Lightmapping... [message #92268] |
Thu, 03 June 2004 15:36 |
deadmoap
Messages: 20 Registered: May 2004
Karma: 0
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I'm not too into the whole 3D graphics thoery, but does renegade support lightmapping? I have a few programs that do lightmapping... but file conversions are what I'm worried about. Gmax wont export texture, for one thing. But I think a lightmap is like a texture that just brightens or darkens certain areas. I think I could get away with doing this:
Export the map from gmax to gile[s] (my favorite lightmapper)
Render the lightmap
Export to 3ds
Import in gmax
Apply textures to my map
Would this work? I know that the 3ds format supports lightmapping, otherwise I don't think gile[s] would export to it. But I'm mainly wondering if I have to apply the texture before lightmapping.
But even if it did work, does the w3d format support lightmaps? In fact does renegade support lightmaps?
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Lightmapping... [message #92299] |
Thu, 03 June 2004 17:11 |
deadmoap
Messages: 20 Registered: May 2004
Karma: 0
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Oh I didn't know they take up more processing power. Maybe they'd be okay for a single player map, but when you're playing with 79 other people, you need all the performance you can get.
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Lightmapping... [message #92307] |
Thu, 03 June 2004 17:28 |
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SuperFlyingEngi
Messages: 1756 Registered: November 2003
Karma: 0
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General (1 Star) |
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...but we must always remember that it was always EA's fault.
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Theodore Roosevelt (1918)
"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect "domestic security." Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent. --U.S. Supreme Court decision (407 U.S. 297 (1972)
The Liberal Media At Work
An objective look at media partisanship
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Lightmapping... [message #92488] |
Fri, 04 June 2004 11:42 |
deadmoap
Messages: 20 Registered: May 2004
Karma: 0
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Recruit |
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I still say it's EA's fault because they're stupid and I hate them. Those dirty bastards.
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Lightmapping... [message #94724] |
Fri, 11 June 2004 22:39 |
PiMuRho
Messages: 494 Registered: February 2003
Karma: 0
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Commander |
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Aircraftkiller | They also take up three times the processing power on your video chipset.
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From Jani Penttinen - engine programmer for Renegade:
I have no idea what this means, but lightmaps are just an extra texture
stage which modulates the primary texture. Lightmaps cause regularly no
performance hit, though it is true that they tend to add the number of
textures in the scene, which slows things down a little (not much, if
everything is designed pretty well). On older video cards it is sometimes
needed to render the lightmap as an extra pass (rather than a secondary
stage), which obviously consumes more fillrate.
Lightmaps are always 100%
precomputed, so they don't make things slower. Lightmaps are usually really
low resolution, because the lighting information doesn't need to be
accurate. Especially when you combine with the high resolution primary
texture, the results are pretty good looking.
Aircraftkiller | They didn't get away with anything. The multi-pass lightmapping, in conjunction with the close proximity of the bases and the way the levels were designed, ended up causing most of the frame rate issues in the game.
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Not true at all. What caused most of the performance problems was that the
assets had been mostly designed for older generation of 3D cards, and not
really optimized for new hardware (new being GeForce2 in this case). After
the game shipped I created guidelines for new art and we succesfully created
levels with moren than 500k polygons visible, running a steady 60 fps on ATI
R200 (GF3 era card). Do some googling and search for Renegade 2 screenshots,
you should be able to find some that were leaked after the studio was shut
down. This was running with the same core technology, just with better
designed art assets.
Dev Diary
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Lightmapping... [message #94725] |
Fri, 11 June 2004 22:56 |
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Aircraftkiller
Messages: 8213 Registered: February 2003
Karma: 0
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General (5 Stars) |
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That doesn't make much sense considering things shouldn't go slower when they're less detailed, unless something REALLY went wrong.
I was told that the lightmapping caused a lot of processing hits due to the second pass, or detail texture, it added across the board on the entire level by Mike Amerson, who was working with the Islands level and had mapped it out himself. Just going by what he said with that one.
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