[Tea Monster]

Locking the light to the player might be a problem as it will lead to a 'doom 3' effect as you will be able to see the light bobbing around with the player. If you can make it work, then great, but I think it will look like a flashlight.
One thing you might do is to generate small, low intesity lights around the player. They would be locked to a single location near to the Player. You could generate them at set intervals. As the player passes them, they would fade and disappear, depending on how far away the player is. Hell, if you do that right, it might approximate the light fall-off that was present in the original 8-bit game.

[Danukem]

I've been experimenting with it already, and so far the results are pretty good. I haven't noticed it nullifying effects yet. For example, the player will still cast a shadow when a spotlight is behind him, even thought the player is giving off his own light.

I made the color of light 64/64/64, so it's a dull gray, which is less glaring than pure white. I set the distance to 4096 and gave it medium priority (I tried low priority, but then I found it would often do nothing at all in maps with a lot of lights in them, even in situations where none of the other lights were close enough to do anything). I put it slightly above the player's head, which seems like a good place. The problem with offsetting it to the left/right/front/back is that the player might be going through a narrow passage or something, then the light would be in a wall, and I don't want to write fancy light position management code.

And yeah, it does look like the player is carrying some kind of light, and it could potentially ruin the ambiance in a level that already has carefully constructed Polymer lighting. I'm certainly not recommending it as a hardcoded thing, but as a con hack compromise it seems better than nothing at the moment.

[Stabs]

I will give it a go in DNE with a nice moonlight color of 0 / 5 / 40 something like that,

should pickup the FPS heaps if i can kill some moonlight SE's iam already using

[MusicallyInspired]

Neat ideas. There's also the problem with certain areas of a map being meant to be pitch black and yet the player would be able to see with his own light. Unless there's some kind of map flag you can throw on a sector that disables the player's light?

[High Treason]

Tile 3026 is pitch black and does not appear to be vastly affected by Polymer lights.
You could also use 1293 and 5064 but they are a little lighter in color than 3026.

[Danukem]

Heh, this is becoming a DukePlus/DNE thread, but I have already added a feature that allows the mapper to customize or eliminate the light given off by the player, and make it different for indoors/outdoors. I haven't made it so that you can make the settings change throughout the map, though.

[Gambini]

And how does that work?

Give me please explicit instructions of how to disable those nasty lights of all the switches in my maps.

[Danukem]

Gambini, on Jan 13 2011, 05:39 PM, said:

And how does that work?

Give me please explicit instructions of how to disable those nasty lights of all the switches in my maps.

atm switch lights are off by default if you use the latest DP (the one at fissile materials)

eventually there will be way to control them; it's all a wip

[Stabs]

DeeperThought, on Jan 13 2011, 12:18 PM, said:

Heh, this is becoming a DukePlus/DNE thread, but I have already added a feature that allows the mapper to customize or eliminate the light given off by the player, and make it different for indoors/outdoors. I haven't made it so that you can make the settings change throughout the map, though.

works great too, not sure if its possible but can it have a gradual fade to the other color? i just ask this so ppl cant make their own personal disco

btw RUN with these settings if you have a low frame rate, i just had a pretty good run of DNE on a ati 2400HD 3ghz dual core, winxp 32-bit by using

r_pr_specularmapping 0
r_pr_normalmapping 0

def putting these in the low settings for DNE, i can also increase the lights a bit on that too because the performance increase was very noticably

this is where the HRP comes in and culls alot of the excess spec and normal mapping, so i think that should be the main focus now on getting performance

[Danukem]

DanM, on Jan 13 2011, 07:15 PM, said:

works great too, not sure if its possible but can it have a gradual fade to the other color? i just ask this so ppl cant make their own personal disco

btw RUN with these settings if you have a low frame rate, i just had a pretty good run of DNE on a ati 2400HD 3ghz dual core, winxp 32-bit by using

r_pr_specularmapping 0
r_pr_normalmapping 0

def putting these in the low settings for DNE, i can also increase the lights a bit on that too because the performance increase was very noticably

this is where the HRP comes in and culls alot of the excess spec and normal mapping, so i think that should be the main focus now on getting performance

But I love specularmapping and normalmapping. It would be really sad to have them off.

If I had to lose one of those two for performance, it would be specularmapping, because normalmapping seems more important plus most of the models don't have proper specular settings anyway.

This brings up another issue: could we please please PLEASE have the polymer settings changable in the eduke rendering menu already? It's inconvenient to have to set cvars in the console (I have a hard time remembering what they are named) and only power users or modders would even consider doing that.

[VinsaneOne]

Before you even see me, you'd see the glow of my shrinker a mile away, and come in for the kill!

[Danukem]

Is that a complaint? The shrinker is clearly supposed to be glowing; that much is obvious from the 8-bit art. I guess the radius might be too large, though.

[VinsaneOne]

DeeperThought, on Jan 14 2011, 02:28 AM, said:

Is that a complaint? The shrinker is clearly supposed to be glowing; that much is obvious from the 8-bit art. I guess the radius might be too large, though.

It realy does light a very large area, especially in darker places.

[OpenMaw]

DeeperThought, on Jan 13 2011, 11:28 PM, said:

Is that a complaint? The shrinker is clearly supposed to be glowing; that much is obvious from the 8-bit art. I guess the radius might be too large, though.

Yeah, but it shouldnt friggin act like a fog light! You can totally run someone's ass down if they have the shrinker. Changes the gameplay mechanics imho. If anything it should be about five or so inches around the player, nothing bigger.

[Stabs]

DeeperThought, on Jan 13 2011, 11:15 PM, said:

But I love specularmapping and normalmapping. It would be really sad to have them off.

If I had to lose one of those two for performance, it would be specularmapping, because normalmapping seems more important plus most of the models don't have proper specular settings anyway.

i will kill both on very low, and kill spec on low then

[Danukem]

Commando Nukem, on Jan 13 2011, 11:49 PM, said:

Yeah, but it shouldnt friggin act like a fog light! You can totally run someone's ass down if they have the shrinker.

Glad to hear that the new multiplayer code is working.

[Scott_AW]

Well, that would be the cost of using a cheap weapon

[OpenMaw]

DeeperThought, on Jan 14 2011, 01:08 AM, said:

Glad to hear that the new multiplayer code is working.

There are iterations of the early Polymer releases that work in multiplayer (with some desync issues getting worse and worse the newer you get). I was able to locate VinsaneOne many times when he was using The Shrinker. I mean, you really shouldnt even need the experience to realise that its going to change the dynamics of the way the game plays.

[LeoD]

I like the glowing shrinker. Maybe this can be switched off in multiplayer?

[MusicallyInspired]

DanM, on Jan 13 2011, 09:15 PM, said:

btw RUN with these settings if you have a low frame rate, i just had a pretty good run of DNE on a ati 2400HD 3ghz dual core, winxp 32-bit by using

r_pr_specularmapping 0
r_pr_normalmapping 0

Lol that like totally defeats the purpose of using Polymer.

[Danukem]

MusicallyInspired, on Jan 14 2011, 08:10 AM, said:

Lol that like totally defeats the purpose of using Polymer.

For his DNE episode, he made a .bat file that allows the player to select several levels of graphics. He was only talking about having those off on the low settings. I agree that it takes a lot away from Polymer to have those off, but at least you still have dynamic light and some other features, so it's still quite different from using Polymost. in Polymost, his maps aren't even playable.

[Scott_AW]

That would kind of make it a modest change, I been wondering if newer openGL drivers are the true culprit as they have caused problems on other things. GLBasic upgraded their openGL code at one point and I noticed several changes in behavior and performance.

Another thing is I have two almost the same netbooks, except for their video chips. The newer one couldn't get polymer to run at all, it just errors. The other can try, but fails. It still goes further, but its a weak ass chip.

Maybe downgrading what drivers you use when compiling eduke could solve this. As even there is a performance difference between Eduke and JFDuke, which is why I was going to use JFDuke in the first place.

I would like to work with Polymer in the future, however.

[Parkar]

Plagman, on Jan 12 2011, 05:29 PM, said:

They do, it's just that they have static light sources built-in the map. For example, a map in HL2 is pitch black until you start lighting it up. The problem here is that we've got the modern lighting layer of top of the classic Duke3D shade system, which can only be used as diffuse lighting and won't show off any of these features because of that. The vision Parkar and I had was for Polymer to just ignore the shade and start from darkness, and that's what the E1L1 maphacks were aiming for.

I think using pre computed shadows for sector shaded art would allow for some quiet powerful control of the lighting. I think I posted some mockup renders showing the effect but to lazy to dig it up right now.

It would be calculated something like this:

pre-rendered diffuse/sector shade + diffuse*directional light.

of course this quiet simplified.

It will cost some extra memory mostly as you need one extra texture, either an extra diffuse or one additional texture with the ambient lighting (multiply with diffuse to create the prelit diffuse). Using the ambient lighting map approach is probably better as it could then be using lower resolution or be stored in alpha channel of diffuse or glow map depending on the needs in each case.

Would allow brightening up sectors without the textures looking flat and still have dynamic lights light up areas in in ambient shadow. It also would work fine both in a level without any dynamic lights and one with only dynamic lights.

I believe mappers would be able to create some very impressive looking lighting using this.

Edit:

realised I could just quickly skim through my post history and found the post mentioned above.

http://forums.duke4.net/index.php?s=&s...ost&p=40008

[BrentNewland]

Tea Monster, on Jan 11 2011, 02:20 AM, said:

Got to agree that the second shot looks much more realistic. To those who think that the second one looks bare, maybe add a small light over the armory sign. But all those hard-coded glowing switch lights just look strange.

We may have to investigate the levels and see where else this sort of thing occurs. It could be that we can get a few extra fps with exchanging 'switch lights' for one or two carefully placed se lights.

In that spot (with all the switches, and maybe above any door with writing), perhaps making the wording above the door lit and glowing (white) would be the best way to go to get some light.