Basic Lighting Quality vs. TGE

#1 T3D's Basic Lighting is not ment to be feature equivelant to TGE or TGEA lighting.... its ment to look good on old hardware and be fast. Its not a modified version of TGE/TGEA lighting... is a whole new lighting system.

Some of the hacks that made sense for TGE/TGEA lighting are not there in T3D 1.0.

For example in TGE/TGEA it would look for a lightmap under the players feet and guess at a good overall shading for the player. This broke down when the player was in the air or the object you were standing on was not lightmapped.

As far as projected shadows in T3D they will see a better filter and performance improvements in 1.1, but other than that they are way beyond TGE/TGEA.

Basic Lighting like all parts of T3D will get improvements in future releases, but to be honest improving image quality for the lighting system aimed at older hardware is a lower priority task.

#2 I would also encourage you to do performance testing, on the same hardware, between TGEA + Deferred Rendering + SSAO and Torque3D using Advanced Lighting. There is no magic in graphics development. You pay for everything in mspf (milliseconds per frame). The solution you have just described, Daniel's TGEA work (which includes PSSM), a deferred lighting pass (requiring large amounts of gpu bandwidth), and SSAO is going to run at, or very near, the same speed as Torque3D, at the same resolution. It's just math.

#3 I'm merely pointing out that the Basic Lighting falls short of TGE standards imo.

#4 So, "basic lighting" simply means unchecking everything in advanced lighting in "options" when you hit ctrl+o , correct?

#5 no Nmuta you need to press F11 to get to the editor up top there is a drop down menu that say lighting change it to basic lighting, then save and close it down then reload and check your performance.