hi I loved your game very much, I would love to see further developments to the game, and one day I would love to create something like a system shock kinda of mod. Anyway one major thing is lacking in visual department, Radiosity.
If you guys could fiqure out how to get some kind of Radiosity solution working for lighting, it would be the iceing on the cake "gold plating stage" but most basic games have Radiosity.
If you dont know what I mean, heres a good example of the diffrence with and with out. Top Images start with out, bottom images start to have more Radiosity added.
http://www.simnet.is/hildurka/content/tut1page.htm
i'm sorry to destroy your dream, but radiosity is currently EXTREMELY heavy on CPU usage and thus only used in raytracers (afaik)
if you want radiosity in realtime you need to generate a lightmap: a texture that saves the brightness at different places, but either the textures get huge or the light looks ugly.
but maybe i'm just talking shit :o
There are ways to do realtime radiosity but it is not very fast even for very simple scenes. Gonna take a few more years before it will be do it with any good speed.
One thing I am gonna try to add though is soft shadows. Not til the upcoming patch though ;)
hmm so is the method used in Half-life 1 good? what do they use to get that radiostiy look? I know they have something?
The thing is that Half-life uses prerendered lightmaps, so the the lighting is not realtime.
Hmm,
Radiosity in HL1? Do you have screenshot? :O
I think effect would be approximated by using point lights but that isn't radiosity.
Half-Life 1 - Source might have :) If they have recompiled the maps that is.
I would be really surprised to see radiosity working in realtime for any game today. Though I agree it would be awesome, and I imagine that ambient occlusion may be possible to render in realtime in a few years, especially if it has a limited radius, much like the raytraced lights in this game do. But that is some time away.
I am aware of two things that can give a similar look for realtime rendering, one would be baking light information into vertex colors, which I don't think is used so much anymore, and another would be by baking it into a bitmap, either the texture map itself or a seperate map that controls self-illumination, probably what you guys are referring to as a lightmap.
If it were baked into the texture that would mean that every texture had to be used in one unique location. If it were a seperate map that would still increase the needed texture size, but yes, it would not be realtime. That would mean that it would be pretty useless for anything that you were going to move around. I think that it could actually look very good though, and add realism, as long as it was made a very subtle effect and the scene lights were strong enough to overpower it.
Would using these maps be possible with the engine as it is? Is there a material slot for a self-illumination or lighmap?
Lightmapping and ambient occulsion maps are not supported in the engine atm. It is nothing that is impossible to add though. Right now materials need to be hardcoded, but I thinking about adding support for simple XML files for making your own materials.
Btw, I hope people do not except that the game will incredibly moddable. Right now, it would be possible to do your own adventure with the same mechanics as in Penumbra, but you will not be able to do a totally different game (like shooter).
However, the game will be updated to support more things. Since it will take some time to get used to doing content people will not be able to do new content straight away. Just rest assured that it will be updated and more features will be added over time.
I would never expect to do something like change the game mechanics. It sounds like alot of people want to change everything and make it a different game, but then they should just consider making their own game. I'm happy with Penumbra and only wish to be able to make my own maps and continue the adventure in my own way. More dark hallways, unseen horror and the fear of not knowing what the hell to expect next.