BIAS Lighting Editing?

Kelzam

Hi there,

So back in 2007 I was working with DaniJ on a project to show off BIAS lighting, which was new to the engine at the time. I was able to create light objects in the map for dynamic lighting. For various reasons I was pulled away from DOOM mapping, but recently returned to the hobby. At the time back then, there was an in-game editing tool for BIAS lighting to place and work with lights in real time. Given that was 12 years ago that output them to a .ded file (or did I just get the info from the editor and copy it into the ded? I can't remember...). Anyway, I can't remember the command or how I went about entering that system; and I was wondering if that system still exists in the current day? I'm revisiting the project I was working on way back then.

Below are some examples on what I had done with the bias lighting at the time. I really hope the engine is still capable of this!

skyjake

Unfortunately the bias lighting feature was never finalized and it was ultimately disabled in the 2.0 release. It had two main features:

• Point light sources that were applied with shadowing on a per-vertex basis. The unsolved problem here was that without splitting down surfaces into smaller triangles, one could easily end up with lighting artifacts along long polygon edges.
• A 2D grid of lighting cells covering the map. This did not scale well for large maps, but did nicely provide some ambient lighting spreading out from brightly lit areas.

The implementation simply was not in a maintainable shape, so I made the decision to remove it in 2.0, pending a better GPU-based lighting system in the next-generation renderer.

Kelzam

Ah, what a shame. It certainly had some hefty performance costs and any time a plane moved the frame dip from the lights being recalculated was drastic. I'll have to move on and build without it, then.

You mentioned a better GPU-based lighting system in a next-gen renderer, there. Is that something you're currently developing? I have a keen interest in atmospheric lighting, so if I may ask, how is that progressing? Is a build with such a feature pretty far away?

skyjake

Yes, I'm currently developing a new renderer that leans as much as possible on the GPU for all rendering, including the lighting of course. So far I have traditional shadow mapped lights, but I'll still have to work on softer ambient lighting like what was possible with the bias point lights.

The new renderer is not yet ready for gameplay. I'm currently putting together the core changes for version 2.2 that encompass making the engine's underlying software framework lighter and more optimized for game-like apps. This will then act as the foundation for integrating the new renderer as an alternative to the classic one. My plan is to then keep improving the new renderer until it surpasses the classic one in quality and then make it the default/only one available.

In terms of a concrete timeline — as usual — I can't commit to one because the time I have available for Doomsday is quite unpredictable. The work keeps progressing, though.