RF Just Can't Take That Much

[paradoxnj]

Jay, that is 8 lights active in a single pass. You can use multiple passes to have more lights using fixed function lighting.

[Jay]

Ah, interesting, i didn't know that. I thought games were just selecting the 8 nearest lights and then using them. (Always seemed kind of restricting to me, though) Thanks for clearing that up.

[paradoxnj]

Yeah...I thought that at first as well. It is still not very efficient to have more than 2 lights affecting any piece of geometry. Most games use the 2 nearest lights for lighting calculations. Shader model 3 makes this easier by allowing you to do loops on the GPU.

Every light you add just destroys the frame rate. Someone should look into using fixed function lighting in G3D in addition to lightmaps. You will get some better lighting. Even better, would be to use per pixel lighting through built in shaders with DX9. You can use shaders on software transformed geometry although it kinda defeats the purpose.