Maximum Dynamic Lights?

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genesisrage
Posts: 93
Joined: Tue Feb 08, 2005 12:19 pm

Maximum Dynamic Lights?

Post by genesisrage »

ive used some other engines (DX9) that had proprietary coding, but they only supported 8 (hardware) lights, with one being the ambient lighting.

my question does Irrlicht use only hardware lighting, or is lighting handled by the engine? (or both)

i would like to make a world with many dynamic lights (because it looks better), but also like shooting a plasma gun and have the bullets illuminate the area around it (i know it is possible in one form or another, but mainly wanting to know if its hardware or engine and how many maximum, because using the built-in lights is SOOO much easier :) )
Electron
Posts: 874
Joined: Sun Mar 14, 2004 12:05 am
Location: Massachusetts USA

Post by Electron »

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/docu/cl ... r.html#a36

Irrlicht uses hardware dynamic lights. The maximum depends on the card. OpenGL guarantees 8 lights, but more may be available as given by the runtime constant GL_MAX_LIGHTS. I have no idea what things are like with DX. I heard somewhere that DX allows exactly 8 dynamic lights, no more, but that could be wrong. If the card allows more than 8 dynamic lights, irrlicht should be able to make use of them, but it would be a bad idea to code an app that relied on >8 dynamic lights.
You do a lot of programming? Really? I try to get some in, but the debugging keeps me pretty busy.

Crucible of Stars
aigam
Posts: 17
Joined: Fri May 06, 2005 3:17 pm

Post by aigam »

In the firsts cards there are 2 dinamic free lights.

Now the number is 4. In really really good cards you can have 8 lights... but I recomend you to don't use more of 2 lights, if you really want yout game playable for everibody.
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