Dynamic Lighting

Tuesday, 18th September 2007

Quake has a few dynamic lights - some projectiles, explosions and the fireballs light up their surroundings.

Fortunately, the method used is very simple: take the brightness of the projectile, divide it by the distance between the point on the wall and the light and add it to the light level for that point. This is made evident by pausing the early versions of Quake; when paused the areas around dynamic lights get brighter and brighter as the surface cache gets overwritten multiple times.

The next problem is that a light on the far side of a thin wall will light up both sides! Happily, this bug wasn't fixed in Quake, and is very evident in the start level where you can see the light spots from the fireballs in the Hard hall on the walls of the Medium hall.

I'd noticed that fireball-spawning entites would occasionally spawn a still fireball then remove it some seconds later. Looking over the Quake source code, it would appear that in each update the game iterates over all entities, checks their movetype property, then applies physics as applicable. Fireballs don't seem to have any real physics to speak of (they can pass through walls) beyond adding gravity each update to their velocity.

This required some further changes to get the VM working, including console variable support (gravity is defined in the sv_gravity console variable - this allows for the special low-gravity Ziggurat Vertigo).

For some reason the pickups seem to have their movetype set to TOSS resulting in all of the pickups flying away when the level started (not to mention abysmal performance). I added a hack to the droptofloor() QuakeC function that sets their on-floor flag (and hence disables their physics), but I'm not sure what the best course of action is going to be. I'm having to dig deeper and deeper into Quake's source, now...

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