Area lights.

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adameros
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Area lights.

Post by adameros »

Right now, it appears there is an ambient light the permeates the world, when you play. I think it would be interesting to have spot lighting.

Let's say you want a warehouse, like at the end of Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark, you would like well light main aisles, but the side aisles need to be basked in shadow, so people have a hard time seeing your tank till it's too late.

To go with it, maybe a "headlights flag", where a cone of light comes out of the front of your tank, letting you see in the shadows, but also making you easy to spot.

I understand this would be a big change to the BZ client, maybe for version 4.0.
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Spazzy McGee
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Re: Area lights.

Post by Spazzy McGee »

You can make a kind of 'fake' spot lighting effect by using a mesh with a gradient texture, but it looks a bit crap.

I agree that a lighting object would be very cool, with options as to the type of light (omni-directional, spot, etc.), and the colour.
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lep
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Re: Area lights.

Post by lep »

This would be a very interesting addition to BZFlag and maps.

Oh goodness...version 4.0. Did the dev's want to see that :D?
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Bambino
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Re: Area lights.

Post by Bambino »

Lets wait for 3.0 to come out before we talk about 4.0
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lep
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Re: Area lights.

Post by lep »

haaa thats what i meant.
do we wanna see that after all the hard work put into 3.0? haha but again good thinking adameros on this addition
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gentle giant
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Re: Area lights.

Post by gentle giant »

how about before we go to 3.0 we go back to 1.0 :P
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Quantum Tank
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Re: Area lights.

Post by Quantum Tank »

Yeah, lighting would be a great addition. I've seen some pretty good quasi-lighting on some maps, but you could make really immersive maps with it actually a feature.
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yarro
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Re: Area lights.

Post by yarro »

I'd like to see tank luminosity as well, it can be hard to make out the color of the enemy at night.
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Re: Area lights.

Post by Strakowski »

Yarro wrote:I'd like to see tank luminosity as well, it can be hard to make out the color of the enemy at night.
If you could assign tank luminosity exclusively to certain tanks,that'd be a wild rabbit chase. (Glowing rabbit, dull hunters)
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JeffM
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Re: Area lights.

Post by JeffM »

Volumetric lighting ( the real name for what you are describing) is most commonly implemented as shaders, it is not a feature of "bare bones" openGL. Doing so in bzflag would change the minimum hardware requirements. It may happen at some point but probably not until the graphics system was cleaned up or extended some more.

As pointed out it would have gameplay implications (like fog does) so it would be hard to make it an optional feature for older cards.
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