obsidian wrote: That's one of the many myths about the D3-engine. The D3-engine was always capable of creating large, well-lit areas without a significant performance hit. Whether or not you have a single bright light or a darker light doesn't affect performance. You only get a larger performance hit when you have many light volumes overlapping each other.
Primarily, you have to create lighting with the D3-engine differently from what you're used to with Q3 - but well lit maps in D3 is completely possible.
...
I know you can place huge, non-shadowcasting lights to flood an area with light and then add smaller ones that *do* cast shadows.
I have seen some pics on Doom3World.org of map areas that are pretty well-lit, that I *think* were built this way, but I thought that this came at the cost of a huge performance hit.
Or are these non-shadowcasting lights calculated into some sort of lightmap, thus causing *less* of a performance hit?
I am thinking: no.
In the Q4-footage I've seen, the lighting is so abundant that I assumed (and hoped) the developers at Raven also somehow elaborated on the rendering code.
Where maybe, I dunno, lightmaps are combined with realtime light rendering, and lights can be flagged to be included either in the lightmap or be flagged to render realtime.
The lightmap taking up less memory.
Anyway, as you can probably tell, I've been out of it for a while, so bare with me for rambling on a bit
