.

The solution was simple: I adapted the method I had developed for D2X-XL levels and made it available for all level types. My method is compatible with all Descent versions, as D2X-XL stores that information in separate sub files inside a mission's hog file. Other Descent versions will simply ignore these sub files. That way I could use DLE-XP to set new brightness and color values for all light sources in Descent 1 and Descent 2, export the brightness and color tables and import them in d2x-xl.hog.

What I have mainly done is to adjust the brightness of panels and switches, which in most cases were way too bright, while a few that from their looks should have emitted light didn't. It was very easy to assign reasonable color values to light sources in Descent 1 and 2.