Am I the only one around here

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Saturday, March 30, 2013, 11:29 (4255 days ago) @ ZackDark

And let's not forget the amazing "sun through the trees" godrays Halo:CE had.

Hehehe. That was definitely a good application of that sort of effect, though it's not exactly the same thing that we're talking about, at least not in implementation details.

Heck, Halo:CE had such an amazing light physics.

It uses a lot of basic effects in a lot of mixed and matched ways to produce a very rich and diverse light scape.

At the core of it all is an unusually hard split in how the game handles static environmental lights versus dynamic lights. In particular, the fact that dynamic lights trigger neither reflection maps nor specular reflections on dynamic objects immediately produces a ton of interesting effects. For instance, light up a dark room with your flashlight, and the dead elites and whatnot will have an eery, ghostly appearance. That happens because of a bizarre choice in the lighting system to not trigger certain types of lighting with the flashlight.

At some level it's a really simple lighting system by todays standards, but gives crazy interesting results because of the weird ways in which the bits and pieces of the system interact with each other.