Doom 64: no dynamic lighting?

Does anyone know why Doom 64 has no dynamic lighting? Yes, there are colored lights that fade in and out, but the classic lighting up of sectors in the old Doom--when firing weapons, when blowing up barrels, when enemies attack--isn't present. I don't see why the system couldn't support such a feature.

I think that only occurred when firing weapons in the old games. Enemies/barrels lighting up were just "bright sprites," not any kind of lighting effects.

Megamur said:

I think that only occurred when firing weapons in the old games. Enemies/barrels lighting up were just "bright sprites," not any kind of lighting effects.

I think you misunderstood. In all versions--including Doom 64--sprites express a "lit up" version of themselves for certain events. I'm talking about sectors--that is, the walls, ceilings and floors--lighting up following certain events, such a barrel explosion or firing a gun. Basically, all sectors in the area will briefly light up to simulate dynamic lighting. I'm trying to figure out why such a simple effect is not present in Doom 64.

because they didn't feel like it.

I am sure achieving such an effect is possible in Doom64 but its more likely due to time constraints that Midway didn't have the time to add in that effect. Another guess is that the dynamic lights didn't look right due to how their rendering engine is designed. Also if I am correct, Doom relied on the colormap to achieve this effect while Doom64 does not use a colormap and thus Midway would had of designed a whole new system or mechanic to do this.

Could you be specific, about it not looking right? Is it because of the use of colored lights?

I think because it was not palette-based but rather true hicolor and hardware accelerated. Think about how OpenGL or Direct3D source ports can't replicate the vanilla lighting exactly -not even close, actually. Doom's lighting system is a major hack that only works well with indexed (aka palettized graphics) and so far, none has bothered extending it to more than 8 bits (e.g. imagine having not just 32 fixed colormaps, but 256 times as many, with a smoothed out palette). Then again, at that level it would start to look a lot like hardware lighting...which would make the whole effort moot.

So either you get it raw and dirty like classic Doom, or not at all :-p

I wouldn't know, I am sure if done right, the effect would look nice but its either due to lack of time or performance issues that Midway decided to avoid doing that effect.

GoatLord said:

I think you misunderstood. In all versions--including Doom 64--sprites express a "lit up" version of themselves for certain events. I'm talking about sectors--that is, the walls, ceilings and floors--lighting up following certain events, such a barrel explosion or firing a gun. Basically, all sectors in the area will briefly light up to simulate dynamic lighting.

I understood exactly what you're talking about, and I'm saying, that only happened in the original DOOM games when you fired your weapon. Barrel explosions and enemy weapons fire did not cause that "sector light-up" effect.

Megamur said:

I understood exactly what you're talking about, and I'm saying, that only happened in the original DOOM games when you fired your weapon. Barrel explosions and enemy weapons fire did not cause that "sector light-up" effect.

Indeed. It actually wouldn't have been really possible for Doom to do this for anything other than player weapons, given that it brightens the entire map. There's no real way for the Doom engine to determine and light a reasonable area around an object that can be anywhere in relation to the player's viewpoint, because sectors can be any shape or size.

If they were to attempt that, the best way I can think of is to do a line-of-sight check from the player, combined with a distance check, to light up the map from any explosions or attacks that are 1) visible to the player and 2) nearby enough to believably light up the area the player currently inhabits.

Actually that'd be kind of neat to see. I imagine it wasn't done in Doom to begin with because of the overhead from doing extra line-of-sight calculations every time any monster anywhere does something. If I'm not imagining incorrectly, I think that'd effectively double the amount of calculations needed to be done.