Wanton Hubris

Man, that was fun. I added a ton of options to the Quake light compiler. I mentioned the sunlight in the last update but that’s all properly hooked up now through key/value pairs in the worldspawn. I just added ambient light options but the exciting change is for lights!

I added a few new fields which give you a lot more power with lights now. For every light you can now set it’s inner and outer radius as well as a light strength for each radius. This means you can do cool things like torches with hot spot lighting on the wall behind them and then a fade out to black beyond that. It really works well. Here’s a picture to better demonstrate:

This gives the level designer a ton of freedom when designing their areas and how they want them to be lit. Quake was somewhat limited in it’s original form (heh).

{
“classname” “light_torch_small_walltorch”
“style” “1″
“_outerradius” “150″
“_outerlight” “125″
“_innerradius” “48″
“_light” “250″
“origin” “-313 -320 44″
“angle” “0″
}

That ain’t your typical wall torch!

Here are some quick examples showing everything working together (the sunlight, ambient light, and new lighting options for point lights). The top shot shows some nice lighting falling from the ceiling beams and being broken up by the torch light. The second shot shows a few torches in the scene and you can see how the hot spot lighting really plays out.

I haven’t checked to see if spot lights are still working. I’ll have to get to that eventually I suppose.

And for those keeping score, I’ve decided that I wasted a ton of time on the texture mapping stuff. It’s actually fine to just use the material tags in Cheetah for the individual cases where I need to align a texture manually. It’s not as bad as I was originally imagining. I suppose I should have tried to build something for real before diving so deeply into the texturing stuff. Oh well, a lesson learned and work flow streamlined - not a bad result by any means!

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Quake, Work Log. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.