Wanton Hubris

So I decided to spend some time today delving into Quake’s light compiler and see what I could make happen.  Turns out that it’s not that complicated!  One important thing to note is that the “light” tag you add to light emitting entities in your MAP file is really denoting a radius, not a light strength.  With this knowledge in mind, I was able to forge ahead.

For my first trick, I added a sunlight option to the light compiler.  What it does is pretty straightforward : for each lighting sample location in the world, the code traces along a user specified sunlight angle.  If it hits geometry, it doesn’t get any sunlight.  If it hits a sky brush, it gets sunlight.  The results are pretty cool!  What’s cool is that I was careful to color inside the lines when changing the code so the sunlight plays nicely with regular light as well.  I’ll be back later with more cool stuff - hopefully!

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 11:04 am 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.