Will Doom 64 ever have dynamic lighting emitting from sprites?

[Koko Ricky]

So far, no version of Doom 64—be it the N64 original, the Absolution TC, Brutal Doom 64, Doom 64 EX or the recently official ports—utilize lighting emitted from gunfire, plasma, rockets, fireballs, etc. Why is this? By 1997, it had already been demonstrated that a light could travel across a surface, albeit somewhat oddly due to gouraud shading, but it was possible. Quake had demonstrated that lightmaps could be used to achieve a similar effect. Couldn't either method have been used in the original N64 hardware? Gouraud shading would have looked atrocious without subdividing surfaces a few times, but with the system's limit of 160,000 polygons rendered per second, 5,000 would have been free at any time and maintained around 30 fps. It's even weirder that none of the community ports have such lighting, as those engines are certainly powerful enough to implement it. Even the Kex Engine that powers the modern Doom 64 ports could handle it. Was this omitted for the sake of authenticity? This is something that's always bugged me because lighting is a hugely important element in giving depth to 3D environments and it always struck me as very odd that Midway couldn't find a way to get any sort of lights to emit from sprites.

[Nevander]

My TC, Doom 64 Retribution, uses dynamic lights for almost everything that would have light.

 

I even went so far as to make sure the light color matched the emitter. For example, the chaingun has a purple light, and the Rocket Launcher has a red light.

 

I'm pretty sure the Absolution TC had dynamic lights too.

[Koko Ricky]

Is Retribution still in progress? I seem to remember reading that the gradients hadn't been fully implemented yet. I feel like once those effects are in place, we'll have the "ideally lit" version of Doom 64. I watched some video clips of Absolution and was surprised to not see dynamic lights.

Edited April 8, 2020 by GoatLord

[Immorpher]

23 hours ago, GoatLord said:

Is Retribution still in progress? I seem to remember reading that the gradients hadn't been fully implemented yet. I feel like once those effects are in place, we'll have the "ideally lit" version of Doom 64. I watched some video clips of Absolution and was surprised to not see dynamic lights.

I am hoping I am not spilling the beans here, but ya I hear there is work adding the gradient lighting which was added to GZDoom to Retribution. The GZDoom version of gradient lighting (as far as I know) doesn't have the scripting behavior that Doom 64 had, so it still wont be 100% complete, but still a great iteration.

I think DZDoom (aka GEC Master Edition) might be able to fully support Doom 64 gradient lighting and dynamic lighting (since its a branch of GZDoom). I am not sure if this ability is indeed possible with it and I am not sure or if anyone has done it yet.