Every time I posted on the Bnet forums, my thread gets put on the 3rd or 4th page right away, so there's no point. Anyways...It sounds great, but it's not really practical, and I'll tell you why. When you're making a game, you have to decide between two things: 1. Static lighting 2. Dynamic lighting They both have their advantages, and their drawbacks. Static lighting usually looks better on buildings and parts of the environment, because you can have global illumination. Sometimes it can make your environments look REALLY nice (Mirrors Edge). It has a few drawbacks though; it's static, so that means no night and day cycles, and the lighting on dynamic objects usually isn't very good. You might have noticed that when you drive a warthog into a shadow, it won't cast a shadow on the warthog, but instead it will just go darker as it passes over. Another drawback is that static lighting is stored in the level geometry via lightmaps, which take up memory. Dynamic lighting is great for games that require a night and day cycle. It looks great for interiors with a lot of dynamic objects. The only drawback is that shadows require a lot of processing power, and if you choose not to have shadows (Oblivion, Fallout 3) it can look pretty bad. As I mentioned earlier, Bungie has decided to go with static lighting. My understanding of how it works is that the lights are placed in the level, and then the engine generates the lighting, and it's baked into the geometry, and stored in the lightmaps. Then points are evenly placed on in the level and these are what define what is shadow and what is not. Dynamic objects will be lit based on these points. Every time you changed the terrain, you would have to rebuild the lighting, so you wouldn't get weird shadows, and a lightmap would have to be included with your map, increasing its filesize. This means that Bungie would have had to implement a way to build the lighting on your Xbox. This is also the reason why you can't change the lighting.
Chan, please stop making your daily threads. Threads are generally for discussions, your thread posts are more like statements which don't go much further than "I agree" or "I disagree". I'm sure people would find a terrain editor interesting but you're burying threads which people would like to have discussions in, threads asking for help and stuff, rather than just rants and gripes.
Yeah. I'll admit that this thread is a bit useless. Though, the other one serves a purpose, and "I agree" or "I disagree" is good. Bungie seems to respond to the collective interest of fans. I find it odd though that you didn't agree with me, but criticized me instead. It was a bit low to assume that I don't know what I'm talking about, and to disregard my points based on that. Anyways...I don't feel like I can do much with Forge World because of the limits, and I have seen so many great maps ruined because they don't run well on my Xbox. Is asking for my game to run smoothly on my Xbox is asking too much? Is that the sprinkles on the cake?
I think you're in the minority in terms of the maps running smoothly on your Xbox. I've read through your posts on the subject, but personally, I haven't run into hardly any (if any at all) of the problems you seem to have been exposed to, or at least, they weren't noticeable if I have run into them. The only lag issue I've had is placing too many of one object in one spot (setting up 24 plasma batteries to blow the **** out of a door lol), and a bit of lag when spawning them in, but that's it. Now in Halo 3, I'd hit lag in certain times (too many explosions at once, that sort of thing), but I haven't run into those issues on Reach. And I know it's not an online connection issue, either--I've got a terrible internet connection, and pause-lags in matchmaking games prove it to me all the time. Maybe I'm looking at the problems from a different perspective than you, but I don't see what you're seeing.
Yeah, it seems to be different for everyone. I've heard a lot of complaints about Asylum but I haven't had any lag on that map. Powerhouse lags every once in a while. Download this map and look at the middle from the top. I get like 10-15 fps when I do.
/thread. You're like the person in my History class who raises her hand just to comment on things, not answer the question.
Agreed. Also agreed, however, is that this is more suited for a blog post. Threads imply discussions.