my wishlist (you may either like my ideas or not)

Post by **Crush** » 11 Oct 2005, 20:17

that's a photo camera, not a human eye. a camera uses a different technique to amplify low light than the human eye does. a camera increases the exposure time. that affects the red, blue and green color layers on the film individually. when it is dark the human eye increases the perception of the seeing cells which see brightness (called "rods"). those which see color ("cones") aren't affected.

Post by **Modanung** » 11 Oct 2005, 20:24

It's hard to discriminate colours because it's hard to see anything at all. In real life, that is. Ofcourse this would suck in TMW.
It's dark and outside at night, but not colourless.

If we're going to use filters I suggest one that brings back the world's R, G and B in to 30%,40% and 60%.
Only the water would need some more tweeking, but I think this gives a nice night-effect.

Why isn't this thread in the suggestions/feedback forum, by the way?

Post by **Pajarico** » 11 Oct 2005, 21:35

Nice ideas there, maci.

random eyecandyness like a few birds picking up food and if you come closer they fly away.. or a cat just walkin across towns randomly sure all those being will have predefines scripts so they can be just included into a town

What i really want to see is fidhing and hunting with weapons, rod and bait. So you can put some food in the forest, hide behind a bush and wait for a wild boar.

Also recolecting of fruits and medicinal herbs. Or fishing with a spear

Reaktor · Post by **Reaktor** » 12 Oct 2005, 06:47

I really don't think that making new tilesets for the daytimes is good way to approach dynamic lighting. It's not really dynamic if day changes to night by going through two or three different tilesets and viceversa.

This is something that should be coded ingame. Programmers just need to add new layer which is drawn between GUI windows and tileset-frame. This layer is used to darken tilesets by showing underlaying tileset through this black (or darkblue) layer. The amount of darkness is controlled by how much this dark layer shows through.

Post by **Modanung** » 12 Oct 2005, 13:49

I wonder how this would decrease the fps... I think it would be a pain the bottocks playing in software mode.
Although I think day/night changes could add a lot gameplaywise.

biggeruniverse · Post by **biggeruniverse** » 13 Oct 2005, 02:48

Actually, there's a fairly simple solution: just keep the image of the last tile you mixed with the daylight color. Statistically, the next tile will likely use the same image, and if that's true, you can simply blit it to the buffer without remixing. That will almost double your fps over an unoptimized software mode.

EDIT: a variant of this is for each unique tile object to have a base image and a 'mixed' image. When light level changes, go through the tile list and blit the base image to the mixed image, then mix the daylight color to the mixed image, and always draw the mixed image when the tile is drawn. It turns out to be very quick and even simpler than above.

Reaktor · Post by **Reaktor** » 15 Oct 2005, 08:22

It should be noted that these effects have been used for games ever since old Lucasarts -adventures (such as Indiana Jones & Fate Of Atlantis). Even though resolution has increased during the years, we are not talking about CPU-killer. Simple overlayers are extremely fast to draw on the memory. Basically you can do almost anything for the image which is then shown to player, BUT you cannot blit multiple overlaying images by drawing each one over each other to videomemory. It would be too much CPU. Drawing must be hard-calculated before it's shown, then there will be no problem.

biggeruniverse · Post by **biggeruniverse** » 15 Oct 2005, 10:31

Reaktor wrote:Simple overlayers are extremely fast to draw on the memory.

You realise you're taking about software-mode fullscreen blending, right? That's several calcs(even if it's all bit-shifting) per pixel, and at 640x480, that's 307200 pixels.

EDIT:

Reaktor wrote:Basically you can do almost anything for the image which is then shown to player, BUT you cannot blit multiple overlaying images by drawing each one over each other to videomemory. It would be too much CPU. Drawing must be hard-calculated before it's shown, then there will be no problem.

I really don't think you understand what I'm talking about.

maci · Post by **maci** » 15 Oct 2005, 10:34

yeah and since we want to use highr resolutions.. its even more

Reaktor · Post by **Reaktor** » 16 Oct 2005, 07:30

Actually you can test how fast computer can perform multiple layer actions by writing several 800x600 screens on one bitmap some ~20 times, then blit the final screen for showing, and calculate the fps. This should give ~60-70fps in software mode.

Another way would be by actually overlaying the few screens ~20 times by blitting 'em to videomemory. This is extremely slow.

I think that the most optimal way would be archieved by using the method which biggeruniverse suggested, but it needs little more coding than and additional time checks for loop to create dynamic lighting... Well... It's just the thing about how coders wan't to approach this... And btw, actually were not talking 'bout dynamic lighting as long as there are no shadows, but just about the shading of tiles.

Hmm... dunno... using premixed tiles has some extremely valuable points. It will just take one more videobitmap-space. Original tileset should be kept on memory for making premixes of each shading (according to daytime)...

There is just one problem. This doesn't actually help the use of lighting, since it only shades ALL tiles to presen't certain time of day. Engine still needs dark overlaying layer (with holes at spaces where bright tiles are shown) to darken everything else but the lightsources... so why not use this dark layer to ALSO remix original tileset to new shading?

example use of night-layer:
http://www.tamk.fi/~c4jlepol/concept-shot2.gif to -->
http://www.tamk.fi/~c4jlepol/concept-shot3.gif

btw, I'm extremely interested about how lighting could actually affect gameplay if made correctly. Now a days games are using "hide" as thievery skill and this skill is used to check if other player can see him. It could be possible to create real ambushes etc. if players wouldn't be able to see players who are ambushing 'em, because of the lack of light. Thieves could have modificators for natural darkseeing, which would affect the amount the client is darkening the screen... Well, just a thought

biggeruniverse · Post by **biggeruniverse** » 16 Oct 2005, 07:53

It depends on the look you are going for. When I have implemented the above method, I restrict all lighting to tile-based (a la Diablo).

http://rpgdx.net/uploads/screenshot396.png

EDIT: and a good way to do THIS is to have a tilespace lightmap as big as the screen that holds light values of all lightsources and daylight for each logic map cell (premixing light values and daylight into a single integer).

(screen is 640x480, tilesize is 32x32, that's a 15x20 array of INTs => 1200 bytes, i.e. small)

This is imperfect(partically showing edge tiles), but you get the idea.

Post by **Crush** » 16 Oct 2005, 17:40

i think both solutions look pretty ugly.

the spotlights look very unrealistic and the per-tile lightning at the screen by biggeruniverse makes the grid extremely obvious.

Reaktor · Post by **Reaktor** » 17 Oct 2005, 06:57

Well, the spotlight I'v been using is using single color and no fading on the edges, so it's not particulary great looking. Still, it's easy to add ~30px (or whatever) wide fading, and it's as close to create 'realistic' light in birdeye perspective as possible (except it's missing the shadows, but shadows can be implemented by detecting surrounding object's and making sectors which are uncovered by spotlight). Spotlight on concept-pics is just to give hint what kind of light I'm talking about and what kind of interesting aspects it gives.

It's true that having own tilespace for lighmap is faster, certainly, but in my opinion it is ugly because, as Crush stated, it's showing the grid. Since now a days we have fast computers, why couldn't we just use the power we are given?

Well, anyways, I have presented this idea and don't wan't to make it the only right way to approach lighting, so I'm fine with whatever solution the programmers come up with.

maci · Post by **maci** » 17 Oct 2005, 07:40

just like the did in the old zelda games .. when you entered a cave everything was dark except certain pixels around you .. there where even different steps of lightening depending on how much lights you turned on .. and they did all that without the need to draw extra tiles

xand · Post by **xand** » 17 Oct 2005, 14:20

Yes, I really liked that

Here's an example gif (so you don't have to get out ur old zelda

: