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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?)
I'm not sure too much more needs to be done for softer edges, assuming you light with higher resolution in mind.
Here are some shots of my relighting of DM2. No, it's not true to the original; this is more to get a feel for how decent high res lightmaps look when you light with them in mind. No comparisons. Shot1: Textured | Lightmap Shot2: Textured | Lightmap Shot3: Textured | Lightmap Shot4: Textured | Lightmap Shot5: Textured | Lightmap Shot6: Textured | Lightmap Shot7: Textured | Lightmap Shot8: Textured | Lightmap Download if you want to see it in action or compare things or just look at the sorry, the download link was owned by caps... this is why you do things when you are awake and paying attention....
http://scampie.net/privfiles/DM2_lite_052215.zip warren: yeah, sorry... my monitor apparently doesn't look like anyone else's and my screenshots always come out too dark :| If we are going down the road of
Could we introduce lightmaps on liquid surfaces as part of lit2's features? Quake's ugly fullbright water is one of the big immersion-breaking things imo, and it would be cool to update that a bit :} Thanks Scampie. DM2 looks a million times better. I recently ported DM2 over to Quake 3 and give it a similar treatment.
http://i1187.photobucket.com/albums/z382/AndehGX/quake3/axq1dm2.jpg Also, does anyone still have Gypsy's Could we introduce lightmaps on liquid surfaces as part of lit2's features?
Yes plz! (need to have some way to make lava fullbright though!) -- I calibrated my monitor (brightness was way too high) and adjusted levels on my screenshots in post #435 and reuploaded them, hopefully they aren't super dark anymore? Think the map itself is actually lit too dark, but it's not terrible. Hah, the same request came up in the inside3d thread. I think it can be done in a way that's backwards compatible, without needing special support in lit2. It'd probably be a "-litwater" flag for qbsp and light; qbsp would use it to chop liquids on the 256 grid (they aren't normally chopped), light would generate lightmaps instead of not. Pretty sure engines not supporting lit water will just ignore the lightmaps (but need to verify this.)
According to LH, DarkPlaces will already render them. Could we introduce lightmaps on liquid surfaces as part of lit2's features?
This doesn't actually need LIT2 at all. You could do it with a regular light tool and some engine modifications. It would also need QBSP modifications because by default liquid surfaces aren't subdivided as much as solid ones. But you probably don't want this at all, because in most cases it actually looks worse than fullbright water. yeah, you can't light water without going into a whole consideration of how light interacts with water. eventually you'll put a fancy portal2 water shader alongside 300-poly monsters and you get this silliness:
http://quakeone.com/~files/ss_e2m1_FN3.jpg mmm yeah, you're right... in Lun's example pic, that water would just be standard Quake water, except tinted bright yellow by the bright yellow lights.
I don't have the game right now to check, but didn't Quake 3 just have lightmaps on top of simple Quake-esque water?
Coupled with transparency, it didn't look too bad if I recall? http://scampie.net/etc/q3_water.jpg
think q3dm10 is the only place it's used in stock q3? It does look reasonable, but might only work because there's like 3 layers of mostly transparent water textures blended with the light. I reckon vertex-lit water would be reasonable, with a single vertex colour for the entire water plane. Of course the mapper would need to be careful about the placement of lights relative to water so that we don't get weirdness like water surfaces half-in and half-out of a really bright area. But it would solve what I guess is the primary problem here, which is a fullbright water surface in an otherwise uniformly dark area.
Much of that also goes away with translucent water, where the water surface blends with the underlying geometry. You almost certainly don't want to add lightmaps there - light is supposed to shine through water, after all. Another problem with lightmapped water is that the lightmap can obscure the turbulent warp effect. Under certain conditions it just looks like a regular solid surface (until you walk into it). Shadows being cast on water surfaces also looks wrong. To be honest, and having implemented this in the past (but with realtime light rather than lightmaps), fullbright water is really just the lesser evil. Lightmapped water falls apart real quick once you move away from just wanting it and graduate to actually thinking about how it would look. Shadows being cast on water surfaces also looks wrong
http://i.imgur.com/5GU8rQi.jpg http://i.imgur.com/f10kgnE.jpg Vertex-lit water like mh suggests could actually be good, just avoiding super-bright water when you're putting it in dark areas likely would be enough.
Tricky part might bebackwards compatiblity and lava which should be fullbright no matter what. But it sounds like a reasonable approach to try
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