Lightmapping/Shadows
 

My experiments with lightmapping that will hopefully be finished soon.

Right now the editor supports RGBA values for each light and a falloff value. I want to add support for multiple equations for falloff, such as inverse square, etc. There's more to be added later, such as proper anti-aliasing, support for custom resolution lightmaps (Right now it's half resolution of a Graal level, which is 512x512), but whatever!

Here's a video showing the editor and lightmap compiling.



Note: I clipped the compiling time. It took 19 seconds in that instance (The compiler's not optimized at all at the moment.) and the editing time was sped up by a factor of two. Also, the software I was using to record raped my video. It's 8-bit =(

When you click render, it does the proper calculations and bakes the lights into two PNG files; a colored light map, and a shadowmap, saved as levelName_lightmap.png and levelName_shadowmap.png. Lights blend correctly with one another as well.

Also, I can't release this until V6 is released, as I need to use the requesturlfromgamefile function for this to work 100% properly. That function isn't available in the V5 client.

umm to-do list:

1) More falloff equations.
2) Spotlights.
3) Custom resolution lightmaps.
4) Fake walls in the editor, and likewise ignoring walls.

Oh, if anyone wants this, PM me, I guess.

That's really, really cool. Excellent work.

Thanks!

That is awesome, pure awesome. Would rep you if I could.

Thanks max :)

I'd like to see some servers start using solutions like this for indoor levels..

Very nice :D!

Perhaps you should add in your light-map editor the ability to select tiles and declare them as walls and use that in your lighting algorithm to add some more realism? Only walls facing down, of course, since those are the ones you can see...

What's extremely annoying is that you never seem to read my posts..

Looks pretty impressive :)
Wondering for what you need requesturlfromgamefile(), is the lightmap generator running on a webserver?

Interesting. Really interesting.

I suppose it is. I, personally, wouldn't want to code something that converts raw image data to PNG in GS2.

Nice stuff :) Would like to see the code for this.

I asked too but I realised it said PM him for it. It would be nice if there was a public release in the Code Gallery though.

He said last night he's using PHP and GD to generate the image.

Sorry, missed that.

I'm considering using some Python code on a webserver to do image generation remotely.