Sector lightning vs point lights

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arachnotron
Posts: 41
Joined: Sat Sep 16, 2017 10:38 am

Sector lightning vs point lights

Post by arachnotron »

What do you think makes maps look better? I love drawing shadows with sectors but I sometimes have trouble combining drawn shadows with point lights. How to combine both in a good way?
jdagenet
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Joined: Tue Aug 09, 2011 10:26 pm

Re: Sector lightning vs point lights

Post by jdagenet »

Both are completely different things, it’d be hard to try and find the middle ground.

Sector lighting is still very much old school and 2d while dynamic lights offers the sense of creating a real 3d environment.
It all depends on what you’re wanting you area to feel and play like honestly. If you’re going for that Tormentor style atmosphere then yeah you’d want to rely heavily on dynamic lights over sector lighting.
arachnotron
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Re: Sector lightning vs point lights

Post by arachnotron »

jdagenet wrote:Both are completely different things, it’d be hard to try and find the middle ground.

Sector lighting is still very much old school and 2d while dynamic lights offers the sense of creating a real 3d environment.
It all depends on what you’re wanting you area to feel and play like honestly. If you’re going for that Tormentor style atmosphere then yeah you’d want to rely heavily on dynamic lights over sector lighting.
Point lights don't create shadows unless you enable this option:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=57900

The problem is, it's not enabled on by default, so I don't want to design a map that would need for people to manually turn an option on, which forces me to craft the shadows by hand with sectors to guarantee the experience is as intended.. (for example you may need a corridor to have a nice shadow that's projected by a wall, kind of like in E1M2 in Doom which by the way is the earliest use of this I can recall). If you put a dynamic light thing on there and enable that option, it casts a nice shadow all by itself, but if it's disabled, you have to draw it with sectors and add a bunch of lines to smooth it out a bit (and no amount of sector shadowing will look as good as accurately math calculated shadows)
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Kappes Buur
 
 
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Re: Sector lightning vs point lights

Post by Kappes Buur »

If the shadows are to be thrown by singlesided linedefs,
then you also have an option to use the Lighting plugin by boris.
Spoiler:
arachnotron
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Joined: Sat Sep 16, 2017 10:38 am

Re: Sector lightning vs point lights

Post by arachnotron »

Kappes Buur wrote:If the shadows are to be thrown by singlesided linedefs,
then you also have an option to use the Lighting plugin by boris.
Spoiler:
That looks neat if it does what I think it does. Can you give me the official download link?
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Kappes Buur
 
 
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Re: Sector lightning vs point lights

Post by Kappes Buur »

arachnotron
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Re: Sector lightning vs point lights

Post by arachnotron »

That looks indeed neat, but I don't know how to compile the code from the github. Is there any tutorial in to compile this? im not a coder.

Also, does this recognize 3d floors? for example, if you use this inside the house that I uploaded for the swinging door example that has a 3d ceiling, will the plugin be able to tell that the shadows must be casted properly inside the house?
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Cherno
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Re: Sector lightning vs point lights

Post by Cherno »

Sector lighting looks good when the light comes directly from above and you can simply brighten the sector under a skylight or hole in the roof/cave ceiling, for example. It also works well when the light comes in horizontally in a room that has a relatively low ceiling. Beyond those situations, it becomes difficult or impossible to simulate accurate shadows and lighting because the light would throw a shadow at an angle which could only be done via slopes and/or 3d floors which is very cumbersome. Sector lighting can also become difficult to do in very complex environments where you have to split lots of lines just to show the lights and shadows, shich can make later editing or textures, height levels and sector/line tags and actions specials hard.

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