I don't think there's any worry about "risks" for implementing bold things at all - at least not from the overall perspective - if there were, ZDoom and GZDoom would be NOTHING like what they are, today.
I think the worst of it is, is that when we get cool new features, there's always someone who complains that it's the worst thing, it's terrible, people will abuse it horribly, etc, when the feature is really is well loved by the community at large. It's made some developers a bit shy to contributing.
Sun light source
Moderator: GZDoom Developers
Re: Sun light source
As dpJudas explained, what holds the feature back is simply not having yet a clear idea how best to implement it and expose it to the modders. I believe that at the moment the biggest cloud to darken a sunlight feature is the ongoing development of a Vulkan backend to future-proof the engine. Once it's done, there will be more clarity for adding yet more features, this topic included.
- Graf Zahl
- Lead GZDoom+Raze Developer
- Posts: 49067
- Joined: Sat Jul 19, 2003 10:19 am
- Location: Germany
Re: Sun light source
The main problem is actually determining what should be affected by a sun light source and what not. Adding one static directional light source with infinite distance to the shader is simplicity itself but without casting shadows it is pretty useless.
Re: Sun light source
Semi-necroing inbound
After experimenting with models and voxel-models in GZDoom (Alone in the Dark TC, Chibi Voxel Doom, §D Dot Game Heroes/Legend of Zelda TC, Lego Doom TC), I now have an idea of what I would want from a sunlight system which I would like to share so perhaps sometime it will be implemented. At least this way, the dev team knows one possible application.
Basically, we have the well-known situation of models being lit uniformly without a light source. This means that models that have no baked lighting textures (which is an art style I prefer) looks pretty bad in outdoor environments where you can't put some kind of light source everywhere. Even indoor environment that are supposed to be dark can be problematic for the same reason. Outsoor lighting can be "hacked" to a certain degree with angled spotlights with a very large intensity and radius. Far from ideal, but possible. Sine these ligths stop at one-sided sector lines, a global directional light for the dark indoor spaces mentioned before won't work in any case.
Which leaves me with what I would love to see: A directional light that only lights models, and does so throughout the whole map without any blocking by walls etc.
I fear that this is one of those features that only benefits a very small percentage of modders, but I wanted to state my idea anyway. Thank you!
After experimenting with models and voxel-models in GZDoom (Alone in the Dark TC, Chibi Voxel Doom, §D Dot Game Heroes/Legend of Zelda TC, Lego Doom TC), I now have an idea of what I would want from a sunlight system which I would like to share so perhaps sometime it will be implemented. At least this way, the dev team knows one possible application.
Basically, we have the well-known situation of models being lit uniformly without a light source. This means that models that have no baked lighting textures (which is an art style I prefer) looks pretty bad in outdoor environments where you can't put some kind of light source everywhere. Even indoor environment that are supposed to be dark can be problematic for the same reason. Outsoor lighting can be "hacked" to a certain degree with angled spotlights with a very large intensity and radius. Far from ideal, but possible. Sine these ligths stop at one-sided sector lines, a global directional light for the dark indoor spaces mentioned before won't work in any case.
Which leaves me with what I would love to see: A directional light that only lights models, and does so throughout the whole map without any blocking by walls etc.
I fear that this is one of those features that only benefits a very small percentage of modders, but I wanted to state my idea anyway. Thank you!