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Guide to new lighting features in 4.0RC1 [message #473749] Thu, 30 August 2012 02:47 Go to previous message
jonwil is currently offline  jonwil
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Registered: February 2003
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This is the first of a series of posts I plan to make describing new features for modders in 4.0 and how to use them. In this post I will be describing the new lighting and vertex solve related features and changes in scripts 4.0RC1 (which is currently undergoing beta testing and will hopefully be released in the near future)

Firstly we have identified (and fixed) a bug in the vertex solve code related to meshes with bump mapping such as water. With this fix, you no longer need to hide water meshes before you run "compute vertex solve".

Secondly, we have identified (and fixed) a bug whereby meshes that have no vertex colors and have an opacity of less than 1 set in their material settings would be treated as though the opacity was set to 1. As of 4.0RC1 the vertex solve code will now use the correct opacity value.

The most well known example where the opacity bug can be seen is with the glass in the nod airstrip tower. With this fix, you will no longer need to hide any of the glass on the stock renegade buildings (including the air tower and the hand of nod) before you run "compute vertex solve".

Thirdly, we have added a feature to the vertex solve code that lets you completly disable vertex solve on a particular mesh. This is intended for meshes where the vertex solve still screws up even with the above 2 features as well as for vertexes that contain pre-calculated lighting baked into the w3d file (such as lightmap textures)

To use it, you select the mesh in 3DS MAX and open the "Properties" dialog. Then you click on the "User Defined" tab. (not sure where the relevant dialog box is for gmax users) In that box you type "Prelit=true" (without the quotes). This will cause the vertex solve code to completly ignore this mesh (i.e. its essentially same as hiding the mesh before you vertex solve)

Part 2 will be posted later and will cover the tools and LE features that let modders use the "alternate lighting" and "alternate materials" feature of the w3d engine building code (the same features Westwood used for the stock maps)


Jonathan Wilson aka Jonwil
Creator and Lead Coder of the Custom scripts.dll
Renegade Engine Guru
Creator and Lead Coder of TT.DLL
Official member of Tiberian Technologies
 
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