rebb

Was this linked here yet ? I stumbled over it today, and thought it's pretty fitting to the topic title. Still shocked at seeing a "web comic" with a deep message, too. http://apina.biz/37195.jpg

Only a week ? Sounds more like a "Pandora's Box" kind of deal

Some people just can't handle having "power" over others, or they think because they are official moderators, they have to display their power as often as possible - thinking this makes the boards look "well under control".

What happens if you see multiple of these zones at once ? It sounds like it would be the exact opposite of the global dynamic ambient - which ambient-lights up everything - only ambient-lighting one zone and nothing else. So much for a derailed thread - maybe some bits should be moved elsewhere.

BlendLights don't care about lighting, this just multiplies over the lit/shaded surfaced that are touched by it's volume.

You can't mask off specific areas from lights like that, unfortunately. But a way to fake this might be using special darkening blend-lights placed carefully and strategically, with a low intensity. It would still be a bit of a chore to place them tho - and they are likely more expensive rendering-wise compared to decals, altho they don't have the full performance impact of standard lights. Also some other possible pitfalls, because they draw over everything they touch. Heres some comparison images that use such blendLights. ( they look pretty harsh in the screenshots because the ingame Gamma isn't accounted for ) blendLights enabled blendLights disabled

If the game gives access to a Z-Buffer Texture that's true, but Doom3 doesn't unfortunately. The scene has to be rendered once more per frame for a Z-Depth Capture Step - so it is ( currently ) somewhat dependent on scene-complexity. But as you said it should still run fine on modern systems.

Hm, seems like there are only lethal takedowns in this trailer as well, i'm starting to worry a bit. Either they aren't showing the more subtle/nonlethal ways to get rid of enemies because it's not "cool" enough for the trailer, or the game just doesn't have them. Edit : Or is the blue gun thing supposed to be some sort of knockout weapon ?

KC85, i remember that vaguely. I used a 1715 from time to time ( didn't own it ), with that horrible game where you have to pee out of a helicopter - or maybe it was a rope

Haha, i remember that TURBO! Button. My first PC was a 386 33Mhz, with a Turbo Button to 40 MHz ( yeah, that impressed the ladies ) ( ok, maybe not ), and one of those Removable HD Slot things, you could pull it out on the front, some sort of Internal/External HD Hybrid. Incidentally, that thing was also the only HD that fried on me so far ( fingers crossed ). With lots of work on it. I miss PC Speaker Sound btw

You could try to fake shadows using blendLights with a "blend modulate" material. One of the beta mappers used this to fake tree shadows, iirc. The only problem with this is that it can easily look "wrong" because the faked shadow will get multiplied on top of the actual ingame lighting/shadowing. Or you can wait until D3 goes open source, then everyone and their grandmother will implement shadow-maps - they adhere to alpha-tested surfaces.

The first idStudio videos looked really interesting - they seem to care about good tools a lot more now, finally, hopefully. The way i understood it, they start from some procedurally generated base, and then artists go in and add unique details. I guess the question is how much more time-consuming this makes the whole process, one could probably spend ages adding little special details to the environment. My personal gripes with the technology are the low-resolution look compared to other assets in some of the screenshots, and the way shadows of dynamic objects are drawn on top of the baked lighting. I'll still drool all over it when it's released tho.

Fog in Doom3 ist just horrible for these things. Once it touches a polygon/model only slightly, it will fog it out completely in a strange way, not adhering to the smooth falloff that you would expect. It's the typical "meh, good enough" implementation they did for Doom3, because they never really needed good working height-fog. It also doesn't let you make really thick fog that you would want for certain water situations, again probably down to "meh, good enough". I could swear the height-fog in Quake3 was better than this, but maybe my memories are fogged ( ). For fog to properly "stop" at some point, you have to make sure that the models/polygons/brushes it touches are either not touching the volume, or have some cut-line going right where the fog-volume ends, so it won't touch any unwanted polygons above it. Does this make sense ? Sorry for the rant .

So it's like shading everything based on the facing-ratio to the viewer, essentially it would be like a lightsource sitting on the player i guess - and it would probably look a lot like that too, and not so much like an SSAO effect. Say you have a chair sitting right up to a wall, and you view the chair head-on, you wouldn't get any AO-like shading where the chair meets the wall for example. If the facing-ratio is exponentiated in a certain way it could also look like a cel-shading. You could blur this and apply it as a post-process, but that would probably require rendering the scene more than once per frame to capture the facing-ratio based shading. And once you're doing that, you can just as well use that extra renderpass for a depth-capture instead, and use the depth-capture for a "real" SSAO postprocess step. That is, if i understand the concept correctly.

That's nice to hear . For a long time it seemed that nobody really knew that to do with the ominous -dirty mode ( should have been called something else, but back then the team AO wasn't very widespread either ). Afaik there have been some improvements by the UrbanTerror team, who turned it into the -lightflood mode. Oops, thread derailed a bit, sorry.

The newer and better-looking Variations of SSAO do take angle the surface-normals into account for a cleaner result, maybe this is what nbohr1more meant with the angle-basedness.

Ambient Occlusion isn't dependent on the View, only SSAO implementations are. Classic Ambient Occlusion is a way to approximate certain Global Illumunation effects on a surface based on surrounding geometry which blocks light coming from the environment. It pretty much sets up a hemisphere of rays on a sampling point and checks for occluders, outputting a certain occlusion value in to the sample afterwards - i implemented AO into the old Q3Map2 Lightmapper ages ago when nobody even knew what AO is even supposed to be, it was pretty new and sometimes called "dirtmapping" ( because the AO term can be used to drive grime or dirt effects ). So it's not absurd to bake AO into textures or to vertices, this was and is being done a lot these days. SSAO ( and it's many variations ) is the realtime version of AO that doesn't require any baking, but has it's very own set of problems. I must admit i didn't really follow the thread, are you trying to simulate SSAO using a cubemap attached to the viewer ?

Why do i expect it to have a "Slide into Cover" and "Slide into Darkness" Button - oh well, we'll see anyway.

I managed to align 2 lights of 256x256x256 size on the 1x1 grid with no visible gap this way. But yeah, it's probably too fiddly in the end - and even has the potential risk of showing a gap if some graphics-card vendor decided that they should have some fancy new "nearest" filtering implemented which does things slightly differently - but thats just a guess.

Oops, yeah looks like it is. Try putting the "nearest" keyword into the projection map stage of the NFO material. That will disable bilinear filtering on the texture and use nearest filtering instead ( not recommended for most textures, but the NFO should have a fully white texture in this stage where there won't be any stepping visible ). I tried it locally and it does produce a sharp edge on the light.

What does the material definition look like for the NFO Light ? If it has a "zeroclamp" in there, comment that out and see what you get then. ZeroClamp causes the texture to not repeat outside of the 0-1 UV Range, and fills the area with black. This can cause a small fuzzy border because of texture-filtering. It's possible that you will get "sparklies" where the lights meet tho, because of rounding errors.

The test.vfp mentions that the Alpha-Channel isn't supposed to be fully black ( filled with RGB 0 ), because Doom3 then thinks that this Alpha-Channel is some sort of Artist-Error and instead drops it completely, which ends up making all the Alpha completely white. Try filling the Alpha-Channel with RGB 1 ( on the 255 scale ) instead. I guess its a good idea to just make a small wiki article on this.

I have a box of BaK somewhere, but i didn't play it very far. ( Also thanks to whoever made a separate thread out of this )

Nooooo ! It will probably crumble into dust once air reaches it. ( prepares plans to sneak into Tels' domain at night )

No the performance impact is still there. At least doing some tests with "r_showPrimitives" shows that the number of draw-calls goes up when having 2 map-stages in the light-material instead of one. @Sneaksie :