Alright. This has been making me think for a while, and I'm not sure what to do.


Should static lights be faked as dynamic lights, or used for "ambience" of the model when walking in certain areas? Both are useful, but I'm not sure which one to choose...

What do you think? single choice
	used for ambience
	faked as dynamic [as is]
Votes accepted starting: 04/07/07 02:23 You must vote before you can view the results of this poll.

'Faked as dynamic' looks by far the best. At the moment I've done some testing and I've simply checked 'dynamic' for all my lights in the level and it works rather well with this shader. Perhaps, I'll build a small (birds-eye perspective probably because of the dynamic lights) Doom3 clone game and it will show what I mean,

Cheers

Well I used 24bit TGA for the diffuse map and 32bit TGA for the normal map.
=> no stencil shadows
=> normal map with decent specularity

If I remove the normal map or reduce it to 24 bit
=> stencil shadows
=> no normal map or plastic look

Engine version is last public beta (6.506) and my testobjects are just simple boxes (closed), placed on terrain and blocks.

Well, doing some research it turned out, I´m not the first one who has a problem with the automatic transparency thing in A6: link

I guess it has something to do with this, because the manual recommends, that for stencil shadows the entities must not be transparent.
Maybe these lines of code could solve this?

ZWriteEnable=True;
AlphaBlendEnable=False;
AlphaTestEnable=True;

These, of course, are just some ideas of a shader noob ...

as far as the dynamic/ambient lights, definately dynamic, im also almost done with that map reader.

@Lostclimate: Nice, I can't wait...

@Robotronic: I'g give your solution a try, but as I said, my [stencil & non-stencil] shadows are showing up, so I can't...

I'm gonna leave the poll open a lil longer until i decide. I'd like to do a combination of both, because a sort of ambience is needed somehow...

Quote:

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Well, doing some research it turned out, I´m not the first one who has a problem with the automatic transparency thing in A6:

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http://www.conitec.net/beta/aentity-overlay.htm

Ahh yes, the transparency problem, A7 solves this with the new my.overlay flag. It works great, I make good use of it already for my terrain shaders. If your using the beta you can try it out. This will fix alpha problems between the entity and other entities, but not necessarily within the entity itself. The lines you posted might also work.

If your having problems where is seems like your normals flipped, make sure that your first texture for your entity(the non-normalmap) has no alpha map. I think the reason for this lies in the second pass where the lighting requires the blending/alpha transparency. If it has an alpha map then its almost like all the normals of the model flips. Mabye this is a shader problem? Or it might just be how it goes. I know when you make vegetation and the such you cannot have alpha transparency or the normals do the same thing. If you do put an alpha map for the first model, and turn off alphaBlendEnable for the second pass, then the lights do not show for that pass, but the normals do not flip.

As for static lights...

I'm going to add a switch to enable/disable the checking for static lights. I'm having unusable results with vecLight, so I must use a trace, and pass the results to the shader. This trace can be slow, so I'm goin to add an option for it. I'll let you know which flag I'll put it on. All feedback is appreciated!

I can just use the last public beta (A6.50.6) but it´s good to hear, that the transparency problem has been solved. I hope this overlay feature makes it into the next public update. Anyway, I was playing around with alphaBlendEnable & co. but it didn´t help. Most often my testcube just turned into something completely black.

@ xXx Guitar: I think it´s a very good idea, to implement an option for static lights. Makes this great shader even better .

@Robotronic: Thanks!

And as for static lighting (again). Accoding to my above poll, I've decided I'm going to add an option [again] in the shader. You'll be able to use faking, ambience, or both...

Alright, I'm still working on this shader, and I just corrected a majot bug!

I was calculating the tangents incorrectly. This means that the faces were being lit corectly, but the bumps were getting the light direction incorrectly. I have fixed it now. It's hard to tell the difference, but it makes a big improvment in look when you figure out what to look for!

I still need to fix some of the lighting options, then I'll update the download and let you all know!