The questions are down below if u don't want to read this crap.
Alil background:
Ok i have few lighting questions. I ideas on how to get them to work but i figure since u guys have been playing around with blitz3d for ages and I, a few months, that u'll probably have decovered something by now.
I know the hardware limitations is 8 max lights. Well, that even wouldn't be a problem if i had more control over them. The problem, u set a light, it becomes global..which is bad. U see, i'm just guess from what i've seen on professional games, that lighting is a function call and probably something that just happens once u set it when u're working directly with DX.
Now there is software lighting, i've tested out many of them and they are all pretty slow. about 1 millisec to light a mesh with 300+ vertices isn't an option. One big reason is that i have about 50,000 polygons on my screen now in my engine( for those who read my first post on here, yes, i'm still working on it :-D). So now i'm working on tryin to get a local lighting system up, where there's probably a global directional light and then local spot and point lights everywere else on actors(not so much the map, that's what light mapping is for..something i'm working on).
So now i'm thinking, hide entity might be an answer, then i reposition the lights and then render the entity. That'll probably work...if it wasn't for render order.
I read from halo's engine that he has multi render system that helps up the FPS. But i think how i'm goin to make sure that when renderworld is called, that This entity might not overlap the entity infront of it. If i create my own Z order system, i figured that would just be to slow and that's the the hardware is for. Now i figured i might just have all other entitys around it become black during the render...then i might be able to use 2d draw commands to the back buffer with transparence on..again tho, now it's rendering extra crap and 2d commands are kinda slow :(
****Questions******
So now how do i make something multirender without worrying about improper Z order?
Is there a decent way around blitz3d's global lighting system( like a function call...maybe someone can make a sweet DX7 DLL with the lighting call in it..:-D )?
Is there a way to make a particular part of a texture uneffected by lighting wihtout using a new surface/mesh to overlay the orginal one effected by light?
Alil background:
Ok i have few lighting questions. I ideas on how to get them to work but i figure since u guys have been playing around with blitz3d for ages and I, a few months, that u'll probably have decovered something by now.
I know the hardware limitations is 8 max lights. Well, that even wouldn't be a problem if i had more control over them. The problem, u set a light, it becomes global..which is bad. U see, i'm just guess from what i've seen on professional games, that lighting is a function call and probably something that just happens once u set it when u're working directly with DX.
Now there is software lighting, i've tested out many of them and they are all pretty slow. about 1 millisec to light a mesh with 300+ vertices isn't an option. One big reason is that i have about 50,000 polygons on my screen now in my engine( for those who read my first post on here, yes, i'm still working on it :-D). So now i'm working on tryin to get a local lighting system up, where there's probably a global directional light and then local spot and point lights everywere else on actors(not so much the map, that's what light mapping is for..something i'm working on).
So now i'm thinking, hide entity might be an answer, then i reposition the lights and then render the entity. That'll probably work...if it wasn't for render order.
I read from halo's engine that he has multi render system that helps up the FPS. But i think how i'm goin to make sure that when renderworld is called, that This entity might not overlap the entity infront of it. If i create my own Z order system, i figured that would just be to slow and that's the the hardware is for. Now i figured i might just have all other entitys around it become black during the render...then i might be able to use 2d draw commands to the back buffer with transparence on..again tho, now it's rendering extra crap and 2d commands are kinda slow :(
****Questions******
So now how do i make something multirender without worrying about improper Z order?
Is there a decent way around blitz3d's global lighting system( like a function call...maybe someone can make a sweet DX7 DLL with the lighting call in it..:-D )?
Is there a way to make a particular part of a texture uneffected by lighting wihtout using a new surface/mesh to overlay the orginal one effected by light?