The state of bias lighting

KhorusKhorus
edited 2015 Jan 19 in General
Hello Doomsday forums!

I'm working on a new map for Doom 2 for any limit removing engine and would like to do some special things for a Doomsday version of the map, chief of which would be incorporating bias lighting. I've had a look at the Doomsday wiki to see what the state of bias lighting is in the engine and it's a little ambiguous. I've been looking forward to using it in some levels since hearing about it sometime in the 2000s, so I'm wondering if it's ready to start using in maps? Is there any documentation/help to get me going if so?

Thanks, and greatly looking forward to the continued development of this still exciting engine.

Comments

  • VermilVermil
    I believe bias lighting has been worked on a bit in the 1.9.x series, though not for a long while now and it still has some very noticeable visual issues.

    I imagine the reason it hasn't been worked on is because a new renderer became planned and apparently that may render the bias lighting system obsolete (i.e the new renderer might offer a superior method to achieving a similar visual effect). This is indicated in the open questions part of the wiki page you linked to.

    Deng Team appear to be gearing up to begin work on the new renderer for 1.15/1.16, so the future of bias lighting may be resolved soon-ish (i.e. whether it will be worked on again, whether it will be kept in the engine as is, or removed entirely due to never leaving WIP state).

    To enable bias lighting (which will automatically apply it to a maps sector lighting), as it's disabled by default due it's WIP state, enter 'rend-bias-grid 1' followed by 'rend-bias 1' in the taskbar/console.

    The DED definitions for bias lighting are part of the light definition: http://dengine.net/dew/index.php?title=Light_(DED)

    Here's probably the most recent examples of the feature, where PVS wrote DED's adding them to the first few maps of Heretic: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1394&p=9053

    Dday also has an inbuilt bias lighting editor accessible with the 'bledit' taskbar/console command and controlled with various other taskbar/console commands (i.e the 'blXXX' commands here: http://www.dengine.net/dew/index.php?ti ... _reference). Here is a video showing it off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DE638Z ... e=youtu.be.

    If you use the inbuilt editor (versus writing the DED's manually), you will probably also want to enter camera mode, which is 'makecam 0' in the taskbar/console.
  • skyjakeskyjake
    While the technical implementation of the bias lights remains not that great (i.e., was never really finished), the light definitions are still useful because they basically just define simple point light sources. I expect in the future we can render this kind of light sources with better fidelity than just vertex lighting, so writing these DEDs is a pretty safe bet I would say.
  • KhorusKhorus
    @Vermil: Thanks a ton for the very detailed and helpful reply! The wiki article makes more sense to me with that information now. Turning on bias lighting under the WIP map and some others, it's certainly a very interesting and already great looking feature. An advanced lighting engine really looks to bring a lot of potential to both visual fidelity and design options. I'll bookmark this thread for when I'm ready to start work.

    @skyjake: Ok, so creating the lights should be rather future proof. Looking forward to future releases, thanks to you and DaniJ for the great work. :)
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