Considering a Doom 3/Chaos Theory game engine with old-school techniques on modern hardware.

[Cyan]

back into Doom 3, this is the version I'm currently playing, an open source version of the game -which is algo open source- that supports DirectX 12 and Vulkan, and adds other modern features.

GitHub - RobertBeckebans/RBDOOM-3-BFG: Doom 3 BFG Edition source port with updated DX12 / Vulkan renderer and modern game engine features

Doom 3 BFG Edition source port with updated DX12 / Vulkan renderer and modern game engine features - RobertBeckebans/RBDOOM-3-BFG

github.com

I talked more about it in the Doom 3 thread.

 

[Davros]

So I finished Industria and found it boring

 

[inlimbo]

Sorry to hear. It's got a lot of a rough edges but the potential is there for something cool in the followup.

Been wondering about sector-based lighting tricks lately. Seems like that's underexplored in rasterized real-time lighting. I know idTech 4's games and the like relied on some sector exclusion tricks and I wonder why more games don't.

Seems like that could've been one solution to single-toned gray and blah real-time solutions pre-SSAO (and I still find SSAO a wanting solution) - boxes defining sectors where a custom ambient light is set. Interiors are defined in sectors with a default lower ambient term than exterior lighting, etc. Feels like that could've been as elegant solution as Sucker Punch's fake SSAO solution for Infamous 2: IIRC rather than use any SSAO they simply gave every dynamic object a rectangularish drop/blob shadow texture that sat flush with whatever object that object was resting on. All the benefits of SSAO with none of the post-process, alpha blending affecting drawbacks. They could even selectively enable them where it made sense so you don't see the indiscriminate coverage you'd see with SSAO.

So what am I missing? Was the multipass rendering necessary to accomplish sector tricks like the above too expense at the time? I imagine there are ways to optimize and sorta fake sector tricks like this using textures too, as in a more complex iteration of Sucker Punch's SSAO trick. In any case how viable would this be for a modern renderer and why don't games attempt this more often? I mean I get that baked lightmaps are effectively texture based "sector darkeners" in traditional rendering. They are a non-uniform precalculated representation of what someone could otherwise accomplish by painting into sectors of the world if they really wanted to do so.

A real-time sector based approximation of this seems very viable and desirable for a real-time lighting solution that doesn't leverage raytracing or lightmaps; and I use approximation lightly as I wouldn't expect any sector occlusion to approach the subtlety of global illumination and bounced lighting.