Is there a port with static lighting?

[Marscaleb]

There are some crazy-awesome features that people have added to doom source ports, especially within GZDoom.  I'm wondering if baked static lighting has ever been one.

 

Like how lighting works within Quake 2 and UT99, individually-set lights that are calculated in 3D space and stored into light maps.

I know there are several ports that support dynamic lighting, and you could use that to create something that looks pretty good.  But static lighting is easier on the system, and I like to keep things so they can run on weaker systems.  Plus, I haven't seen dynamic light support sunlight/directional light.

Edited January 8, 2020 by Marscaleb

[Gez]

Paging @ketmar, somebody lit up the Vavoom signal!

 

But besides Vavoom and K8vavoom, there's Strife: Veteran Edition which also has a lightmap system.

[Bauul]

There was some work being done on a GZDoom fork by dpJudas that implemented lightmaps, and showed promising results.  However, he ran into some major issues that prevented his approach working IIRC, and the work stalled.

 

Nash created a test map based on it (screenshots taken by Nash and posted on the ZDoom Discord channel a few months back):

 

 

 

 

 

[Linguica]

🧐 https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/92263-cornell-box/

 

 

 

[maxmanium]

54 minutes ago, Bauul said:

 

I thought this was from Half Life 2 for a moment...

[Redneckerz]

4 hours ago, Bauul said:

There was some work being done on a GZDoom fork by dpJudas that implemented lightmaps, and showed promising results.  However, he ran into some major issues that prevented his approach working IIRC, and the work stalled.

 

Nash created a test map based on it (screenshots taken by Nash and posted on the ZDoom Discord channel a few months back)

 

I am fairly sure that unnamed fork used this from Judas: ZDRay

I am not sure if that unnamed fork had a release build. Did it? It likely didn't given how all what can be found has to be compiled first.

EDIT: Nash's post with screenshots.

EDIT2: Post where Judas mentions he ran into problems with ZDRay.

Edited January 8, 2020 by Redneckerz

[ketmar]

7 hours ago, Gez said:

Paging @ketmar, somebody lit up the Vavoom signal!

;-) thanks! ;-)

 

8 hours ago, Marscaleb said:

I'm wondering if baked static lighting has ever been one.

it was implemented in Vavoom more than a decade ago, even with overbright support (it is toned down, but it is there). yet Vavoom is calculating lighting on map loading, and even today it may be slow for huge maps with alot of lights, and it was *very* slow back then. and it had to do it on *each* map loading, including loading a savegame. this is prolly one of the reasons why people weren't really excited.

 

yet i recently added lightmap caching to k8vavoom (see my profile for links ;-). there are still some small bugs in lightmap tracer (mostly some wrongly unlit triangles), but nothing fatal. ;-)

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 8, 2020 by ketmar

[Marscaleb]

2 hours ago, ketmar said:

Vavoom is calculating lighting on map loading, and even today it may be slow for huge maps with alot of lights, and it was *very* slow back then. and it had to do it on *each* map loading, including loading a savegame. this is prolly one of the reasons why people weren't really excited.

 

That sounds like something that could be relatively-easily fixed.  Once the lightmaps are calculated, save them in an external file.  Include some simple checksum info so it can make sure the lighting is accurate to the map file.
Since the lights aren't part of the original maps anyway, it would just be something to distribute with map.  Even if there are compatibility issues, I should only need to calculate that lighting once on my end.
Granted, this is something that I know almost nothing about, but it still *seems* like that would be easier to program than everything else involved in having static lighting.

At any rate, those Vavoom screenshots look fantastic!  The GZ fork looks great too, but those Vavoom ones actually match the visual quality I had in mind.
That being said, Vavoom is irking me right out of the box for its lack of proper widescreen support.  And I can't find where to download a compiled binary of K8Vavoom.
Also, where could I download those sample maps that use the static lighting?

[ketmar]

37 minutes ago, Marscaleb said:

That sounds like something that could be relatively-easily fixed.  Once the lightmaps are calculated, save them in an external file.

that's what i did recently in k8vavoom. ;-)

 

37 minutes ago, Marscaleb said:

Since the lights aren't part of the original maps anyway, it would just be something to distribute with map.

it is not that easy, because internally the engine does surface subdivision and some other geometry modifications. don't worry, it is not *that* slow -- like, you don't have to wait hours or something, it is several seconds for most maps, and maybe up to minute for VERY complex ones (but then it is cached, and you don't have to wait anymore).

 

37 minutes ago, Marscaleb said:

That being said, Vavoom is irking me right out of the box for its lack of proper widescreen support.

it is still somewhat broken in k8vavoom too, because i don't have a hardware to properly test it with. but i know it, and the problem will be addressed eventually.

 

37 minutes ago, Marscaleb said:

And I can't find where to download a compiled binary of K8Vavoom.

it is there in my profile: this post, scroll it down a little, and you will find a download.

 

37 minutes ago, Marscaleb said:

Also, where could I download those sample maps that use the static lighting?

those are mostly normal maps with lights. first is Umbra of Fate by Alexa "YukiRaven" Jones-Gonzales (modified; and sadly, it is barely playable, with single-digit FPS in outside area; it becomes way better if you manage to enter the building, though), then Dark Wispers by Kevin Robinson, then Silent Steel:Remastered by Gunrock, then Braham Manor by Gunrock and Kevin. it is somewhat hard to run them "as is", because k8vavoom is not Vavoom (it is better, but different ;-).

 

also, almost any GZDoom map with light sources should be playable. k8vavoom calculates lightmaps for static light objects automatically. but please note that more advanced GZDoom features aren't supported (ZScript, portals). also, decorate compiler is more strict, and may reject many maps/mods with decorate bugs ZDoom happily accepts. and the renderer is somewhat slower, so very complex maps may or may not give you good FPS (and maps with alot of monsters will lag too -- like, 500-600 is okish, but then it starts to degrade into unplayable area).

 

yet i am working hard on k8vavoom to make it faster and better, so as the time passes, it supports more features, lags less, and so on. join the official thread, that is the place where i am putting out new public builds. for k8vavoom, "public build" is rough equivalent of "release", and i am usually uploading a new build once per month.

[Kronecker–Capelli]

On 1/8/2020 at 11:31 PM, Redneckerz said:

EDIT2: Post where Judas mentions he ran into problems with ZDRay.

 

Quote

I did start the work on a ZDRay command line tool meant for baking things, based on the ZDBSP codebase, but I quickly ran into the trouble how to store the lightmaps. Especially dealing with the floor/ceiling is tricky as you can't specify it at the subsector level (gzdoom might regenerate them). Sectors themselves can have huge gaps in them. Ended up concluding it requires more work planning how to output things than the ray tracing part.

Gzdoom have ray tracing? Or I should have "ray traced" videocard?
Gzdoom repository on github do have ray tracing mentions, but only in third party library.

[Redneckerz]

3 hours ago, Kronecker–Capelli said:

 

Gzdoom have ray tracing? Or I should have "ray traced" videocard?
Gzdoom repository on github do have ray tracing mentions, but only in third party library.

No, GZDoom does not have raytracing. GZDoom does have a stale lightmaps branch.

 

ZDRay is a utilty to bake lightmaps, derived from Strife VE. It has been abandoned since Dec 2018.

 

It is currently source-only. And i say that on purpose.

[Kronecker–Capelli]

https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=64395&p=1100726&hilit=ray+trace#p1100726
 

Quote

It is far more feasible to wait until ray tracing hardware becomes more mainstream than to extend the shadowmap feature, but that's still a few years off.

Just a few years.

[Redneckerz]

@Bauul in case you or others are interested, thanks to Nash there is now a custom GZDoom build available that has baked lights support along with a compiled ZDRay exe so one could bake lights (with quite some restrictions). And it includes the map that you have posted the screenshots of.

 

Read the threads for more info.

 

GZDoom-ZDRay thread

ZDRay thread

[Gunrock]

On 1/8/2020 at 6:30 PM, Marscaleb said:

 

That sounds like something that could be relatively-easily fixed.  Once the lightmaps are calculated, save them in an external file.  Include some simple checksum info so it can make sure the lighting is accurate to the map file.
Since the lights aren't part of the original maps anyway, it would just be something to distribute with map.  Even if there are compatibility issues, I should only need to calculate that lighting once on my end.
Granted, this is something that I know almost nothing about, but it still *seems* like that would be easier to program than everything else involved in having static lighting.

At any rate, those Vavoom screenshots look fantastic!  The GZ fork looks great too, but those Vavoom ones actually match the visual quality I had in mind.
That being said, Vavoom is irking me right out of the box for its lack of proper widescreen support.  And I can't find where to download a compiled binary of K8Vavoom.
Also, where could I download those sample maps that use the static lighting?

 

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