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#1 04/24/14 13:04

TOCS
Member
From: Denmark
Registered: 04/04/07

Lightmapping

I was digging around on the OniGalore for some pre-beta stuff when I noticed a section covering pre-beta exclusive features specifically. I stumbled upon an image depicting what seems to be merely a exhibit of the lightmapping that was around back the early stages of Oni's development: http://wiki.oni2.net/Pre-beta_features#Lightmapping

This graphical difference alone makes, the otherwise average looking retail version, a billion times more appealing to the eye! Has there been any attempts to actually add lightmaps to the game? If so, can someone please direct me? Wouldn't it be possible in combination of external hooks to manually override the pre-baked lightning we currently have? When I say this I'm of course thinking of Boris Vorontsov's ENBSeries which injects unto games and overrides some parts of the graphical API to add features such as bump mapping, real-time reflections, motion blur, bloom etc.

Oni is using some non-standard version of OpenGL, right? What possibilities lies within reach of that?

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#2 04/24/14 21:04

Iritscen
Moderator
From: NC, USA
Registered: 10/22/07

Re: Lightmapping

TOCS wrote:

I was digging around on the OniGalore for some pre-beta stuff when I noticed a section covering pre-beta exclusive features specifically. I stumbled upon an image depicting what seems to be merely a exhibit of the lightmapping that was around back the early stages of Oni's development: http://wiki.oni2.net/Pre-beta_features#Lightmapping

I'll 'fess up to writing that, only to point out that it was speculation on my part that the main image is from Oni.  However, even if it isn't, the images I linked to in the text after that are all in-game and depict roughly the same quality of lightmapping, so it's clear that the game did once look much better.

This graphical difference alone makes, the otherwise average looking retail version, a billion times more appealing to the eye! Has there been any attempts to actually add lightmaps to the game? If so, can someone please direct me?

See here: http://wiki.oni2.net/Lightmapping_levels.  As you'll see, geyser had lightmaps looking pretty good, however he ran into a problem; there's a reason why, when he retired, no one else continued it....

Wouldn't it be possible in combination of external hooks to manually override the pre-baked lightning we currently have?

You've made an important error in your wording here, whether you realize it or not, which is that you suggest that lightmapping is not baked lighting.  The lightmapping in Oni was being rendered (baked) by something like 3DS Max and then imported into Oni, based on the clues we've found in the game data.  The issue is not with inserting the functionality, as geyser showed it can be done in a hacky way even now, but rather the data is the issue; we don't have the lightmaps that Bungie calculated for the levels, and it's possible that whatever data they had eventually became obsolete when they dropped lightmapping during development but continued working on the game.

Anyway, in theory it would just be a matter of importing the level into a 3D editor and baking the lighting, but there's no easy way to bring it into Oni.  I never learned the details of the technique that geyser used, but if it was too much work for him, then there isn't another human alive who will have the doggedness to work on this project.

When I say this I'm of course thinking of Boris Vorontsov's ENBSeries which injects unto games and overrides some parts of the graphical API to add features such as bump mapping, real-time reflections, motion blur, bloom etc.

I didn't realize that he sometimes added all those features to game engines.  I've just seen him adjust some existing effects, like his famous de-yellowing of Deus Ex:HR.  It's hard for me to comment on this since I'm not sure how he does it.

Oni is using some non-standard version of OpenGL, right? What possibilities lies within reach of that?

Because OpenGL was so new back then, it didn't offer a lot of features for Oni to take advantage of.  As Neo explained to me recently, back then you couldn't even use OpenGL to handle occlusion.  Also, Oni was developed during the era of competing 3D standards, so it had to support 3dfx cards and other stuff.  So basically Oni does a lot of stuff in software that now would be done through OpenGL calls to the graphics card.  That's why the engine slows down so much even on modern PCs when we push it with modded content; it's hardly touching your graphics card.

Anyway, there is some work being done by Neo which might relieve the engine of some of its troubles by updating the renderer to more modern OpenGL standards, but I'm not sure it will help us use lightmaps at all.  I will ask him about this, though.


Check out the Anniversary Edition Seven at ae.oni2.net!

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#3 04/26/14 05:04

TOCS
Member
From: Denmark
Registered: 04/04/07

Re: Lightmapping

It does indeed sound like a lot of work. smile

From what I understand there was a lot more testing going on for the Mac version of the game. I read somewhere on the OniGalore that several public tests where made. Did any of these test builds contain graphical additions that are non-existent today? I remember someone here talking about having fetched the engine source code itself from the Mac publisher (or something close to that) - is this code being worked on in any kind of way?

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#4 04/26/14 07:04

Iritscen
Moderator
From: NC, USA
Registered: 10/22/07

Re: Lightmapping

Yes, Edwin at Feral Interactive got the source code so Feral could produce a Mac Intel build after Macs moved to Intel chips.  They did add FSAA and a couple other little things like that.  We helped them test their builds for a while.  The only release of that work was a beta build back in 2011.  Unfortunately it doesn't seem that Feral has the time to do anything major with the engine, as even releasing a final Intel build never happened.  So when it comes to major changes, it's up to the fans to make that happen.  Neo is almost finished with his recreation of the renderer, so we'll see where that leads, though that's Windows-only, unfortunately for us Mac users.  I haven't gotten to ask him about lightmapping yet; we've talked briefly about it in the past and he said it would be nice to add in, but he didn't say how hard it would be.


Check out the Anniversary Edition Seven at ae.oni2.net!

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#5 04/26/14 11:04

Iritscen
Moderator
From: NC, USA
Registered: 10/22/07

Re: Lightmapping

I talked with Neo about lightmapping.  It would require some way to attach the lightmap data to the existing geometry, of course, but it's theoretically not too hard.  But as you saw in the wiki article about lightmapping, geyser had to do a lot of manual work to generate the lightmaps, including breaking the level up into pieces, and even then some polygons were not being lit properly.  So I think the main issue is that no one has the time and technical ability to make the lightmaps.


Check out the Anniversary Edition Seven at ae.oni2.net!

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#6 04/26/14 11:04

TOCS
Member
From: Denmark
Registered: 04/04/07

Re: Lightmapping

Yeah, I could imagine it would be quite time consuming. But really, back when I toyed around with textures for Oni way back in 2008, there was a ton of manual work that had to be done as well -- I'll never forget how much time I spent making .bat files so that I could convert between Oni's files and standard image formats. tongue I'll see how things look in a month or two when my finals are over. smile

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