Would this be possible?

[Alientank]

I know in Doom 3 that if there is a surface where no light rays hit that it is totally pitch black, yet a foot away from there it may be bright as day, I heard before that the engine could do this but technology doesn't allow for it right now because gfx cards couldn't handle the stress of radiosity. I was wondering if it would be easy to implement something like that into the engine to make it possible so that it isn't so dark all the time. Maybe with Quake 4 when they do changes to the engine they will do something like this?

[Lord FlatHead]

John Carmack said he's been looking into a few ways to do good ambient lighting, to brighten up the really dark areas. I don't think he means radiosity, because that's just not a viable solution right now. I think it's possible they may put some of that in for Quake 4.

Now wait for dsm to come castrate you and murder your family for not posting this in the Tech forum.

[Job]

God save the queen -- though it is justified.

[Arioch]

From the screenshots there weren't any noticeable "pitch-black" versus "bright light" areas so I'm sure this isn't an issue.

[dsm]

/me castrates Alientank and murders his family for not posting this in the Tech forum :-P

/me moves thread.

[Lord FlatHead]

Arioch said:

From the screenshots there weren't any noticeable "pitch-black" versus "bright light" areas

[AirRaid]

That's a shadow of a monster though, in a room with only one light source. I think he means like, level lighting. And there are such areas in the alpha... but it doesn't really detract, I would even go so far to say that it makes it more scary.

[AndrewB]

It does look quite fake. It makes the shadows look exaggerated, like they're trying to brag about them. But that's just a technology limit.

I think it's far more important for a game to look good artistically than to simply have lots of hi-tech graphics features. Example, I think that Super Mario Bros. 3 is a far better-looking game than Operation Flashpoint. I'm sure most of you know what I'm getting at.

[Alientank]

Well as for saying it's a tech limit how hard would it be on systems and gpu's to make it so that the shadows of the player and monsters are not totally pitch black? It's hard to see the great detail when it's black everywhere.

[Linguica]

There's no particular reason why shadows couldn't have a minimum light level, although this ruins any effects where something is SUPPOSED to be pitch black, and plus I think I remember that Carmack was squeezing out some extra FPS by simply not rendering anything at all if an area was in pitch-black shadow.

I know it goes against the whole prerendering idea, but it seems to me like it would be a good idea to make a pass over the whole level, determining ambient light levels, so that shadows aren't completely black. Or, just have areas in shadow reduce the light level by 90% or something.

[Arioch]

Lord FlatHead said:

Oooh I got owned.

[Lord FlatHead]

If you've played the alpha you'll notice that most shadows aren't 100% black, and most of the ones that are black don't bother me. The levels are designed with the lighting in mind, and everything looks fine just as it is IMO.

[Arioch]

Lord FlatHead said:

If you've played the alpha you'll notice that most shadows aren't 100% black, and most of the ones that are black don't bother me. The levels are designed with the lighting in mind, and everything looks fine just as it is IMO.

Yeah that's what I'm talking about, I remembered seeing shadows that weren't pitch black.

[AirRaid]

Yeah, shadows are only pitch black in places where there's only one light source. Put another light in and it looks a lot more 'real'.