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Topic Starter Topic: Dynamic lights in Quake 3

Cool #9
Cool #9
Joined: 01 Dec 2000
Posts: 44131
PostPosted: 05-06-2011 04:02 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Well, sort of:


It's light emitting func_train entities actually. This should've been possible in vQ3 but isn't due to a bug in the client game code, which I've fixed in EntityPlus (at least, in the upcoming 0.5 release).

Unfortunately it's effect is an effect on top of the current lightmap. It looks like it's some multiplication blend func, don't really know the technical mumbo jumbo here. The point is that it can't be used to actually light areas, because a dark lightmap will not show much of an effect when a dynamic lighteffect is added to it. It's actually the same functionality used by rockets, quads and flags to give a glow around them.

It's certainly not entirely useless, some pretty neat things can be done with it that we haven't seen before in Quake 3. No idea why id Software never bothered to fix this problem.




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Mercenary
Mercenary
Joined: 28 May 2010
Posts: 210
PostPosted: 05-06-2011 05:54 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Very nice, that can come in handy. But what about the scaling of these dynamic lights on the z-axis? They have the correct size on floors, but are extremely stretched on vertical surfaces. Was that done by id on purpose or is there a technical reason for it and it is unwanted? IF it is unwanted, can you configure it in a way it has the same scaling factor on all axes?



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I'm the dude!
I'm the dude!
Joined: 04 Feb 2002
Posts: 12498
PostPosted: 05-06-2011 06:09 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


It works by texture projection along the z-axis. Not easily fixed for vertical surfaces, you would have to determine which surfaces are affected by the effect, calculate the surface normal of each affected surface and use that to determine projection axis.



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Cool #9
Cool #9
Joined: 01 Dec 2000
Posts: 44131
PostPosted: 05-06-2011 06:12 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


That's all code in the engine, which I have no access to, at least, not without writing an engine mod.




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Insane Quaker
Insane Quaker
Joined: 05 Nov 2010
Posts: 449
PostPosted: 05-06-2011 06:31 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


For one, this is awesome, I'm glad someone finally did this, I was actually surprised to find that more things weren't given these dynamic-ish lights in-game. I figured at a minimum it could be used to add some life to flashing lights which the single player game is full of. Very, very cool Eraser.


DaEngineer wrote:
Very nice, that can come in handy. But what about the scaling of these dynamic lights on the z-axis? They have the correct size on floors, but are extremely stretched on vertical surfaces. Was that done by id on purpose or is there a technical reason for it and it is unwanted? IF it is unwanted, can you configure it in a way it has the same scaling factor on all axes?


What Obsidian said. I doubt it was wanted, as it looks insane, but on a non-technical note, I feel like this glitch adds a charm to Quake 3 that...personally, I wouldn't ever want totally removed. It would be cool though if someone crafty found a way to fix it, and offer some kind of command line switch to toggle dynamic light processing mode.




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