UnrealSP.org

This is a little something I'm working on on the side. I did this ages ago but I never got it working quite right. Now however, I figured out a way to redo Unreal's lighting in levels without the use of custom textures. Just a custom level, and a simple mutator. It works really well. You'll notice in some of these screenies, a few textures are messed up but I'm working on that. I just wanted to show that this was possible and I'm interested if anyone else is interested in this.

Is the shadows working well in front of the wents?

That is pretty cool. Though the brightness seems like it's been whacked up.
Look forward to seeing how you did this.

yeah blame gamma correction for the brightness. The method isnt hard...its a technique used by most mappers actually...but usually it involves custom textures. The only thing I managed to do was make it work without custom textures.

And for those who cant read...IT STILL REQUIRES A CUSTOM LEVEL...lighting needs to be rebuilt...period...there's just no way around that. It's how the engine works. No "227 magic" here sorry.

There other ways to enhance the quality of shadows without using a modified driver or engine build.

A long time ago, I learned that if you scale the textures down, this increases the resolution of the light texels thus giving you higher quality shadows. This was passed onto me by the guys behind the real life mod for Unreal. Actually, it was Bleach who gave this to me.

In any case, not sure if you were aware of this so I thought it appropriate to pass it along.

damaged wrote:There other ways to enhance the quality of shadows without using a modified driver or engine build.

A long time ago, I learned that if you scale the textures down, this increases the resolution of the light texels thus giving you higher quality shadows. This was passed onto me by the guys behind the real life mod for Unreal. Actually, it was Bleach who gave this to me.

In any case, not sure if you were aware of this so I thought it appropriate to pass it along.

That's exactly what Shivaxi did here, except he scaled the textures down with a mutator rather than making a custom texture package for it

yeah...there's no modified driver or engine build wtf xD where did that come from?

I also made a mutator which switches all lights to OmniBumpMap...which looks great...but....lags like hell xD In most places anyway...and on my machine, that pretty much spells unplayable for everyone else out there.

ividyon wrote:

damaged wrote:There other ways to enhance the quality of shadows without using a modified driver or engine build.

A long time ago, I learned that if you scale the textures down, this increases the resolution of the light texels thus giving you higher quality shadows. This was passed onto me by the guys behind the real life mod for Unreal. Actually, it was Bleach who gave this to me.

In any case, not sure if you were aware of this so I thought it appropriate to pass it along.

That's exactly what Shivaxi did here, except he scaled the textures down with a mutator rather than making a custom texture package for it

On second thought, why would you need a custom package?

Shivaxi wrote:yeah...there's no modified driver or engine build wtf xD where did that come from?

I also made a mutator which switches all lights to OmniBumpMap...which looks great...but....lags like hell xD In most places anyway...and on my machine, that pretty much spells unplayable for everyone else out there.

It was at the end of my day when I read the post and misunderstood what you had said. In any case, it looks cool.

Thanks. Pretty useless though =P

Shivaxi wrote:yeah...there's no modified driver or engine build wtf xD where did that come from?

I also made a mutator which switches all lights to OmniBumpMap...which looks great...but....lags like hell xD In most places anyway...and on my machine, that pretty much spells unplayable for everyone else out there.

Pure conjecture here, but I wonder if this is the sort of thing that could be majorly sped up by making changes to the renderer? Since the Unreal engine doesn't support hardware T&L, all the geometry and lighting will be bottlenecked by the CPU, hence it's so slow even on what I'm guessing is a pretty powerful computer. You find this in an awful lot of old engines when you try to push them too far.
There was a guy who basically coded a new renderer for Id Tech 3 called Rend2, which dramatically sped up Quake 3 on modern systems by doing all the geometry and lighting calculations right on the GPU instead of having to pass through the CPU first.
Now I absolutely don't claim to know if that's strictly the case or not for the Unreal engine, or if the rendering header is even modularised in a way that would allow somebody to implement this, but it might be worth looking into as a means of being able to get even better graphics out of this old but still amazing engine!

PS, first post in a while, been away. Hello again USP

It's theoretically possible to throw all lighting into OpenGL. the FLightManager class can externally handle lights if you're on rmode 6

[]KAOS[]Casey wrote:It's theoretically possible to throw all lighting into OpenGL. the FLightManager class can externally handle lights if you're on rmode 6

I wasn't aware of that. Pretty cool!

Yeah I want to learn more about OpenGL before I try to do it. I don't know a whole lot about it, as is. I know how to render multiskins and apply textures, but I don't know how to light things.

The main issue will be trying to replicate accurate lighting of Unreal using shaders. It'l be {probably?} impossible to do 1:1, especially without some source code intervention.

After that, It will be.. well.. interesting to try to use the baked-in lighting already in the map. I know nothing of how that's generated, so to repeat that lighting will be interesting.

Although, I may be able to completely replace the baked in lighting and replace it with true real time soft shadows.

This is all theoretical, of course. Don't keep your hopes up. All I know that should be possible is applying lighting externally, but if that actually can be done in the hardware is not known to me.

I've already done this with most of my maps, including the Skytown and Nyleve reduxes I was working on.

Skytown:




Nyleve: