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4.9.9 Dynamic Worlds

Written by Jorrit Tyberghein, [email protected]. Last updated 28 September 1998.

This section contains a number of ideas and stuff but it is mostly outdated.

Normally the portal approach lends itself very well for dynamic worlds. However, the big problem is lighting. Static lightmaps are very static (as you can imagine) and are difficult to scale and recompute. This severely restricts what you can do dynamically in general. You can also use stencil shadows in which case there is no recalculation needed but the problem with stencil shadows is that they tend to get slower with big levels and lots of lights. Finally you can also use just regular vertex lighting with no shadows. The discussion below focusses on the situation where you want to use static lightmaps.

First a small definition. The sector-lights is the list of lights that affect some sector. Every sector will have a sector-lights list containing not only the lights in that sector but every light that shines through the sector. It will contain dynamic, pseudo-dynamic and static lights.

Another small note about lighting. Crystal Space currently has static lights, pseudo-dynamic lights and dynamic lights. The pseudo-dynamic lights are an extension on the static lights which allow the static light to change color or intensity but not move. The advantage of pseudo-dynamic lights compared to real dynamic lights is that shadows are computed more correctly. Pseudo-radiosity will also work correctly and there is no run-time view-frustum calculation as with dynamic lights. Their only disadvantage is that they cannot move.

Now on to the cases for dealing with lights:


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