Ok, In the past few days people have been asking after seeing some of our in-game videos about dynamic lights and their overuse. People were worried that low-end or older machines would not be able to see the lights, or that they would lag them.
I said that, being the good coder that I am, i would make an option to disable dynamic lighting from my MOD itself, or make sure that it would have alternatives for older machines. But i am wondering now exactly how i can achieve this. Making a convar that prevents creating any DLights in my code is a simple thing to do, a matter of minutes really. But i was wondering about the possibility of using ELights versus DLights, then i realised i didn't really know what the difference was, and if one or the other needed Dx9/Dx9 compatible cards to show up or not. So my questions are: What is the real difference between AllocDlight and AllocElight? I remember trying both for muzzleflashing and that ELights didn't bounce off walls, but I am not sure of that fact anymore. What hardware is needed to run DLights and what hardware is needed to run ELights? Should i hard code in a convar to turn them off, or will the engine take care of managing that for me already? Will it affect performance if i call AllocDlight on a machine that can't handle them, or will they just not be displayed? Thanks Imperio59 -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.322 / Virus Database: 266.11.16 - Release Date: 24/05/2005 _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
