Maps with dynamic lighting?

Can anyone suggest some good maps with good dynamic lighting? :)

Legacy of Suffering

How's that work (some kind of trick?)

All I know about is static lighting, based on the sector's brightness (0-255) and flicker pattern (if any).

hex11 said:

How's that work (some kind of trick?)

All I know about is static lighting, based on the sector's brightness (0-255) and flicker pattern (if any).

He's talking about the dynamic lights that can be placed in some OpenGL ports.

Personally, I think that they're kind of ugly. In GZDoom the only light that exists is spherical point light and it clips through walls. In other ports it still conflicts a bit with Doom's pixel-ly graphics.

What exactly is considered "dynamic lighting"? I assume we're talking about GL-enhanced levels only.

Edit: Well, that answers that.

I vaguely recall that sitters' Risen3D maps have some nice lighting, but don't quote me on that or anything.

bgraybr said:

Personally, I think that they're kind of ugly. In GZDoom the only light that exists is spherical point light and it clips through walls. In other ports it still conflicts a bit with Doom's pixel-ly graphics.

It's certainly not ugly. It has a totally smooth gradient, and it complements the GL graphics.

When it was first introduced, it was mainly used as light-effects for sprites like torches, as I'm sure you remember. But they've gradually been used more together with lighting or lamp-textures, from what I've seen.

The single form it comes in doesn't allow for much practical use, however.

As I've said in other threads that were directed at the GZDoom team, I think it has a lot of good potential but it's very hard to work with in its current state.

That's why I was looking for maps that have done something creative with dynamic lighting. I need some ideas... :P

gemini09 said:

I need some ideas... :P

1. Place a dynamic light at floor level at the mouth of a tunnel or cave, make the rest of the tunnel/cave dark, and you can get the appearance of "natural" lighting (coming from the sky or other light source above) at the tunnel/cave opening.
2. Use the appropriate type of dynamic light inside a flickering sector within a darkened room, and not only will the light source (e.g., TLITE6_1) flicker, the entire area will be momentarily lit up during the flickering. Again, this simulates natural light flickering.

Those are good ideas, but I meant more along the lines of ambient lighting, and not just as special effects. This is where the limitations of only having the spherical point-light comes into play, unfortunately

At one point I thought GL's dynamic lights had finally did away with the whole sector based, static color lighting that was popular in the early ZDoom days. But GL lighting is lazy or at least looks lazy when used generically. As for little things like fireballs and stuff it looks cool.

Or maps with limited amounts of light sources, like Unloved.

Cyanosis said:

But GL lighting is lazy or at least looks lazy when used generically.

The thing is that it's near impossible to not use them generically - at least in my experience. You can use them as lighting effects directly nearby a light source, and with good planning on how you use lighting throughout the map, I'm sure it can work out very nicely. But it's so ineffective, and a horrible chore, if you ask me.

I have to check out Unloved again, and this time purely to look at the lighting. Also, I've totally neglected Sitters' outstanding work, but it's Doomsday.. :/ I'll try to muster the determination to have it all collected and installed...

Dynamic lights aren't really usable for anything other than point sources.

Hence Doomsday's WIP bias lighting: http://imageshack.us/f/709/biaslighting.png/

I love that. Sky giving off lighting.

That looks interesting. How does it work?

gemini09 said:

That looks interesting. How does it work?

I couldn't remotely explain the technical side of it, but put simply, it blurs the sharp edges of sector lighting. This means light from light areas will also spill into dark areas.

Doomsday can automatically apply it to any map with no extra ded required. One can also manually place there own Bias lights on a map via ded, coloured or white.

However, because the feature is exteremely WIP (i.e full of bugs), it's turned off by default (one has to use the console to turn it on).

Cyanosis said:

I love that. Sky giving off lighting.

Doomsdays "sky glow" feature. Currently it has to be enabled via ded on a map by map basis. The default Doom1 defs included with Dday have sky glow set up (though none of the other games default defs have it set up meaning one has to write deds for them).

Vermil said:

I couldn't remotely explain the technical side of it, but put simply, it blurs the sharp edges of sector lighting. This means light from light areas will also spill into dark areas.

I've always wanted to see an engine do this. You can anti-alias all you want, but sector lighting is always going to look a bit blocky. This sounds like it could be a good way to make it look more convincing...once the kinks are ironed out.

The bias lighting model in Doomsday is comprised of two components: 1) lightgrid, implements the smoothed sector lighting and z-biasing 2) bias point light system.

The reason its disabled by default is because its little more than a proof of concept implementation. It will be replaced entirely.

The current lightgrid implementation is conceptually very simple; sample the sector light level at regular intervals in two dimensions and store in a lookup table. When drawing a world surface, take each vertex coordinate pair, quantize to lightgrid coordinates and use it to lookup the light level in the grid. The smoothing is achieved by blurring the samples when storing into the lightgrid. "Z-biasing" is where we interpret a sector's light directionality; skies result in walls being brightened as they get closer to the sky plane.

Well either way I'm just glad Doomsday doesn't rely on shaders to make fancy looking effects. This comp doesn't have the hottest video card.

E2M4 Redux from the ZDOOM forums (can be found in projects).A map that uses dynamic light very well.

EDIT: Found it!