DeleD Community Edition

[eonblue]

after a year break im back

but what troubled me last year was i was trying to make a daytime map but i could only get the indoors of the map as dark as the outdoor shadows. the only way i was able to acomplish rooms inside with no lights was having the shadows outside pitch dark? is this fixed or am i just doing somthing wrong?.

edit: hey why dont people come chill on irc?
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eonblue.org

[jwatte]

As a work-around, you can have two sets of textures: one set for indoors, and one set for outdoors. Make the indoors texture significantly darker than the outdoor textures.

The general problem is that the DeleD lightmapper doesn't do any kind of global illumination solution, so you won't get shadows based on exposure to other lit surfaces. Not even general radiosity would necessarily fix this -- however, a "sky dome" light might help. A Sky Dome light is a light which has the same intensity from each direction, and each point casts some number of rays out to infinity (on the order of 15-40) to figure out how much of the point is illuminated by the sky.

A hackier work-around (again, it requires updates to the light mapper) is to support "zones" within the level, where different zones can have different ambient brightness levels. The only reason I mention this, is because zones with user-settable properties are a generally good thing for maps in many engines :-)

[Paul-Jan]

In addition to what JWatte said above:

The lightmapper doesn't have the concepts of 'indoors' and 'outdoors', it just knows about faces blocking light. Which is kinda how nature works, except for nature having fancy additional concepts of transfering light / energy through and in between surfaces

On a serious note, do you have a suggestion yourself on how you would like to address this issue? Do you have previous experience with other lightmappers that allow you to mark indoor/outdoor zones and set separate properties, or are you looking for Global Illumination / Radiosity like behaviour?

As for a workaround, I would personally suggest you try
1. setting shadow opacity to full (this will be your indoor darkness level) and
2. using an extra directional 'fill light' (orthogonal to your key light source) to make the shadows outdoors less harsh.

[Daaark]

LIGHTMAP SELECTION would help. Just light your outdoors one way, and light the rest with the other settings.
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[Vijchti]

An interesting way to solve this problem would be to do so in the code of your game -- have it dynamically change the brightness of the screen based on whether you're indoors or out, the way your eye adjusts naturally. I don't know if you're working on a game right now, but that'd be damn cool.
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