DRD Team

Right now, GZDoom's lights are omnidirectional. How about some additional light types?

I was thinking of directional lights (with an argument to control the pitch), ambient light (which could probably be just a really huge light, because even at 255 size, the dynamic light just isn't big enough for some situations), and maybe a spotlight type (again, with pitch).

These additions would help level builders create more visually appealing levels (with the proper usage of course).

Directional lights can't be done properly with the information at hand.
Huge lights won't be done because they can kill performance faster than you can look. If you need something larger you can use Vavoom light which multiply the radius by 4.


This is Doom not some modern engine with all the needed data to process light sources efficiently.

If you want ambient light and spot lights like that, your best choice is Half-Life. I can't see those being implemented easily in Doom as well.

You can always fake it sometimes, too. Spotlights especially. Using some fancy level editing skills and dummy sectors, you might be able to fake the effect of a moving spotlight. Or you could use a sprite to simulate the effect.

Or a model but it's still a long shot.

Snarboo wrote:You can always fake it sometimes, too. Spotlights especially. Using some fancy level editing skills and dummy sectors, you might be able to fake the effect of a moving spotlight. Or you could use a sprite to simulate the effect.

Faking a static spotlight that never moves is easy as hell too. Just use two dynamic lights.

Doomsday has a neat trick to do this in a really cheap but usable manner - It just lets you pick what lightmap texture gets used above, below and to the sides of an object. You can essentially use it to fake areas of shadow, and I don't see it being hard to implement (really, just a swap out of the basic blob light texture for something custom)