Lots of lights.
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Lots of lights.
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| I’m starting to write a game again and I have a question about lights. I remember a game from ages ago called Forsaken. In this game when you (or an enemy) fired a bullet the nearby textures would all light up and this 'local' illumination would follow the bullets around. How is this done? Is there a separate light in each of these bullets and rockets? It seems obvious that there are but I ask because there were at times maybe 50 odd of these lit buttons flying around. I seem to remember there being a severe limitation on the number of lights you can use. Or is this fake lighting? This game is pretty old and I think it was 3dfx so it’s not like the hardware was that amazing. Thanks a lot. |
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| Using many true real-time lights is not a good thing to do, it will slow down everything considerably. I wouldn't use more than two lights, even if their ranges do not overlap because in reality the light range is almost infinitive. In fact, I would not use true lights at all, just cubemap lighting. And you don't have to attach light to EVERY bullet, one light for burst of bullets will be enough. |
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| Why do you call yourself sulfuric acid? Is this some kind of pseudo-chemist nerd appeal? Anyways, what you want involves real-time calculation of uv coords to map a circular gradient texture rendered in a second pass. Don't listen to these guys talking about DX lights, they are crap. |
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| So that way halo, basically your mapping a lightmap across the reciever to simulate a good light source. So basically, you have two options, 1, layer it as a texture, max of 2 lights even on a g5(if the other two are textures and lightmap) 2, do a second pass render of the level mesh with lights, max of 4 lights on a good card. but double your framerate. Blitz light's work fine, you just have to use sub 1 values. like lightcolor mylight,1,0,0 for red, and mylight,0.5,0.5,0.5 for grey. i think 0-255 is a misprint in the manual.. |
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| You need combiners at rendertime according to carmack. It's one feature that would benefit any blitz game and mark should have it in. Fake lights are a worthy engine feature. |
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| This may not be possible in current blitz implimentation due to surface organisation. Surfaces are blitz's way of grouping. A fake light, or combined textures must light up the lightmap to reveal detail. Therefore they need to be told which texture channel to affect. |
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| You're so far in the dust. |
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| As Rob knows I was considering such a lighting system, but I am no longer convinced it can be done fast enough, or in a way which is easy for people to use. Even with the professional-grade clipping algorthms I coded into my shadow system, it still struggles, and the number of polygons a shadow actually hits and has to build for the shadow mesh is might lower than for a light. It is my opinion that it would be faster, and almost as good looking to simply come up with a way to subdivide the walls and floors in your level more so that the vertex lighting looks better. |
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| You're so far in the dust. Yeah? I expect yours doesn't exactly run that fast. Just having it working is not enough. |
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| I think the solution is probably going to be as simply as drawing pixels to a lightmap. Or you could project uvs every frame from the camera to all visible verts to create a much higher resolution lightmap texture space, render some flare sprites to a buffer, copy to texture. That would be a reasonable speed, but the trick is to translate the flare sprite positions to 2D space effectively. |
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| Thanks for all the suggestions. It's a top down vertical shooter not one of your fancy FPS's. The map is made up of meshes at different z positions to simulate parallax. So basically it's like using a lightmap texture but I'm just taking a chunk of the lit texture and using something like a mask or alpha channel to blend it with the normal texture. Cheers. |
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| so can we expect a fake ligting system from you guys soon? |
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| Hey team! I was just wondering, What does Halo use in the Singularity Engine? You know, in the SE3.03 map when the light from a gun blast travels realtime down all the walls, the floor and ceiling and on meshes which are close by where you are shooting? IPete2. |
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| Good old dynamic lighting with a circular gradient texture (it's fake lighting rendered in a second pass). It may be dated but it works. ;) |
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