Half-Life Trinity Engine Created 12 years ago2011-12-09 11:31:35 UTC by Suparsonik

Looks like you don't even know what dynamic radiosity is

I don't want to be a debbie downer but that water looks sooooooo out of place next to standard-scaled textures and low polygon maps. You'd really have to build your maps specifically around this if you wanted it to look right.

There's no such thing as truly dynamic radiosity right now. BF3's radiosity generation works off of a simplified map mesh, which is then mapped onto more complicated geometry. Their level designers are effectively creating two versions of their maps. Even so it takes a few seconds to compute, which is still too slow to be interactive. It's great for the level designers though.

Even if truly dynamic radiosity could work it would still be a bad choice. Most dynamic light sources are small lights. Their lighting contributions to a larger scene would be negligible, and so the extra computation is there for no real purpose. The largest contributing dynamic light source I can think of is vehicle lights, or maybe even explosions (but they're short lived).

Another downside is that realtime dynamic radiosity would look terrible unless the light-map resolutions were cranked up really high. If you used dynamic radiosity on a flashlight the light would be fuzzy around where it hit. Also the filtering of the light map texture would cause some weird artifacts if you moved the flashlight around. You would clearly see the individual lightmap texels as the light moved unless the light map resolution was non-computationally high.

Really though most light sources are static. Even if you made an effort to use dynamic lights, most of the lights would still be static. It will happen eventually but it isn't worth it now. I think it will jump straight to ray-tracing though. Re-computing radiosity again and again per frame is more wasteful than pure ray tracing because it lights a ton of unseen geometry, while ray tracing only lights what you can see and what affects it.

Not really sure why you think you're unwelcome at TWHL. Maybe it's something from before my time. The Internet has a short memory, if you feel like getting active on TWHL again, please do so!