Nexuiz's render effects

[cuiyehong]

Hi everyone, as anyone could see, Nexuiz's visual effects are amazinggggg.

I wonder if anyone could tell me besides the realtime lighting/shadow, what else features/technologies made this amazing visual effects came true ?

Are this render effects all came from Darkspaces or just used a few part of Darkspaces and did a lot of additional effort ?

Much Thanks for any answer !

[FruitieX]

Yes, almost everything you see is realtime. One thing springs into mind that is not calculated in realtime, and that's the whole lightmap. It is generated when the mapper compiles their map with q3map2, which TBH sucks quite much . As a mapper I'm just waiting for the built in darkplaces raytracer to get a save feature (plus eventually skybox and patches support to make it all easier), currently all it can do is generate the lightmap and of course use it in-game. Playing around with that for 10 minutes yields these results (compare to relatively ugly/flat feeling that the current aggressor map in Nexuiz has):

I'll do this same thing for all official maps the moment a save feature gets implemented, so get to work LordHavoc

[Rad Ished]

Hi Fruitiex, looks awesome, however i don't quite understand what you mean, built in raytracer?

[FruitieX]

Yeh you can have dp calculate the lightmaps instead of ol' q3map2, though there's no save function yet (and other quite important stuff missing such as no light from skybox, no smoothing over patches)

[Tei]

Hi Fruitiex, looks awesome, however i don't quite understand what you mean, built in raytracer?

Murky description follows:
I suppose he don't mean raytracer, but that lights emite ...light... these emissions have a shape so generate a volume (that is unfortunally not infinite) everything inside that volume is lighted.. (well.. the faces that .... face the light)

The more complex objects in scene, the more complex this volume will be, and the more lights, the more of these models will exist.
DP seems to combine this with lightmaps. So traditional lighting and dynamic lighting can be mixed for better effect.

It also support a lot of cool stuff like lumas (overbright pixels), bloom (everybody loves bloom), all part of the Quake3 shaders stuff.

Take my words with a grain of salt, I am not expert at this stuff

[Shoe]

Yes, almost everything you see is realtime. One thing springs into mind that is not calculated in realtime, and that's the whole lightmap. It is generated when the mapper compiles their map with q3map2, which TBH sucks quite much . As a mapper I'm just waiting for the built in darkplaces raytracer to get a save feature (plus eventually skybox and patches support to make it all easier), currently all it can do is generate the lightmap and of course use it in-game. Playing around with that for 10 minutes yields these results (compare to relatively ugly/flat feeling that the current aggressor map in Nexuiz has):

I'll do this same thing for all official maps the moment a save feature gets implemented, so get to work LordHavoc

Isn't it possible to generate external, and much higher resolution, lightmaps now? I seem to remember div showing off some tool that created much higher quality lightmaps than q3map2 can currently output. Though baked lightmaps still are quickly seeming... well, outdated, compared to a lot of modern technology. Though admittedly it's nice that they make it possible to run the engine well on older hardware.