Renderer wishlist

[NAB622]

Yo, I'm just curious what you all think - what would you like to see added to the JA renderer? (Ignore everything about Rend2, I'm talking about rd-vanilla, the base game renderer.)

 

Don't worry about what's possible or not, I'm interested in a complete list.

[Noodle]

I don't know if it's related to rendering, but I want better working toggable and movable lights. Most of the time when I'm trying to do toggable lights I get errors one way or the other that produce black texture on the surrounding areas. Really unhelpful when trying to create an immersive atmosphere in some maps.

[Droidy365]

Normal maps, they can really bring textures to life.

[AshuraDX]

Fix the character min light. If you spawn into a pitchblack room with no lighting at all the character will still be slightly illuminated.

[NAB622]

Noted.

 

Ashura, to be honest, I never even thought about the minlight issue..... I guess I took it for granted. That sounds like the easiest suggestion so far.

[Lancelot]

Better dynamic shadows would be nice, as I find them too awkward and blocky sometimes (especially on characters and objects). It would be also cool to have filters to select, like film grain, HDR or cel-shading.

[AshuraDX]

@@NAB622 @@Droidy365

I wouldn't bother with Normal Maps for vanilla tbh, normal maps won't do a lot for jka without a massive rework of the lighting and reflection system at which point you're better of to build up on rend2 or Somaz GL renderer which already did that. Vanilla JKA doesn't even do per pixel shading (which is a requirement for normal maps) of character models at the moment and instead relies purely on vertex lighting.

 

Better Dynamic shadows and dynamic lights sound like good suggestions though, the main problem with the latter is more on the side of q3map2 and how it utilizes 4 versions of the same lightmap to fake different lightstates which is why those errors @@Noodle is referring to appear when you have multiple different dynamic lighting styles in the same area.

[SomaZ]

@@NAB622 @@Droidy365

I wouldn't bother with Normal Maps for vanilla tbh, normal maps won't do a lot for jka without a massive rework of the lighting and reflection system at which point you're better of to build up on rend2 or Somaz GL renderer which already did that. Vanilla JKA doesn't even do per pixel shading (which is a requirement for normal maps) of character models at the moment and instead relies purely on vertex lighting.

Jka does per pixel shading for lightmapped and lightgrid lit objects. Vertex lit objects aren't per pixel shaded. Problem with normal mapping is that you need the light incident vector. Only the lightgrid stores this, so the problem is normal mapping vertex lit and lightmap lit objects. One can kind of fake it with the lightgrid in modern opengl, but it's not preferable. There are surfaces that are out of the affection volume of the lightgrid so you still won't get a proper incident vector for these.

 

Btw, HDR rendering is not a posteffect. Tonemapping, which is essential for hdr rendering, is a posteffect. Problem is that all jka lightsources are LDR, so you would need to fake HDR for vanilla maps and that's also not preferable.

 

Edit: Player models are lightgrid lit. They compute the light contribution once per model. The renderer takes the center of the model and interpolates the lighting from the closest lightgrid points. The renderer adds dynamic light contributions to the lightgrid values then. The complete model gets shaded with the computed values. (Direct light color, direct light incident vector and ambient light)

[NAB622]

@@NAB622 @@Droidy365

I wouldn't bother with Normal Maps for vanilla tbh

 

Sssshhhh. Everything is possible. Nothing is forbidden.

[Droidy365]

Another thing that would be amazing, but probably won't happen in a million years: Ray Tracing/Path Tracing

[NAB622]

I can only imagine how powerful of a rig one would need to raytrace JA in real time, 60fps....

[Lazarus]

normal physics, current physics are script depending, there was a test a while ago with implimentation of physics. This means a breakable would litterly be breakable and leave trace arround.

[NAB622]

normal physics, current physics are script depending, there was a test a while ago with implimentation of physics. This means a breakable would litterly be breakable and leave trace arround.

 

Ya, that test was Cagelight. Ignoring physics for now (They're still a thing). Just focusing on renderer. Because reasons.