Workings Of See-ability?

[sparhawk]

1) You will only see the silhouette if the sky is bright enough.

2) If you are sitting in a lit room and look out into the night you will usually see nothing. Go try it. When you are a scout, one thing you learn is, to NOT use a torch in the night in the forest. The reason is exactly the same. Using a torch means that you have good vision in the cone of the torch and zeor vision outside of it, while without a torch you have generally a much better vision, even though you may not see all details.

[OrbWeaver]

When you are a scout, one thing you learn is, to NOT use a torch in the night in the forest. The reason is exactly the same. Using a torch means that you have good vision in the cone of the torch and zeor vision outside of it, while without a torch you have generally a much better vision, even though you may not see all details.

 

It amuses me in TV and films when a character is searching with an oil lamp or other omnidirectional lightsource, and they spot something and hold up the light in front of them to get a better view.

 

I can confirm from experience that in this situation you would see nothing except for the light source itself.

[sparhawk]

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

As I previously mentioned I have a collection of around 20 kerosene lamps at home. On some occasions I did exactly that. If you hold the lamp ahead and to the side a bit, and don't move your eyes, look straight ahead, then the peripheral eye cells get saturated with light while the central ones can see well ahead.

[OrbWeaver]

It's better to hold it further to one side or even slightly behind you, so that the light source does not enter your FOV at all.

[sparhawk]

I'm sure it is quite easy to do this while you are looking for your way along a path.

[Ishtvan]

It's better to get a lantern with one of those backing things on it.

[ZylonBane]

Just activate your night-vision aug.

 

And your skul gun.

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

@"with one of those backing things on it": Only one of my lamps is a fully enclosed modular 1910 carriage lantern. ...Which i'm going to model and texture etc into darkmod eventually (in a few years)

[OrbWeaver]

Which i'm going to model and texture etc into darkmod eventually (in a few years)

 

You don't need to wait for Dark Mod to do this, you can model and texture it into Doom 3 now.

[cloud dew]

WOw you are a hardcore bunch!

 

I see your thinking of the variables of the eyes, inc retina (rods & cones) and pupillary dilation.

These areas have a impact on visibility but are not even touched upon in the d3 engine.

 

I do hope you lot don't overstreatch yourselfs or make the system specs for this mod sky high

 

It seems that most of this visability code is going to end up in the AI rather than the fudged/optimised 3D visual engine which you mentioned does not do ray tracing

Edited May 17, 2006 by cloud dew

[sparhawk]

Even though it is not supported in the code, you still have to analyse the various effects to determine wether they contribute an effect that has to be modeled in the software. It doesn't mean, that the real thing will be simulated, but depending on the impact, an effect that is suitable to represent the original effect may need to be implemented.

 

It's called: Abstraction.