A perfect idea, meshes taking color from lightmap texture

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
#1

In a week I went from struggling to get a lightmap to work to being fairly decent at them. But the dynamic objects can’t currently take the color of the lightmap texture.

This is probably in Ashsid’s area of expertise, but have a function where a dynamic object takes the color from nearby areas of the mesh shaded with the lightmap texture as its own, so boxes in areas where the lightmap texture is dark appear dark and boxes in areas where the lightmap texture is bright appears bright.

This probably won’t work for lightmapped sharp shadows perfectly, but it would be a step up for graphical realism without coding in a whole new lighting engine.

#2

You should focus on a smaller game that is more at your skill level.
If the game engine cannot make all your dreams come true I suggest a new game engine.
Poor planning in the first place will get you nowhere…

why not make a plan that the current game engine can actually do? rather than make up stories on how the big bad BGE developers are keeping you from making a game?

We can already bake vertex colors from lighting and from the texture colors. To do it in real time like you are suggesting is impractical with the current rendering engine.
(If not , prove it and code an example for us.).Look at how bad the Dynamic lighting bog it down… and you are suggesting that it does more calculations on the texture color it might be near?

In my opinion, the Blender developers should spend less time listening to non productive Wannabes , and start listening to the people who are actually using their product for a productive purpose.(I have a feeling this is what Apricot was all about)

The way Erwin was treated last year totally makes me want to puke still… they guy donated his heart and soul to the GE, and all he got back from us was a bunch of negative $hit.(Thank Karma, he is dealing with professionals now, who appreciate his work, and Bullet is in apricot now).

Sorry for the rant, but cant you guys try doing a “What I can do with the game engine” rather than “What I cant do”?

Why not use a little creativity , and actually produce something other than forum posts?

#3

You can make them take ‘color’ from anything, just make them reflective in the uv image editor. However, I think you really want them to show the shawdows etc and not color?

In this case put them all in before you bake them, I think that should work? maybe you need to joing everything before you back them, then pull them apart…but if you move the box it wont match anynmore, lol.

#4

I get you’re trying to sound like a know-it-all here and you think you’re the ultimate expert on the BGE.

I don’t mean calculate the whole lightmap in real time, just change dynamic object vertex coloring to the color of the nearest pixels in the lightmap. And I’m not saying I need this feature, it’s only a feature request, if you shoot down everyone who asks for features then the BGE developers won’t have a chance to code features the people request. I’m a lot more then just a BGE game developer wannabe, I have completed at least two games and have worked on several more prototypes that are very playable. The part you accuse me of in bold is a flat out lie. This is everyone’s BGE that everyone wants to see developed, stop acting like you know everything.

Look here, I have a nice lightmap on the level already, it it needs is a little tweaking in the UV window. It has soft shadows too. I can show you pictures if you really want proof.

#5

it’s called dynamic lights. leave the lights you used for your lightmap in, but set just the dynamic objects to be affected by them. if you used AO or radiosity to bake, place lights that will approximate it.

believe me, the bge developers have much more important things to be coding than little features like shadows and small lighting upgrades. if you keep swamping them with minute little requests, they’ll miss the stuff that really matters.
[edit] and the bold part in mmph’s quote there is an opinion, the polar opposite of a lie. it is everyone’s bge, that’s true, so if you want this crap, why don’t YOU do something about it.

#6

I set up a nice little hack in the Zark game. For shadowed areas, I added Ghost planes which could be sensed with a collision sensor. When detected, the brightness of the character was lowered using an IPO. It was a decent effect with very little overhead.

#7

Shader, maybe?

#8

Nice hack PlantPerson!
I love that idea :smiley: In marble I did a shadow hack too under the marble with an IPO.
Mine was not perfect, but it still was beter than nothing :smiley:

#9

I mean taking vertex color from the color of the nearest pixels of the lightmap texture, not dynamic lights. I don’t get how you don’t see this is not quite a request for dynamic lighting.

#10

This forum is for discussions too. Like this.

However there is a thread you can add to, for requesting new features, instead of starting another one.

#11

Sounds good Cyborg Dragon… don’t let them put you down… its a good idea and thats that

#12

All in all what the renderer would need at the least is the ability to take the color of nearby pixels and translate that into vertex color for the object, and a ray system fired from major parts of the object to detect pixel color on the lightmap.

The thing here is that shadows from dynamic objects won’t work with this system, but it’s something that can be done with less work then a whole new lighting engine, and it’s still per vertex lighting on the objects, less you want to use it to change the color of the pixels on a second texture on the dynamic objects and not just the vertex color (though it would be slower)

#13

Hmmm, someplace in this forum is a… shoot no, thats the reflection thingy, but maybe thats what you are after?

Its one of the FPS template demos…the gun reflects the surrounding environment…I cant remember how they did it though?

Anyone remember this? know where it is?

Thanks.

#14

i think you’re thinking of setting the UV Realtime Texture Mapping to Reflection, itirx.