a doom3 compile

    Hey there, mapcore. Havent posted here that much, so I figured I'd kick off the posting frenzy with a screenie.

    This map has no name, specifically due to the reason that this is not going to be a map made for playability, but its a map that I'm going to use for creating a cinematic that will be the main navagation of my upcoming portfolio/company website.

    [Blocked Image: http://rich.zurad.net/images/dduplinkshot1.jpg]

    Comments welcome.

    Hey, you're not far from here.

    It looks good overall. Very nice sleek shape to things. I would recommend upping the subdivisions on the patches to 8 instead of 4, though, it's a small enough area you can get away with it and the edges kinda stick out. Particularly for cinematic use, it might be a good touch to address.

    Also, the lighting doesn't entirely do the scene justice. The only thing that really identifies the scene as being modern tech as opposed to Q3 (or even HL) is the slight light pattern visible on the walls and the normal map highlights barely visible on the ceiling. The bottom of the supports would be great for a small accent light, and with some planning and adjustment you can still keep the light count reasonable. As much as people complain about Doom 3's darkness, its lighting is really its greatest strength.

    Of course, all depends what you want to do with the scene. But for the purpose you mentioned, you can probably get away with quite a bit a playable level couldn't.

    thanks, kungfu.

    Yeah, lighting is the hardest thing for me in Doom3. I have a whole other room constructed, but I didn't post any pictures because I cant get the lighting to look right. and due to the cinematic value and the map not needing to be playable, I'm almost fully ignoring the lightcount limits, but that still doesnt mean I can get it too look good.

    Thanks for the tip. I'll take care of the patch meshes, and I'll toy with some lighting in that room. I'll also post a pic of what I have of the larger room, even though the lighting sucks.

    the sad thing about doom 3 lighting is that to get it to the point where the light in the room is bright enough you end up using like 12 lights LOL... The issue I think is the fact that Doom 3 is naturally a dark game and the lighting effects refelect that in the game and the editor.. I found myself going back and editing some of the lights in notepad to get what I wanted.

    On top of that the lights do not work well with edges. for example in the image of the map above anything that sticks out past something will be dark... with almost no light at all. The light could be the brightest you could get it and it will be black and this is an issue even in Doom 3... The lighting in the game is good, but it as some overall enviorment lighting issues where the light does not cast into areas it should. So to fix that mappers just keep adding more lights and I think that causes more issues. I mean In HL we could put maybe 3 lights in a room and it would be alive... in Doom 3 the avg amount of lights per room was something like 6 or more... I don't think it should have to be that way.

    yeah, if you dont want any pitch black shadows in a room, you need to have one light that casts shadows, and another dimmer light that does not. Then you get a soft lighting effect. Only problem is, thats 2 lighting passes on every texture in the room with the exception a few. And as we all know, its the lighting passes that can really drop your framerate.

    doom 3 is all well and good, but the more I mess with it, the more I find out its limitations. This will probably be the only compiles I do with the doom3 engine. Once Source is released, Source all the way (Unless of course, X-Ray is open for modding, then X-Ray would be the engine of choice).

    the second group of picks is a great example of where doom 3 lighting has some issues. where its hard to have softlight effect where its not dark and its not all lighten up its just in the middle. I do not think you should have to spend a lot of time with lighting. I mean I think one should focus more on the map...

    Another thing lighting has some wierd issues with is Shaders... Section_Ei8ht try making water in the game and then putting a light on it and then you will get some wierd ass shit.

    Quote from Section_Ei8ht

    doom 3 is all well and good, but the more I mess with it, the more I find out its limitations. This will probably be the only compiles I do with the doom3 engine. Once Source is released, Source all the way (Unless of course, X-Ray is open for modding, then X-Ray would be the engine of choice).

    I'd be interested to know specifically what is bothering you. A lot of the 'limits' I've seen people complain about can either be easily worked around/with, or are simply design decisions that don't constitute a limit at all.

    well, 20 bucks says that that post was just me trying to come up with a reason why my dumbass cant get the lighting to satisfy me.

    But the one thing that does bother me is the lighting passes on each surface. If I want to make a room with soft lighting, non pitch black shadows, I need to have two lights (correct me if I'm wrong). One that casts shadows, and a dimmer one that does not. Only problem with this is that now every surface in that room has two lighting passes on it (except a few, depending on the map). If I want to add more detailed lighting, I'm approaching three to four, and maybe even five lighting passes on a surface. In a big area such as the large room, my frame rate dropped to mad, and I'm on a 3 gig with a 9800xt, and in terms of playability, I'm gonna want people on low end systems to play this with great framerates.

    Granted, I can counter this by splitting the brushes and texturing them so they do not repeat so the engine does not break them up, so that is not the largest issue.

    I know that doom3 was made for a dark, scary, sci-fi enviornment. But even those scenarios have shadows that have an umbra and a penumbra. That is probably what is bothering me the most. Granted, if used the the right context, such as doom3 and im sure quake 4, it can look extremely well. Maybe its just that I cannot seem to find a threshold in my room that can get that kind of a look. Perhaps I'm just missing something in the lighting options (i thought maybe fallout would add a nice soft shadow, but that does not seem to be doing anything to my lights) that could make a soft shadow. And if not, then I can understand why there are no soft shadows. I think, and correct me if I am wrong, that because the engine is pure dynamic lighting, the processing required to make soft shadows would be too great to blend well with the rest of the rendering that needs to be done.

    I also am missing the texture light feature, but I understand the ways to get around that and make textures look as though they support the feature.

    Maybe, KungFu, you could give me some pointers or help me see what I'm missing when it comes to the doom 3 engine, because I know you are working with it right now. Actually now that I write out what I think is a limitation on the engine, I know am seeing that its not really that big of a list of limitations. I guess its more just wishful thinking. Doom 3 is a really powerful engine, dont get me wrong, it just seems that with so much emphasis on the lighting passes, It seems to me that the creation of a very large outdoor map with multiple light sources (perhaps a map that takes place in a city street at dusk, so you still have the hint of red sunlight, but the street lights and surrounding shop lights are still on) is near impossible.

    Granted Doom3 was not designed for this purpose, and I completely respect that. Just seems that the idea for expansion into a different mode of storytelling seems a bit limited.

    Sorry for the long post. I'm sure some of you are sleeping right now.

    From my brief stunt of Doom 3 level design I never found a limit to the number of lights you can have in a room. What I learned, and KungFu might confirm this, is there is only a limit to the number of intersecting light volumes.

    The reason? Doom 3 is totally fucking dynamic and it's awesome because of so. You can also use large volumes of light with very bright settings, the problem is that you get these white spots in the center that are totally blinding. I believe there may be some texture you can swap out in the lighting to fix this... I was unable to find this texture.

    BTW KungFU, we play Quake 3 daily at the office. I hope Quake 4 multiplayer is Quake 3 with visual upgrades. Like CS:S to CS. Please lead me to believe Raven understands the reason people love Quake 3.

    i second dd, dont mess with a good thing. just change the bullets in the netcode to client side! that was the worst thing about q3dm

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