Minor Rules Change (Game Settings)

[Jediluke]

wow.

[Drakona]

[birdseye]

[Drakona]

Ah! You're misunderstanding the way lighting works in D1 and D2.

In most game engines, an area of the map is either light or dark, and this light or darkness affects everything in that area - walls, objects, whatever. D1 and D2 do not work this way.

In Descent, levels are built with light values for each of the vertices of a cube, which control how bright or dark the walls are, and with a light value for the whole cube, which controls how well lit objects within it are. These values are independent, and can be set in ways that bear no relation to each other. Bright ships forces the second one to always be 100%.

The original Octave had all the wall light values at 100%, so firing a flare won't light anything up. But it (accidentally) had all the cube light values set at 0%, meaning ships were invisibily dark. The only way to test this value is to look at another ship in multiplayer, as in my above screenshots. It doesn't affect powerups.

This is what original Octave looks like with bright ships off -- bright walls, invisibly dark ships:



The argument with Octave is that since the level came out in 2002, there MUST have been some sort of bright ships active in D1 at the time, since the lighting without it is egregious to the point of unplayable. We would have noticed. Whether that bright ships setting is a config setting, a default rolled into the code, a command line argument, whatever, I don't know - but something had to be lighting those ships up when we played the level, and it wasn't the cube lighting.

The levels I marked as 'brightly flat lit' all have the cube lights set to the same, bright value in every cube (two caveats - I just spot checked in the editor, clicking on several cubes in darker or lighter areas and looking at the cube light level and called it flat if those values were all identical and bright if they looked bright to me in a playtest. DLE was having trouble reading them, as it sometimes does, so I can't guarantee that 'bright' here means exactly something Descent interprets as 100%, only that it looks indistinguishable to me on the ground.)

Since this cube light value is what bright ships affects, the setting being on or off has literally no effect on the game in these levels. This turned out to be every popular level I examined from either the IDL or the DCL eras, with the exception of Sirian's works! And even in Black Rose and June Bug, the effect appears to be mainly cosmetic - the dark areas do not get very dark, and are not the parts of the level where darkness would be useful anyway. Whether Sirian did this intentionally or whether it was an automatic part of his workflow / the editor he was using, I do not know. I suspect it's automatic because the darkness is not tactically used, at setting the light levels to as many different levels as he did in Black Rose or June Bug by hand would have been a minor nightmare. This is speculation though. What isn't speculation is that literally the most recent levels I was able to find that use cube lighting in a tactically sensible way are D1 level 20 (FRP) and Total Chaos, both originally released with Descent.

That is why I say it is hard to believe that playing with bright ships off is some sort of important tradition from which we are breaking in a game-changing way. Beyond the memory of most pilots that the setting existed and was on, and the evidence that an accidentally darkly lit level wasn't discovered until later... the popular levels of both eras overwhelmingly don't support ships changing brightness in different parts of the level at all, so the setting clearly was not being designed for, even by the Spaz era of level design. Unless you go back to Total Chaos, the ships have literally never changed brightness as you moved through the level. Athena is identically lit with bright ships on or off, and always has been.

[deimos]

[Drakona]

Yeah, I also remember having to find people by their plasma streams in TC1. It's pretty dark in there.



For me that would have been pre D1x by quite a bit, though. The D1 source code was released in January of 1998, and D1x 1.0 is dated Aug 1998 in the d1x readme. I think I was already a Nysa pilot by that point, when I played D1. Feb 1998 was when I appeared on Kali, and by summer of 1998 you and I were regular sparring partners (I have some *precious* demos...), I was studying fusion with Soulvoid, my first game with Lotharbot I wanted to be in D1 Nysa . . . I definitely would not have given the time of day to Total Chaos by the tiem D1x came out. D1x 1.4 is dated August of 1999 on my hard drive, and appears to be the earliest D1x I have, so that is probably when I switched.

[deimos]

You should probably share those old demos!!!

[Drakona]

That in itself gives an interesting timeline to study in relation to this. Going off dates from my old Descent directory, I have -

?? 1994 - Total Chaos, D1 single player levels -- variable, tactical internal lighting
Dec 1994 - Get Smart - majority brightly flat lit independent of wall textures, central area is uniformly a little darker; this makes some tactical sense and was probably done intentionally by hand!
January 1996 - Kaotix -brightly flat lit (the exception I thought I saw before was in the exit tunnel, doesn't count)
March 1996 - Minerva - brightly flat lit
April 1996 - Tribute - brightly flat lit
April 1996 - Aglaia - brightly flat lit
April 1997 - Manes - brightly flat lit
April 1997 - Kruel's Kolumns - highly variable, sensible lighting. Winner of Interplay's level design competition, completely useless for actual multiplayer.
May 1997 - Nysa - brightly flat lit
Dec 1997 - FRP - variable lighting, almost all super dark. Note that the lighting was inherited from the D1 single player level.
Dec 1997 - Standard 1 - variable lighting all over the map that looks crazy. Internal lighting follows textured lighting religiously, suggesting this was automated, because anyone who would light a level like this on purpose is certifiable.
Feb 1998 - Vamped - brightly flat lit
Aug 1998 - Kiln's Fusion Farm - brightly flat lit

------- Aug 1998 ------------ First D1x release

Sept 1998 - Black Rose - variable lighting closely following textures -- doesn't look tactically intended to me
Jan 1999 - Fuzed - brightly flat lit
Jan 1999 - (Untitled) - brightly flat lit

------- Sept 1999 ----------- D1x 1.4, apparently the last major version

Sept 1999 - Fusion Love - brightly flat lit
May 2000 - Ugh - brightly flat lit (of course). Textures all also have identical lighting.
Sept 2000 - Monkey bars - brightly flat lit
Nov 2000 - Rickets - brightly flat lit
March 2002 - Tetrafusion - wildly varying light levels. The corners are super dark.
March 2002 - Octave - super dark flat lit

[Drakona]

[Drakona]