Vertex light is cheating ?

[SCDS_reyalP]

Ok, so as not to crap on ydnars thread, we can have our own flamefest in this one.

• Vertex lighting is not cheating. To be cheating it would have to be prohibited by the rules of the particular competition, or the server operator. I don’t know of ANY competition organizations which restricts it.

• Any league, ladder or server admin who wished to restrict it could do so with punkbuster (r_vertexlight in 0) with no action required by mappers.

• Vertex lighting does not have to be fullbright, on any new maps compiled with ydnars q3map2 (see the :q3map stuff in the manual). On many older maps, it does make large areas fullbright.

• Vertex light can provide a performance boost, even on modern machines. The argument that it ‘only helps voodoo 1 level cards’ is, quite simply, bullshit.

• Attempting to restrict brightness is futile anyway, because of the variation in monitors and graphic cards. What is unplayable dark on one machine may be ‘cheatingly’ bright on another. Much as it would be nice to have light and shadow be an important factor in quake based games, this is IMPOSSIBLE to enforce outside of environments where all the players have identical machines. When people are playing on a wide varity of machines, allowing everyone to turn their brightness up to the point where shadows are not a factor gives you a more level playing field.

• picmip has nothing to do with vertex light, and can also be restricted by server admins or sanctioning bodies without any action by mappers.

Matt, I’d love to see the context of where you quote ydnar as saying “vertex lighting is the same as cheating”

If you think configs are what makes the top players so good, you are seriously mistaken. At the previous qcon, all the RTCW teams were forced to use a ‘pretty’ config (even drawgun). Those widely known as the top teams in the world came out the winners, and played VERY impressively. The current qcon RTCW qualifiers show every indication of the same happening this year. Tweaked configs help, but they are no substitute for for skill and hours of practice. Oh, and using vertex lighting for RTCW at qcon WOULD be cheating, because it is against the rules.

[chavo_one]

::puts on devil’s advocate underoos::

So at the end of your exposition, you admit that vertex lighting is cheating… :???:

[Matt]

The Q3Map2 forum is hardly the place to debate this. It is about Q3Map2 and requests/bug reports, etc.

Old style vertexlighting is the same as cheating. New vertexlighting is better, but still not even half as dark as lightmap lighting is. New vertexlighting also produces odd banding across vertices so you can have a long bridge, and one triangle of the top surface of the bridge is fullbright, and the other triangle is nearly pitch black in some cases. In situations where people have demanded vertexlighting and said they wouldn’t play my map, I had to choose between ethics and having my damn map played. I ended up doing _minvertexlight 255 to make it just like the old vertexlight because some small areas of the map looked horrible in vertexmode, and I’d rather have it with no lights than vertex.

Vertex light is an advantage over lightmaps because it removes shadows. If someone is walking through a dark shadowed area, on a default config you wouldn’t see him. On a system with vertexlight, you’d see him.

It’s unrealistic and looks like garbage. That alone should be well enough of a reason for it to be removed and/or for true mappers to not compile in it.

It is not needed for ANY videocard after the voodoo1 era. If you sit here and tell me you’re on a voodoo banshee right now with a straight face, I swear to god I’ll hunt you down and give you my GeForce1DDR.

There is no vertexlighting in DOOM 3 so get used to it. I believe HalfLife2 is the same way.

From now on, I believe I’ll be compiling all my maps with no vertex, and nopicmip on every shader. I wish idsoftware would release v1.33 with vertexlighting removed, amongst other commands. (Limit r_subdivisions from 4 to 40, r_mapoverbrightbits locked at default, etc.)

Bottom line, if you don’t care that it’s a cheat in today’s world, then maybe you should question your own ethics before you debate with me about something that is a fact. Above all other things, vertexlighting looks like absolute garbage. Don’t compile in it people.

[SCDS_reyalP]

The Q3Map2 forum is hardly the place to debate this. It is about Q3Map2 and requests/bug reports, etc.

You are telling the mappers here that they should do things to prevent the use of vertex lighting and picmip. I’d like to provide a counterpoint, because TBH, I think your advice is misleading and (in the case nopicmip) harmful.

New vertexlighting is better, but still not even half as dark as lightmap lighting is.

with vertexscale and minvertexlight you can make it as bright or dark as you like. It is still ugly, but that is the nature of the beast. Most people who play seriously prefer ugly and high frame rates to pretty and low frame rates.

Vertex light is an advantage over lightmaps because it removes shadows. If someone is walking through a dark shadowed area, on a default config you wouldn’t see him. On a system with vertexlight, you’d see him.

On a good monitor with a brightness adjustment he could also see you. You don’t think players will crank up their brightness until they can see ? I’ve played a game where you were supposed to equip a ‘night vision’ mod at night, but you could just crank your brightness if you wanted to use the slot for something else. Of course the players on old monitors and video cards will be screwed, because they can’t turn theirs up as bright.

The fact is using monitor brightness combined with fairly modest values of gamma, intensity and overbrightbits, you can get rid of the shadows anyway, so restricting vertex light is not going to help. If you play online, don’t expect to be able to hide in a shadow. Ever.

It is not needed for ANY videocard after the voodoo1 era. If you sit here and tell me you’re on a voodoo banshee right now with a straight face, I swear to god I’ll hunt you down and give you my GeForce1DDR.

Nope, I have a GF2TI, and swtiching to vertex light gives me a significant FPS boost. Do I need it ? It helps me get 76 FPS most of the time. (note, I’m talking RTCW here. I don’t have to tweak anything to get good FPS on the original maps for quake3)

From now on, I believe I’ll be compiling all my maps with no vertex, and nopicmip on every shader.

I think ydnar explained pretty clearly why nopicmip is a Bad Idea.

In any case, I really don’t see why mappers should try restrict these things. With punkbuster, admins can require whatever setting they like, much more effecively than the things you suggest. Without punkbuster the point is moot, because they can jack their gamma etc. up so high you couldn’t tell the difference between vertex and lightmap.

chavo_one:
Got me.
yes, vertex light is cheating like going 25 MPH is speeding… True in some cases but most certainly NOT true general rule. In anycase, the rule is enforcable without making any changes to your maps.

edit:
hmmm… minvertexlight and vertexscale may only work on vertex lit shaders… Dunno.

[LodeRunner]

I can attest to that. I play RTCW in lightmap mode so the environment looks nice, but the lightmaps are drastic in their differences between light and dark on some maps so I crank the HARDWARE gamma values on my card to vertex lighting levels. And as was stated before, whatever isn’t against the rules in a competition is not considered cheating.

So regardless of what in-game settings you use, or how the map was designed/compiled, that and any punkbuster controls can be subverterd by changing gamma/brightness/contrast levels in the hardware or the drivers. Just don’t forget to set r_ignorehwgamma 0.

Oh, and what one person and one tournament may consider a cheat, another person and another tournament may find acceptable. Drawing such a huge line on what YOU consider to be cheating and expecting everyone to fall in line…you must have a high opinion of yourself. No wonder most responses to what you write are heavily sarcastic and caustic.

[Matt]

I think ydnar explained pretty clearly why nopicmip is a Bad Idea.

No, nopicmip is perfectly fine. Nomipmap is the bad one. I typed it on accident earlier. Nopicmip just means that if you try to jack your settings up to like r_picmip 10, it’ll still look like r_picmip 1. Nomipmap disables mipmapping and reverts all texture drawing to GL_NEAREST, instead of GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST or what have you.

Edit: Oh, and honestly I don’t know what ydnar was talking about with mipmapping vs. no mipmapping performance. I got more FPS when I benchmarked with r_texturemode gl_nearest and I’m on a GeForce1 still. I don’t know how ATi does it, or if the newer lines of GeForce cards do things differently, but last I knew, mipmapping is a process on top of the rendering to smooth everything out basically.

LodeRunner, I don’t care what others think isn’t cheating. I know for a fact that playing in vertex is the same as running around with a flashlight. It’s an advantage, and hey if you need it to beat someone, fine with me but I’m not going to give anyone an advantage on my maps. Doom 3 is coming and people who use vertexlight in Quake 3 engine games will just be hurt in the end when they don’t understand how to play in near pitch black environments without their precious vertex garbage.

[LodeRunner]

You missed the point I was trying to make regarding lightmap and vertex. Given the depth of settings available, it is no longer neccessary for someone to even switch to vertexlighting to crank the brightness to a point where shadows are non-existent. You can do it in the driver and then set up presets so that a certain profile loads with the game. Likewise, with a little more effort, you can change your windows color profile so that darker colors are lighter (this is playing with the color table). For me, I adjust it to the point where I can see where I’m going as for some reason my system runs dark (my monitor I think, it uses HDTV color matching/phosphors instead of standard RGB, so it’s darker).

In light of what you can do with some simple driver side tweaks, your comment about DOOM 3 is irrelevent. One can simply adjust the brightness and contrast in the hardware to the point where pit black and blinding white are nearly the same and still have a playable config.

As far as mipmapping, it smooths textures as they go further away, blurring them (similar to LOD on patches). Disabling this forces the engine to draw full textures even when said texture may not be clearly visible. Taken from the Shader Manual:

3.6 nomipmaps
This implies nopicmip, but also prevents the generation of any lower resolution mipmaps for use by the 3d card. This will cause the texture to alias when it gets smaller, but there are some cases where you would rather have this than a blurry image. Sometimes thin slivers of triangles force things to very low mipmap levels, which leave a few constant pixels on otherwise scrolling special effects.

So even on newer cards, disabling mipmaps on some maps with higher numbers of textures could theoretically flood the pipe and exceed the fill rate of the card. Remember that the largest limitation in any benchmark using the Q3 engine is fill rate (which is also the orignal reason for v-light, was low fill rate cards).

If you want, I can produce some screenshots demonstrating a simple way of making lightmaps look like vertex light without ever editing the game configuration.

As for ydnar’s comment relating to GL_NEAREST, I believe he meant make your shade with the nomipmaps line in it, then set your gl_texturemode to gl_nearest. It looks like crap (gl_nearest being the absolute minimum quality level on the quake 3 texture slider). Also, setting nomipmaps disables any bilinear or trilinear filtering, making textures look even crappier (as bi- and tr-linear filtering raise the surface detailing).

[SCDS_reyalP]

LodeRunner, I don’t care what others think isn’t cheating. I know for a fact that playing in vertex is the same as running around with a flashlight. It’s an advantage, and hey if you need it to beat someone, fine with me but I’m not going to give anyone an advantage on my maps. Doom 3 is coming and people who use vertexlight in Quake 3 engine games will just be hurt in the end when they don’t understand how to play in near pitch black environments without their precious vertex garbage.

Nice of you to completely ignore the fact that there are plenty of other, more effective ways to get rid of the shadows, and pretty much no way to prevent it. I somehow doubt doom will break the brightness button on my monitor, and it will certainly include some software brightness/gamma command.

Forcing picmip 1 is really silly too. The stock RTCW maps, for example, use well over 64 megs of texture memyou have a 64 meg card, that doesn’t leave you any room for framebuffer.ory at the high quality setting. If you have a 64 meg card, that doesn’t leave you any room for framebuffer. If you don’t much system RAM, your load times go through the roof. And, despite your complete unwillingness to acknowledge it, admins can use pb to control exactly what level of picmip is allowed.

I don’t play with an extreme config myself, but I don’t see it as my place as a mapper to dictate how other people play.

[Matt]

Upping the gamma values of your video card will still result in the same view you would get with default gamma, except black will be grey. If a person is in that shadowed area and is black, they will show up grey. It’s not a valid comparison to vertexlight at all. Gamma values on your monitor or your video card have nothing to do with the pixels being drawn other that they send more to white or black, it’s not like you can set it up to be like a bright and sunny day if the map is pitch black in some corner. I never said my maps are stock RTCW maps, therefor that comparison is no good either. I go by this rule when making my maps: If it runs at 100FPS on my GeForce1, then it’s fine for everyone else. I also test it on a card with only 8MB of vram to see how it does. The last map I did with a nopicmip setting on every single shader ran at over 125FPS on this system. If it gets 125 on mine, then everyone else will be fine.

[Asnagrim]

There is also the fact that some people have other reasons for using lower detail and vertex light. My girlfriend for instance uses lightmap but also uses r_picmip 3 for the simple reason that she gets motion sickness if the texture detail is too high. Im sure there are also some people out there that have problems with flashing lights on maps, which you dont get in vertex lighting.
Also if ID did think vertex light was cheating then they would have taken it out along with showtris etc.
And your argument about players in dark areas being invisible is just stupid. Half the player models glow so it doesnt matter where you are. It was the first thing i noticed when playing q3 after playing Unreal Tournament. You can hide using shadows in ut but not in q3. Q3 is very anti camping…if you want to hide then you have to do it by knowing where your enemy is and keeping away from them.
Also you can go to the opposite extreme and turn brightness way down until you can hardly see the map, but make playerskins so bright that you can spot them easily. If ID had tried to treat players the way you think they should be treated then i doubt many people would be playing the game so long after its release.
You are just deluding yourself and the only reason I have bothered to argue with you is so that new mappers dont go thinking you are right without hearing other points of view.

[Matt]

I’m not going to sit here and spend my life arguing about a video game. If that’s what you internauts like to do, continue without me. Vertexlighting is an advantage over lightmap because it provides clarity of perception whereas lightmap is more realistic and has much more visual detail for the brain to deal with. I don’t give a damn what anyone else has to say about it except if John Carmack comes in here and gives his opinion. I know it was left in Quake 3 for compatibility’s sake, just like 16-bit color was, but it clearly gives an advantage to those who use it over those who don’t.

If you disagree with that fact, then you’re lost in a sea of idiocy.

[Hewster]

ok, here’s my take on this issue

A long long time ago, in a place far away, when maps were compiled
with q3map, vertex shadows were passable… however,
due to some changes in q3map2, unless a mapper creates his shaders
with the same path as his/her textures, when in vertex mode, there
will be no shadows at all…
If, however a mapper takes the time to create his/her shaders with the
same path, and then removed the shader after compile, it is possible to
have goodish vertex shadows…
Infact in my experience using lightmap mode in this case will have lighter
shadows

Here are a couple of pics showing why in some maps, using vertex light
mode may be seen as cheating (ok having an extreem advantage)

Pic 1, in lightmapped mode:

Pic2, in vertex lit mode:

These screens were taken from the wildwest_mine map by BoltyBoy
As you can see using vertex light mode will give a very clear advantage
in this map.

NOW, if we use the same path method of shader creation, we can get
these results, which I believe give no benifit to players using vertex light:

Pic1, lightmapped mode:

Pic2, in vertex lit mode:

These screens where taken from wildwest_canyon by BoltyBoy

So in conclusion, I believe that in some maps, we can say vertex light
gives an unfair advantage, but in others it does not

Hewster

[chavo_one]

Thanks Hewster!! Through this entertaining argument, I actually learned something valuable and lasting!

[Asnagrim]

Vertexlighting is an advantage over lightmap because it provides clarity of perception whereas lightmap is more realistic and has much more visual detail for the brain to deal with.

i never claimed it wasnt an advantage. It is an advantage…but its one that anyone is free to use including you. Just because you choose not to, doesnt make everyone else who uses it a cheat.

[LodeRunner]

Here’s some screenshots of what you can do with driver level gamma tweaks in lightmap mode. These shots were taken in roughtly the same areas of q3dm6.

First set:

Second set:

Third set:

Oh, and as far as nopicmip settings in a shader, well, anyone with half a brain could comment them out. The no picmip command is an engine command, not a compiler command, so if the shader were edited, the map would not need to be recompiled.

[ydnar]

All we need is arQon in here and it’s a party!

[SCDS_reyalP]

If you disagree with that fact, then you’re lost in a sea of idiocy.

Ahh the crux of your argument… “If you disagree, you are an idiot”. :eek:

[LodeRunner]

Agreed, ydnar. Last time I watched a debate with him in it…it was somewhat…amusing. He can be very sarcastic and blunt.

[Emon]

I never understood how blinding yourself with insanely bright maps just so you can see people in a dark corner provides a significant advantage. “Hey, I can see guys in corners that would have moved within two seconds, and the rest of the map is so bright I can’t see shit! Man, this rocks, I’ll win now!” :rolleyes: