Doom3world

sorry if this has already been asked to death.....

does all this mean that the only way to get any sort of global lighting is to stick a bit of code into the material file for every new material you make?

that was the best thing about q3 - you just had to pop a sky in and you got magic free lighting.

You had that luxury with the Quake games because the lighting was precomputed. Light and shadow were tied to lightmaps.

In Doom 3, the lighting is entirely dynamic meaning that there is no such thing as global lighting. Light and shadow are tied to light entities and geometry.

What's documented here in this thread is just one technique for faking global lighting. It's certainly not the only way, it's just the only way anyone has come up with so far.

Not quite...There's always surrounding the entire map with a huge ambient light...though it's definately not as pretty and more taxing on the frame rate.

Just remembered something I suggested in another thread awhile ago but I didn't get much feedback. So maybe I'll just post it one more time in a probably more appropriate thread because I think it's important.



If you have say, 3 versions of every texture with different amounts of 'manual lightmapping' added to each, you'll then be able to do much more realistic ambient lighting.

The only problem I see with this is I'm not sure if this would take up 3 times as much memory or not. Perhaps it could be done selectively if that is the case.

It's an idea for sure.

I'm not sure how it would affect performance though because you certainly would be using alot of decals.

Decals wouldn't be used nearly as often as the different materials with varying levels of brightness.