Pictured: Q3 map format with dynamic light sources in next version of Quake3_Quake1 (hotel1.bsp)
The Quake 3 map format does not have support for the type of dynamic lights that Quake 1 supports. Here we are talking about flickering lights or strobe lights or lights you can turn on or off.
These are the kind of lights that give the Quake 1 map E1M1 the "E1M1 feel".
Quake 3 map format and the Quake 3 map compile tools have no method available for doing the type dynamic lights on E1M1.
A Discussion That Starts At Point A and Leads To Dynamic Lights For Q3
DarkPlaces supports real-time lighting. This feature does not solve the problem here. We could have specific types of animated "lightstyles" available in real-time lighting. But this is not what we want.
Additionally, there is no mechanism to support turning a light on or off.
There are few individuals including jakub1 who has been incredibly helpful with describing DarkPlaces features. During a discussion of how the real-time lights editor works and supplemental tools made by the user community, examined the DarkPlaces source to see if something could be done in Zircon engine to make this easier. First, I would need to fully understand how real-time lights work from A to Z including all parameters and the format of the rtlights file.
I came across a field called "mode". "No idea what that vague name could be. Must find what the values are expected in the engine source." Saw "LIGHTFLAG_NORMALMODE 1, LIGHTFLAG_REALTIMEMODE 2".
As it turns out, DarkPlaces supports putting regular lights in the real-time lights file. This small piece of functionality would become the gateway for a flood of new features.
Pictured: The Zircon parking garage. Many tests have been performed here. In this case, a test of all 14 Quake 1 lightstyles/types in Q3 map format plus cubemap test.
The next version of Quake3_Quake1 will have ..
- Dynamic light source support for Q3 bsp (whole pipeline from map editor to DarkPlaces or Zircon.)
- Access to colored dynamic light sources.
- Ability to "make your own" special light animation using a simple field for the light in the map editor.
- Q3 map: Flickering Lights
- Q3 map: Turn Lights On or Off
- Cubemap support including in the map editor, selecting any of the cubemap images.
- Day and Night Support
Quake3_Quake1 source code in QuakeC has a large string handling library that takes the DarkPlaces string functions and adds perhaps 100 new functions, so using any piece of a cube map to get it back to source is a couple lines of human readable code.
The Zircon parking garage did actually start out as a true parking garage, before becoming a test map for experiments.
