Ben/Brian: Any sneak peak on MS 4 for us? :-)

#41 In case that's what you meant I'll provide some details about the Atlas light mapping:


Atlas light mapping is performed during the lighting phase just like the existing terrain, however with Atlas you have full control over the light map size, so you can tune the lighting/shadowing detail to fit your project.

Right now the light map is rendered as-is (one big texture), however for 1.0 the light map will be stored in the chunk texture format, so very large light maps can be used without worrying about the hardware's max texture size.

The TSE Light Editor (just like TLK) allows you to relight in varying lighting and shadow qualities (to trade quality for performance), and relight only the area you're working in, so you can have extremely large Atlas datasets and still be able to tweak the lighting efficiently.

You can import an unlit Atlas terrain into TSE and customize the lighting using the sun and any number of static or dynamic light objects.


Let me know if any of this helps!

#42 No, for me L3DT features come into play with normal maping on the terrain. If you're familiar with L3DT, you'll know that a very large part of lighting detail comes from the normal mapping that is added in with the lightmap it generates. Now if you have your lighting setup dynamically, you can't use a baked lightmap anymore, not even for normal map detail because it'll look strangely wrong because the normal map shading would never change direction.

So what I wanted to do with it is load the normal map with the texture, basically having 2 textures of sorts on the terrain, however one just being a complex normal map to add some more detail. However this isn't easily done at all because the terrain normal map is usually somewhat low res and you get ugly aliasing issues (i tried it before.. looked kinda bad..) and plus there are texture-specific high res normal maps added in during the lightmapping phase. So I contacted the author about adding a special normal map export that will add in the texture-specific normal maps at a high resolution to the terrain normal map that has been properly scaled and smoothed and to export it all as a high res normal map.

So then you'd add support to load two textures on there, the texture and the normal map, and then work it all together. Obviously, not many others would have a need for this, so thats what makes it so TSE specific of a change done in L3DT. Get it? heh

#43 Ah that makes sense - from your post it sounded like the change was adding full dynamic lighting, not just providing the normal map.

That sounds a lot like Ben's terrain blender (if you extended it for use with normal maps). It takes several source textures (in this case texture specific normal maps) and blends them based on the alpha map. That might be another option for you.

It sounds like what you're doing will work nicely with the shadow system if you decide to modify it for dynamic terrain shadows. Even if you don't that level of surface detail with static lighting will be very nice.

#44 Ah, well, thats good to hear! And I most DEFINATLY plan to get dynamic terrain shadows. You've no idea how hung up I am on this :P If someone offered me perfect dynamic terrain lighting and shadowing and their price being one of my testicles.. I'd prolly pay up on the spot! I always look for a game with a dynamic lighting setup in terrain with real day/night, etc. But nobody ever focuses on that well.. Saddens me. :(

#45 @Jacob: I'm with you actually! I've been campaigning when I can for some sort of lighting solution that allows for dynamic terrain shading, and between what Ben G has done with Atlas and what John has done with the lighting, it wont' be stock, but the pieces are there to do what you need if you are willing to give up the performance needed.

FYI, A mid-term solution that isn't real time, but is possible given Atlas's nature and the lighting on it would be to create a thread that re-lights portions of the terrain and blend them in over time in some manner...that's just one of the ways to mimic strong sunlight based shadowing.