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Postby Joe Kari » Tue Apr 01, 2008 11:58 pm

Damn... So I couldn't have in the same duel map, one during afternoon and one during night :'(
It's boring...

Or perhaps a night place that doesn't have a true skybox... what about the "_skybox" entity and skyportal ?
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Postby ReD NeCKersoN » Wed Apr 02, 2008 1:11 am

Joe Kari wrote:Or perhaps a night place that doesn't have a true skybox... what about the "_skybox" entity and skyportal ?

I seriously doubt that's going to work. But you're certainly free to perform all the tests you want. :D

Here's another screenshot to illustrate what's happening with these duel maps. Another 4 area map, this time with different colored suns in each section.
Image
Every section looks like this. Light "bleeds" from one area into the next. It's just easier to see the effect with the different colors in here. (The fake suns do seem to help with the shadows though if I use old ICI shaders.)
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Postby Joe Kari » Fri Apr 04, 2008 3:54 am

That's right, working with many skybox is really boring...
It looks like a q3map2 bug instead of one of the q3engine, because the lightmap is calculated at compile time...
Because Smokin' Guns is probably the only one game where a map can have more than one skybox, we cannot expect a fix...

Even two skybox with the same q3map_sun can't team together (the light intensity seems to be add together).

I have found only one way to have different skybox : only one could have a q3map_sun line in his shader. This constrain us to have only one sun angle...

I still have some hope of finding a way to avoid this...


I have noticed that your shaders manual (this is the link you give to me) is a little out of date. This one :
http://members.lycos.co.uk/quakeroats/q3map2/shader_manual/
was made by Ydnar himself (the q3map2 coder). There is some new keyword in the last version of q3map2.
The q3map_sunExt is really nice. It doesn't solve our skybox trouble, but we can cast half-shadow with it (there is two more parameters than with q3map_sun).
q3map_skylight is nice too, much better than q3map_surfacelight...
And q3map_lightmapFilterRadius really improve shadow !

EDIT :
In this forum thread, we can see what difference between them...
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Postby ReD NeCKersoN » Fri Apr 04, 2008 5:21 am

Joe Kari wrote:It looks like a q3map2 bug instead of one of the q3engine, because the lightmap is calculated at compile time...

I wouldn't call it a bug. The compiler simply wasn't designed to handle this type of situation. A good coder might provide a solution by starting HERE. My guess is it wouldn't be easy, but you never know if a willing coder is reading this.

As for your other observations, you're doing homework that we are familiar with and you are finding information we have implemented for the SA. But it's very good that this discussion is in a public area, & thanks for sharing all of the handy links. I'll pm you our new sg.shader that will help get you up to speed. Just keep in mind it's based on our new file structure & won't work for beta 2.2
But with a text editor you'll see the sky shader directives you speak of & more. Remember this video? :wink:
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Postby L3th4l » Fri Apr 04, 2008 5:37 am

Yup, we use all of yadnar's sun keys in our new shaders/maps.

As far as the skybox issue, the old development team "ICI" didn't seem to have a problem as the current duel maps work fine with multiple skyboxes. It's only when we tried to re-compile them we ran into the problem. There is something we are overlooking..
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Postby ReD NeCKersoN » Fri Apr 04, 2008 6:22 am

L3th4l wrote:As far as the skybox issue, the old development team "ICI" didn't seem to have a problem as the current duel maps work fine with multiple skyboxes.

Maybe I'm too picky, but if you look again you'll see the shadows "don't make sense" thingy in the current ICI duel maps. But perhaps we have stumbled onto a solution for that in this thread? (More testing is needed to confirm.) One down, one to go?

If a special switch/shader combination doesn't work out for us, I feel the last place to go is the compiler itself. My switch & shader tests haven't been promising. But like Lethal said, something may be getting overlooked. Anyone with time to experiment, please do. Try anything that comes to mind.
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Postby L3th4l » Fri Apr 04, 2008 9:22 am

ReD NeCKersoN wrote:Maybe I'm too picky, but if you look again you'll see the shadows "don't make sense" thingy in the current ICI duel maps. But perhaps we have stumbled onto a solution for that in this thread? (More testing is needed to confirm.) One down, one to go?


Yes, but they clearly didn't have light bleeding through each section though, there is something we are overlooking. I have gone through all the switches and nothing gets rid of it.. I wish one of the guys that did the duel maps would grace us with their presents. :wink:

Worst case (which isn't bad :wink: ) is going with Breli's work around.. I would just feel better with a true fix...
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Postby Pardner » Fri Apr 04, 2008 3:45 pm

didn't Red get the stock duel maps working with the old skybox shaders? They still had the issue of the sketchy shadows; which were also present in the stock DU maps.
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Postby ReD NeCKersoN » Fri Apr 04, 2008 6:04 pm

L3th4l wrote:I wish one of the guys that did the duel maps would grace us with their presents.

I emailed all of them a while back. I got replies from Lixus, Spoon & Frag but none of them remember doing anything out of the ordinary.
Pardner wrote:didn't Red get the stock duel maps working with the old skybox shaders?

Not really.:? But they do look better than when I used the new shaders.
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Postby Pardner » Fri Apr 04, 2008 6:11 pm

i guess worse case you guys could use the _noshadersun key and use _minlight and light entities (do not use as a "sun" source). the shadow detail would surely suffer, but its better than over brightness.


EDIT: seems this thread has gone a little off topic. its become a public du_ bug discussion/solution thread.
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