Spring RTS Engine

Lightmaps

Texture which defines the colour of light, shining on a certain Area/Mappart. Would be cool, to simulate "glow" effects, vulcanos and such stuff... thx alot..

PicassoCT wrote:Lightmaps

Texture which defines the colour of light, shining on a certain Area/Mappart. Would be cool, to simulate "glow" effects, vulcanos and such stuff... thx alot..

That makes no sense, since light has both colour and direction - plus the light would be a column - a unit 50 feet above the volcano would have hte same illumination as a unit directly on top of it.

Lights on the maps is a good idea, but as a texturemap that's not going to work. Better approach would be to have features that contain (or are) lights.

Glowmaps on the texture would make sense, but glow is only self-illumination, it doesn't illuminate units nearby.

good idea, hell on videocards...

it'd have to be able to be toggled on or off in preferences... those guys on old GeForce cards would have a heart attack when their 15 fps drops to 2...

Direction could be handled by a normalmap, except it would be interpreted as light normals instead of surface normals.

KDR_11k wrote:Direction could be handled by a normalmap, except it would be interpreted as light normals instead of surface normals.

It would be sheer hell to make those normal maps. Most normal map editors I've seen have been landscape-to-normal-map converters, which would be totally inappropriate for this case... you'd need to either hand-edit your normal maps or develop new tools.

Plus you'd still have the problem of altitude.

Pxtl wrote:

KDR_11k wrote:Direction could be handled by a normalmap, except it would be interpreted as light normals instead of surface normals.

It would be sheer hell to make those normal maps. Most normal map editors I've seen have been landscape-to-normal-map converters, which would be totally inappropriate for this case... you'd need to either hand-edit your normal maps or develop new tools.

Plus you'd still have the problem of altitude.

use it like features.. just GIVE THE FRAKKIN FEATURE a script that give off light.

the feature itself could be something like "light (1-10)" with the 1-10 in accordance to how "high" the altitude of the light is from the map surface(feature placement height within UpSpring).. then the feature tdf can define the script that says what color and how much light, and the properties of that light, be it volumetric, strobing, osscilating, whatever...



again though, this would require something to scan all the features' tdf's for lua scripts...