Let There Be Lightmaps

Monday, 30th July 2007

Original post by Ravuya
Eventually I gave up on my mod (double shotguns).

Heh, you might like the Killer Quake Pack. grin.gif

I've added some primitive parsing and have now loaded the string table, instructions, functions and definitions from progs.dat but can't do a lot with them until I work out what the instructions are. Quake offers some predefined functions as well (quite a lot of them) so that'll require quite a lot of porting.

Original post by Evil Steve
I seem to recall that the original Quake used "Truebright" colours (Which were either the first or last 16 colours in the palette), and these colours weren't affected by lighting. How the rendering was done, I've no idea.

I haven't looked at the data structures so could be making this up entirely: Quake does lighting using a colour map (a 2D structure with colour on one axis and brightness on the other). I'm assuming, therefore, that for the fullbright colours they map to the same colour for all brightnesses, rather than fade to black.

How could you simulate that? I guess that the quickest and dirtiest method would be to load each texture twice, once with the standard palette and once with the palette adjusted for the darkest brightness and use that as a luma texture. I believe Scet did some interesting and clever things with pixel shaders for DOOM, but that would end up playing merry Hell with 24-bit truecolour external textures.

I might make a Quake clone as my next random side project / engine code test actually. I like doing cool low level stuff like this.

Aye, it's fun. smile.gif



I think I've cracked those blasted lightmaps.

2007.07.27.06.jpg   2007.07.29.01.jpg

The lightmaps are small greyscale textures applied to faces to provide high-quality lighting effects with a very small performance overhead. Most of the visible faces have a lightmap.

They are stored in the BSP file. Extracting them has been a little awkward, not helped by a very stupid mistake I made.

Each face has a pointer to its lightmap. To get a meaningful texture out of the BSP we also need to know its width and height, which are based on the bounds of the face's vertices.

However, a lightmap is a 2D texture, and a face occupies three dimensional space. We need to scrap an axis!

Each face is associated with a plane. Each plane has a value which indicates which axis it closest lies orthogonal to. I could use this property to pick the component to discard!

This didn't work too well. Most of the textures were scrambled, and most of them were the same width. This should have rung warning bells, but I ignored this and moved on to other things. The problem was that each face (made up of edges) specifies which of the level's global list of edges comes first, and how many edges it uses (edges are stored consecutively).

// My code looked a bit like this:
for (int i = 0; i < Face.EdgeCount; ++i) {
    Edge = level.Edges[i];
    //
}

// It should have looked like this:
for (int i = 0; i < Face.EdgeCount; ++i) {
    Edge = level.Edges[i + Face.FirstEdge];
    //
}

With that all in position, sane lightmap textures appear as if by magic!

2007.07.27.01.jpg

The textures aren't really orientated very well. Some are mirrored, some are rotated - and the textures of some are still clearly the wrong width and height. This 3D-to-2D conversion isn't working very well.

Each face references some texture information, including two vectors denoting the horizontal and vertical axes for aligning the texture. This information can surely also be used to align the lightmaps correctly (where 2D.X = Vector2.Dot(3D, Horizontal), 2D.Y = Vector2.Dot(3D, Vertical))?

2007.07.27.02.jpg

I now draw these textures after the main textures and before the luma textures.

2007.07.27.04.jpg
2007.07.27.05.jpg

Problem: There are typically > 4000 lightmap textures. Rendering all of the lightmaps drops the > 200FPS framerate down to about 35FPS. This isn't great!

Coupling this problem with the other problem that drawing non-world BSP objects (such as ammo crates) isn't very practical at the moment gives me a good excuse to write a new renderer.

Quake uses a BSP tree to speed up rendering. Each leaf has a compressed visibility list attached to it, indicating which other leaves are visible from that one. Each leaf also contains information about which faces are inside it, and so by working out which leaf the camera is in you can easily get a list of which faces are available.

/// <summary>Gets the leaf that contains a particular position.</summary>
/// <param name="position">The position to find a leaf for.</param>
/// <returns>The containing leaf.</returns>
public Node.Leaf GetLeafFromPosition(Vector3 position) {
	// Start from the model's root node:
	Node SearchCamera = this.RootNode;
	for (; ; ) {
		// Are we in front of or behind the partition plane?
		if (Vector3.Dot(SearchCamera.Partition.Normal, position) > SearchCamera.Partition.D) {
			// We're in front of the partition plane.
			if (SearchCamera.FrontLeaf != null) {
				return SearchCamera.FrontLeaf;
			} else {
				SearchCamera = SearchCamera.FrontNode;
			}
		} else {
			// We're behind the partition plane.
			if (SearchCamera.BackLeaf != null) {
				return SearchCamera.BackLeaf;
			} else {
				SearchCamera = SearchCamera.BackNode;
			}
		}
	}
}

The following three screenshots show a wireframe view of going around a sharp corner using the visibility list information from the level's BSP file.

2007.07.29.04.jpg   2007.07.29.05.jpg   2007.07.29.06.jpg

Another fix in the new renderer is the correction of faces that don't have a lightmap texture. Some faces - such as those which are completely dark, or the faces used for the sky texture - don't have such information, and are currently rendered at full brightness.

2007.07.29.07.jpg     2007.07.29.08.jpg
Before and after the fix

If the renderer encounters a lightmap-less face, it enables lighting, sets the ambient light to the face's brightness level, draws the face, then disables lighting again. As you can see from the screenshots this looks a lot better. smile.gif

The new renderer not only renders the levels using the BSP tree - it also breaks them down into individual models. A level file contains multiple models. The first model is the main level architecture. Other models form parts of the level that can be moved.

2007.07.29.09.jpg   2007.07.29.10.jpg   2007.07.29.11.jpg
Models 0, 1 and 2 of The Slipgate Complex

Having multiple BSP renderer objects means that I can now render the ammo boxes and health packs.

2007.07.29.12.jpg
maps/b_bh25.bsp

I'm not sure what advantage there is to using BSP models instead of Alias models for these items.

2007.07.29.13.jpg
Place of Two Deaths has a Place of Two Medikits
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