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Ok, here's a big question which doesnt seem to have really been asked before. How do you make a good looking level? I'm in the process of putting together an engine to be used for RPGs and I've hit the tiny little snag of the levels looking like a bag of shite.

The thing that seems the most important thing to me is lighting/light mapping. The beautiful thing about BSP isn't really it's collision, or speed, it's the way the light mapping is all calculated for you and your levels look realistic as a result.

... but BSPs aren't suitable for all types of games, and they're also buggy at the moment. So the rest of us opt for a combination of models and matricies. But how do you make them look good? Matrices are ok, because you can set the normals and give the effect of light mapping to a moderate degree, but .X models just look crap. I mean, is there anyway, other than making textures with pre-drawn lighting, to make models look light mapped? It doesnt seem to matter how good the textures are, and how well made the models are - they just look crap in DB because there is no real shadowing.

Any ideas?

Well, I'm confused ...

I don't use modelling programs ... about all I have the skill to model is 'lump of clay', but I'd assume that they would allow you to generate and save with normals precalculated.

Personally, I generate my own terrains by converting from heightmaps to meshes, and calculate the normals as I do so - looks Ok, and will look better once I sort out one or two niggles.

Kevil wrote a light mapper. I'm not 100% sure how it works exactly, but here goes:

* Make your map in .x format
* Load it up into Kevil's light mapper
* Place some lights in kevil's light mapper.
* Let it work its magic and produce you a supplementry .x model
* load both models in exactly the same position, but negatively ghost the lightmapped version.

Enjoy...

Ahh yeah, normals is fine. There's no problem in DB with getting the faces facing the light to be lit and faces facing away to be dark. But that's only half the battle isn't it. Inside a house building, where the lights are switched off, you dont want a light source from outside lighting the wall inside the house, just because its facing it.

I'm not really talking about how objects take light. I really am talking about light mapping, and shadowing (but not real time shadowing - as I know thats too much to ask). For simple objects, normals and how objects take light to each face is fine, but when you're talking about static objects and specifically buildings, you want shadowing and darkness in the way BSPs work, otherwise the levels just look tacky.

Ooo, sounds like that could do the job adr. But also sounds like it could have a huge performance hit. I'll check it out anyway.

Stick with bsp's. U r right about the light mapper but you can alson store waypoints, light info, object info etc using BSP. I'm sure the bugs u have metioned will be written out in time.

I use BSP and it's totally adequate at the moment. Don't lose faith.

I'll be honest, I used to love bsp until I got dbpro. You know that help tutorial with the bsp level that's built into dbpro? Well, I run it on my system and I get about 45 fps. That's terrible for such a crappy looking level. No lightmapping, and I'm just in a big box area. The scene has about 4500 poly's with the skyshere and monsters. When i use 2 x files instead of bsp( one for model and other for lightmapping), I get about 300 fps. OH, I did change the sync to off and set sync rate to 0 in the help demo, just incase you're wondering. The test demo I made is way more complex with jumping and a gravity system, more polys and even a first and third person camera and runs over 6 times faster than the bsp method. Geesh, maybe it's just me, but bsp's don't work worth a darn in dbro. I use Cart shop 3.02 and I just export and go, super easy. I don't have to worry about converting and my lightmapping looks great. I can also do a search and replace in my lightmap model for ".bmp" and replace with ".jpg". Then i convert my lightmap bmp to a jpeg file. That way it only takes up 100 or 200 k instead of 3 or 4 meg. Makes it much easier for people to download.
Oh yeah, as far as waypoints, object info, light info and things like that. Cartography shop lets you assign properties for everything including lights, geometry, homemade entities, faces, etc. And someone wrote a handy dandy entity exporter too. It puts info into a text file you can easily open and read into a db program.

my specs are: amd xp 2500+, geforce 4ti4200, 1 GB DDR, w2k pro

old specs before the upgrade :amd 1Ghz, geforce 2ti, 1 GB, w2k pro
and it ran the help demo for bsp at about 20 fps. It ran my homemade demo using just x files at about 120 fps.

It's late and i'm rambling , sorry

How does cartography shop work then? I've got not intention of buying it, I'm just curious. Does it use that dark ghosting method for its light map, or what?

yeah, it does use the dark ghosting...at least that's how you do it in db to achieve the lightmap. In ver 6 of dbpro, the lightmapper will be fixed and there will be only one model loaded for scene instead of two. But even now it is fast.