Lightmaps cont.

Well, it's been a little while since there has been any progress of note on any of my primary projects, but today I finally felt motivated enough to jump back in to work on Synergy.

What have I been up to in the mean time? After having a game of a WarCraft III map called `Warchasers' at Ben's place, I felt compelled to make a much improved clone of its gameplay. I worked obsessively on this clone, titled Netherworld Odysseys. It has become quite sophisticated, with a generalised random loot system, random monster spawning, character saving, charged item stacking, multiple difficulty levels including difficulty scaling with number of players, door/key system and Diablo 2-style mercenaries. Here's a couple of screenshots just for fun:

Assaulting the Spider Warren

The derelict wastelands of the Prison Realm

Unfortunately the map was foremost designed as a multiplayer experience, but due to a number of technical shortcomings saving and load of characters became a necessary process to keep the map running, and saving/loading of data only works for single player. This in effect rendered the map a single-player only experience, killing my enthusiasm for it.

However, it's not a complete loss. The triggers I developed for it are highly modular in nature and much of the cool features of the map can be reused in other warcraft maps of mine. If I find time and enthusiasm I might return to it and see if I can improve some of the technical issues crippling it currently and bring it back to a playable state for multiple players, get it to a satisfying play length and release it. Until then it festers on my hard drive...

So! What did today bring? I admit that I had become horrificly bogged down with the lightmap functionality of Synergy and thus suffering a fetid case of Coder's Block. The lightmaps needed to be divided into correct patches over the level geometry to give an unstretched, unwarped surface for the lighting to exist over.

Such functionality is non-existent in Synergy in its current state, and my coder's block prevented me from proceeding further with the matter. Thus, today was spent researching methods for patching, and other methods of lighting a scene.

I ended up reading up on radiosity methods, and the literature revealed a great deal of insight to me. Such was the extent of my new-found understanding that I went back to the problem of patching with much clarity and began to sketch out a patching algorithm for Synergy (based largely upon this example).

I'm still going through it, and will continue work on it tomorrow, but as it stands currently it seems most satisfactory. Upon implementation I expect Synergy's light mapping to be devoid of artifacts, uniform and correctly aligned. From there it's a very simple extension to add in some brute radiosity.

Here's hoping there's no hitches.