Plasma Lighting?

[Lontahv]

[..]however, for PyPRP you will need all your lamp distances to be large numbers.

I would like to add a note here. For the lamp type "sun" it's not a good idea to choose a large number.
As Trylon wrote in his "first age" tutorial here : http://www.guildofwriters.com/wiki/Addi ... of_surface

When adding lights with ray shadow enabled, take care to keep the dist value below 100 or so, or the resulting shadows may 'clip' or vanish entirely.

And this is true for a lamp type "sun". I made that mistake myselves. In fact, a sun lits a scene in Plasma regardless of it's dist value, so I did not take care about the value.
But I experienced a disappearing avatar shadow sometimes, because I've set the distance to about 200. Reducing the distance to 80 (below 100) solved the problem.

Let me clarify since the terminology is rather confusing. A "Sun" type is not the light type "Lamp". Although Blender does use "Lamp" instead of "light" as a general term for light-emitting points, they also have a type of lamp called "Lamp". This type of light is the simplest and, in my opinion should be the first to be used when learning about lighting. In PyPRP, a Blender light of the type Lamp (sun, area, and spot don't apply here) is exported as a Plasma "OmniLight".

[andylegate]

Makes great sense to light everything this way, but for true Myst ambiance it is unavoidable to use shadows around every in game light source. Ya know all the wall sconces, hanging lamps, desk lamps, glowy objects, etc. I know this means vast amounts of extra light mapping work, but I'd rather have one really good room than an entire age that lacks the realism necessary to immerse its visitors. In my opinion if the player can't get lost in your age's ambiance, then you have wasted your time.

No, see, that's what I'm trying to tell you: You can "light" your Age with textures just fine. Here, look at this texture here, and it's a texture from Uru, not a light map:



You have a light beam, light spash and shadows. It's perfect of like a directional light shining down. If you apply this texture to your wall, then you don't NEED a light that gives you the same effect during Real Time rendering. Instead, you'd only need to provide a light to light up the avatar if they can get to the wall at that point.

Please remember that with the exception of Myst V, the rest of the Myst games were "Pre-Rendered" images. The detail and realism was achieved by performing high resolution renderings of scenes, but the games themselves are only presenting what has already been rendered long ago by the game designers. I've been playing around with this type of game play myself with Pipmak.

You CAN still get some very impressive results in Uru with live rendering. If you take the time to create or get ahold of textures like above, apply them correctly to your objects, and yes, use lighting, but as I said, try to keep the lighting more towards lighting up your Avatar.

Light Maps can achieve the same effect as above, BUT, you will have to use large maps, and they will end up bloating your Texture PRP file to HUGE sizes. Cyan used light maps sparingly themselves.

[bnewton81]

Light Maps can achieve the same effect as above, BUT, you will have to use large maps, and they will end up bloating your Texture PRP file to HUGE sizes. Cyan used light maps sparingly themselves.

So what is the alternative?

I have begun to consider making custom textures for each face in my age. I know that sounds like a lot of work, but really it would end up being the same textures used over and over with minor changes to add variation. And as a side effect would guarantee a low-as-possible poly count.

[andylegate]

If that is what you'd like to do, you can. Custom textures made by fans is always awesome.

[Lontahv]

Keep in mind that having a lot of polygons is not as much of a hit has having a huge number of textures that must be loaded by the video adapter into memory.

[bnewton81]

It must seem like i'm being purposely obtuse to some of ya'll. What justifies "too many textures" ? Do they all get loaded at once upon link in? Seems to me they should only load when you get within a certain distance, until they are told otherwise.

[Luna]

It must seem like i'm being purposely obtuse to some of ya'll. What justifies "too many textures" ? Do they all get loaded at once upon link in? Seems to me they should only load when you get within a certain distance, until they are told otherwise.

well, that is were visregions come in But I have no idea what is "too many" in this case.

[andylegate]

He meant if you give each face on your mesh it's very own unique texture, and your mesh has 5000 faces, that's 5000 textures that would have to load (not to mention your texture prp file would be in the gigabyte size!) when the object get's rendered. That's asking both the game engine and a person's computer a LOT.

The texture example I gave above, you would put on just a certain section of a wall of course. Please try reading through my tutorials on Materials and Textures, they may help you understand better:

http://dusty.homeunix.net/wiki/Andy%27s ... _Tutorials

[Luna]

He meant if you give each face on your mesh it's very own unique texture, and your mesh has 5000 faces, that's 5000 textures that would have to load (not to mention your texture prp file would be in the gigabyte size!) when the object get's rendered. That's asking both the game engine and a person's computer a LOT.

But...but...why would you do that? I mean you can do quite a lot with a simple UV map. That is sort of what UV mapping is for. Blender doesn't even like meshes where different faces have different textures.

[bnewton81]

Yeah, I'm didn't mean doing individual faces for every face of every model just for like floors, walls, ceilings, and then only when they are long expanses where repetitiousness is very evident. I'm not so anal as to make textures for every facet of a diamond. I love your tuts too Andy. I have read a lot of them several times. Oh, and wouldn't it be better to export all the texture layers to photoshop or gimp and flatten them all into one texture then import back into blender? Seems to me that is probably what cyan did. Not that i know anything of course. I mean hell you could make a texture look anyway you wanted in photoshop without any need for lamp angles or baking. Oh btw, any of you guys watch extracreditz? Little vid that broaches subjects of game design in a fun way on http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2443-So-You-Want-to-be-a-Game-Designer I asked them if they'd do a video on urulive. Doubt they will, but eh who knows. Getting the word out that its still around can't be bad. Check out those vids I know you guys will appreciate them.