Below are some examples of various types of lights and effects along with the light ODF parameters. These examples only show snippets of the ODF parameters, such as color and radius, can be set to whatever the user desires.

Editor Lights

There are 4 types of lights: abmient (includes top and bottom), directional light, point light, and spot light. There are some common parameters to all lights types and each type has additional parameters that affect only that type.

Light Parameters

Editor Parameters

Name Description

Dir Light Icon Size the size of the directional light icon

Spot/Omni Icons whether or not to display in wireframe or solid mode

Show Real Lighting turns lighting on and off

Common Parameters

Name Description

Casts Shadows whether or not the light should cast shadows

Static whether the light has been burned into ALL "-vertexlighting" objects (this is explained more in the section below)

Texture a texture that acts as a mask for the light

Wrap Mode the wrap mode for the texture

Blend Mode (PS2 only) how the light texture should be blended

Color the color of the light

Directional Parameters

Name Description

Bounding Region the name of a region. Only objects in the region will be affected by the light.

The name should be the region name you type in the "Type" edit box. If no name is specified it will affect all objects.

Omni Parameters

Name Description

Radius the size of the omni light

Spot Parameters

Name Description

Range the length of the spot light

Inner the inner cone angle of the light

Outer the outer cone angle of the light

Bidirectional whether or not the spot light should have a double cone (useful for light becon

Global Light Settings

The global light settings are lights that are always present unless excluded by a "Shadow" region. The global light settings are described below.

Shadow Regions

A shadow region redefines how to interpret the global light settings. You can create a shadow region by placing a region and setting its type to "Shadow". The shadow region properties let you attenuate each directional light, set new ambient colors, and assign a new environment map for that region.

Misc Topics

• Each object can only be affected by at most 1 ambient light, 2 directional lights, 4 omni lights (3 on PS2) and 1 spot light. If more lights affect an object then a heuristic is used to choose the “best” lights to use.
• Statically lit objects (any msh tagged with –vertexlighting) take lighting from non-static lights (any light that isn’t marked as static). However it is required that these objects are vertex lit offline. Static lights include ambient light. Start by painting all vertices the ambient color and then selectively add areas of light.
• Shadowed lights should not overlap
• Areas that have local shadows should be more tessellated for better shadow fading

Glow (or HDR)

Glow will bloom bright light sources that you specifically tag under the lighting drop down box in the edit flags. The HDR effect is off by default. All parameters are adjustable from the console with the prefix “HDR.” Below is a description of all the parameters along with their default values:

Effect(“HDR”)

{

Enable(0) // whether or not the hdr effect should be enabled

DownSizeFactor(0.25) // what fraction of the back buffer to use when bloom (smaller means

// better framerate – don’t go below 0.25)

NumBloomPasses(5) // the number of blur passes higher numbers means bigger blooms and

// is more costly

MaxTotalWeight(1.2) // the amount to over-brighten the glow areas

GlowThreshold(0.5) // value at which a pixel is considered to be blooming lower values

// mean more pixels will be blooming

GlowFactor(1.0) // a factor used to dim the overall appearance of the bloom (probably

// better to use less bloom passes or less total weight)

}

Attaching lights to materials

This is used for when you want some emissive polygons to animate according to the light intensity. In the mesh option file specify the following:

-attachlight “<nodename> <lightname>”

<nodename> is the name of the xsi node that contains the geometry you want to animate

<lightname> is the name of the light (you specify the name of the light in the light odf – see docs)

NOTE: the quotation marks are needed!

Example

tan4_bldg_barracks.msh.option

-attachlight "flickering_light white_light_flicker"

flickering_light is the name of a piece of geometry in the tan4_bldg_barracks.msh

white_light_flicker is the Name property given in the light ODF named flicker_white_light.odf

flicker_white_light.odf:

[GameObjectClass]

 ClassLabel = "Light"

[Properties]

 Name = white_light_flicker //this is the lightname

 Color = "255 255 255"

 OmniRadius = 4.0

 FlickerType = StrobeRandom

 FlickerPeriod = 0.5

 ShadowCaster = 1

 FlareIntensity = 0.0

 ConeLength = 0.0

 HaloRadius = 0.0

Removing/Adding light to a vertex lit object

This is used if you already vertex lit a mesh and you want to brighten/darken it.

You can specify how much light to add/subtract in the mesh option file using the following option:

-ambientlighting “r=<-1.0..1.0> g=<-1.0..1.0> b=<-1.0..1.0>“

The r,g,b parameters specify how much light to add/subtract from each color channel.

NOTE: the quotation marks are needed!

Example

 -ambientlighting "r=0.5 g=0.0 b=-0.8"

Shadow parameters

I added some parameters that globally effect shadows. Below is a description of the parameters along with the default values:

Effect(“Shadow”)

{

Enable(1) // whether or not shadows should be enabled

BlurEnable(0) // whether or not to blur the shadows

Intensity(1.0) // intensity of the shadow

}

Blur

Blur will be off by default now if you want to enable it add it to the .fx file. It would be better if it was not used because it is expensive, not worth the cost and it is better to enable features such as HDR and soft shadows. I’m considering removing it from the game because the HDR effect does similar processing.