I'm an old jet3d user before i made the switch (basicly because the jet3d settup was awful) and one topic that i inquired about there was using animated gifs. it was turned away because of licencing cost.. ect, then somone sugested a new png based format called "MNG( multiple- network-graphics)" It's basicly a flipbook of pngs. I thought this would be awsome because i currently use Gile[s] for my global illumination and such and it exports it's lightmaps to png. So what if you string multiple lightmaps together, yes animated lightmaps which would be awsome for effects such as outdoor lighting changing throughout the day and slowly changing to night, or spinning red alarm lights. ect ect.
http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/
Feature request! Look at this new image format, it's awsome
since each frame of animation will need to be held on the graphics card anyway there's no real advantage to using an animated file format, it only saves disk space not graphics ram. unless you were to overwrite the active frame in graphics ram from system ram, but texture loading is expensive, compared to cheap disk space and graphics ram.
you can animate through a series of textures that are already in memory by using a texture animator
you can animate through a series of textures that are already in memory by using a texture animator
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Guest
MNG doesn't even really save much disk space compared to just a number of PNGs. And it's not a new format -- it's just never been widely implemented.
More to the point, animating lightmaps is really a rather expensive proposition in terms of memory. Each different lighting situation requires another complete lightmap of the level. "fading" between them doesn't help much.
For a moving sun, you're probably talking about something more than 250 seperate lightmaps if you want it to look smooth.
For spinning alarm lights... well... you can just composite such things on top. Not actually effecting a wide area. Effecting a wide area, you run into the memory problem still (possibly to a smaller extent depending on how you implement it). But you're probably better off just throwing on a "local" lightmap on top. And for that, you're better off just rotating a single image. Unreal Tournament 2004 does just this.
My $.02.
More to the point, animating lightmaps is really a rather expensive proposition in terms of memory. Each different lighting situation requires another complete lightmap of the level. "fading" between them doesn't help much.
For a moving sun, you're probably talking about something more than 250 seperate lightmaps if you want it to look smooth.
For spinning alarm lights... well... you can just composite such things on top. Not actually effecting a wide area. Effecting a wide area, you run into the memory problem still (possibly to a smaller extent depending on how you implement it). But you're probably better off just throwing on a "local" lightmap on top. And for that, you're better off just rotating a single image. Unreal Tournament 2004 does just this.
My $.02.