I've been having problems with my entities staying bright lately, so I decided to try to get to the root of the problem. Here's my very simple test case . . .

Hollow a cube, then add a bright light and a model.

No matter what I do, I can't get the model to darken. However, if I force the engine to A5 mode (var d3d_transform = off;) the unlit, ambient, and albedo controls work perfectly. Why won't it darken in A6 mode?

manual

The main difference between A5 and A6 mode is the handling of polygon coordinates and lighting. A5 used its own highly optimized algorithms for lighting and for converting polygon coordinates into screen space. A6 uses the DirectX algorithms for this, thus omitting the software world->screen conversion and lighting step. For this reason the A6 renderer is a lot simpler than the A5 renderer, but offers more features and can use T&L hardware. Very old 3D cards without multitexturing (weak or slow cards) are not supported by A6.

Lighting:
A6 supports up to 8 point, spot or directional dynamic lights. The DirectX lighting used by A6 does not look as smooth as the A5 lighting, but offers more features and control possibilities. Dynamic lights now affect all polygons of a model separately, not just the model as a whole. The new A6 material parameters give more control over the light reflection properties than the old metal, ambient, or albedo parameters of A5.

I seem to remember someone else having a similar problem. I think it was because part of the model (or sprite) was in some level geometry or some such thing.

Don

I would really appreciate it if someone would do this VERY quick little test to make sure I'm not going crazy. However, you need to have a new enough card that it's detected as "...T&L device detected." Otherwise, the engine's going to default to A5 mode--and I'm already certain sure it works correctly in A5. Here's a sample of how you can tell if the engine thinks it can default to A6 mode:



Here's the test:

1. Hollow a large cube.
2. Add a very bright light.
3. Add any model and check it's "unlit" box (leave ambient at zero).
4. Compile and run. See if the model is ignoring it's environment and is dark.

It works correctly in A5 mode, but not A6. Here's a shot that shows how the barrels are correctly dark when I force it to A5 mode, but simply turning on A6 mode leaves them full-bright: