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are there any quake maps that actually use cast shadows really well? We should test on those. I'm thinking like, dm2 and dm4 have a lot of shadows behind grates and stuff.
here's DM2, compiled with -extra4 -soft -dirty -dirtscale 1.5 -dirtgain 0.9 -lightmapscale 0.25 (4x resolution)
area1, lit, textured area1, lit, lightmap area1, lit2, textured area1, lit2, lightmap area2, lit, textured area2, lit, lightmap area2, lit2, textured area2, lit2, lightmap area3, lit, textured area3, lit, lightmap area3, lit2, textured area3, lit2, lightmap area4, lit, textured area4, lit, lightmap area4, lit2, textured area4, lit2, lightmap Obviously DM2 wasn't made with this in mind, but I think this does show were some of the higher resolution lightmaps can make a big difference. just tried to compile dm2 at 16x with all those settings...15min compile to make a 93mb
I was testing fte with a 173mb lit2 before I started messing with projected lights.
(side note: xz compessed it to 14mb, so if you can cope with the load times then its not completely impractical to distribute, just use 7z or xz instead of zip or gz - assuming lit2 was a finalized file format anyway) Wait dont we have area lights support in these compilers? If so then you can have sharp bases for the lights that widen out and look super sweet with this new resolution.
http://area.autodesk.com/userdata/forum/3/3dsmax_viewport_shadows.jpg Not going to bother with 2x. That goal isn't 'find a compromise where higher resolution and American McGee's lighting from 1996 looks good'. The goal is to make a high resolution lighting system, and make THAT look good.
I disagree. I don't like the 16x lighting. The hard edges and sharp shadows don't look good to me. What I'm looking for is a 2X, maybe a 3x, improvement in resolution. That would give me what I need to make Quake levels look better than they do today while still retaining the look that makes them work.
I came to the conclusion that either 2x or 4x could be the new standard for modern mappers. I'm certainly going to map with this in mind.
I think one of the factors making the DM2 shots look bad is the unnatural approach id took to lighting back then, using multiple lights to represent light from the sky as this screenshot taken at Scampie's location 3 indicates - http://puu.sh/hVGCZ/4ed3224645.jpg (taken with DarkPlaces and r_editlights 1 for the sake of convenience).
As a result, you get shadows being cast in several different directions, in a location where one sees a sky above and no other light source and thus expects all shadows to be cast in the same direction. Consequently it ends up looking weird when they aren't. This wasn't quite so prominent with lower lightmap resolution. I think of all the screenshots Scampie took, the one at location 4 looks best, and that's not surprising since there is only a single light source there - http://puu.sh/hVH6K/089cd1541c.jpg - and thus it looks more realistic. However, as others have said, even in location 4 there is the issue of the shadows looking unnaturally sharp a la Doom 3 and the increased resolution can produce that old problem of better quality media appearing dissonant with the low fidelity of most of the game. Nonetheless, ericw, I think once people have worked out what combination of compile options works best for a given scenario, this will be a really nice feature and I wouldn't be discouraged by the mixed results so far. AFAIK id never had the ability to scale lights using the options we have now, they certainly never had things like skyboxes casting light in pretty much any uniform direction.
Yes, like I said, DM2 obviously wasn't lit with this in mind, of course it looks terrible. The test was for curiosity, and to see how much of a difference higher resolution lightmaps make on a map which relies heavily on shadows (as opposed to my maps, where I rely more on bright highlights of light)
And yes 5th, the original tools had no falloff options, no sunlights, -extra was the only compile option for added quality. Anyone know a decent decompiler? I'd actually like to take a stab at relighting DM2 with a proper sunlight setting all the map sources have been released by romero... you can pretty much just use that to redo everything.
No idea where you can find the files, it used to be on romero's website but that hasnt worked in a while. I disagree. I don't like the 16x lighting. The hard edges and sharp shadows don't look good to me. What I'm looking for is a 2X, maybe a 3x, improvement in resolution. That would give me what I need to make Quake levels look better than they do today while still retaining the look that makes them work.
Remember that at the moment, soft edges are not working correctly as they are not scaled to the resolution. One of the things that might be interesting to explore with the new resolution is to have shadows change hardness based on distance of light to shadow caster to shadow receiver. If you can fake that, or if you need to resort to light arrays, either way, that would be one way to exploit the higher resolution without it just looking like lame Doom3 stencil shadows. Yea that is why I was asking about area shadow / Area Lights support.
With the new BSP / Material lighting option you can get that effect. But the light source is always visible as GEO. Not a bad thing I guess but be nice to have BSP materials cast light and then be tossed out once compiled or with no rendering or collision. Couldn't find anything on how area lights are implemented in raytracers, but the _deviance/_samples keys can probably emulate it (or they may be the same thing as area lights?)
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