Per-pixel Lighting

OpenGL OpenGL: Basic Coding
1

Hi guys!

I am intrested in per-pixel lighting but before I move on I would like to know what options are there so I can find each in Google and choose the best for my requirements, WITH shaders, and WITHOUT using shaders.

Please complete my list (or correct it if I am wrong)

Per-pixel Lighting WITHOUT Shaders)
-1)Precalculated lightmaps implemented with Multitexture
-2)Run-time CPU calculated lightmaps implemented with a texture created on runtime and then multitextured (produces worst results as technique 1, as radiodity and other expensive calculations cannot be done, and be considerably slower (?))

Per-pixel Lighting WITH Shaders)
-1’)Miracle shader solution that uses Phong calculations or any other light algorithm and is stored in vertex/fragment shader. (can only be used with high-end GPU’s, so you loose at least 50% of your target market if you are targeting not only ‘gamers’)

Thank you so much! :smiley:
Cheers!
Rod

2

can only be used with high-end GPU’s, so you loose at least 50% of your target market if you are targeting not only ‘gamers’
AFAIK GLSL support requires at least a NVIDIA Geforce FX or ATI/AMD Radeon 9500 or higher GPU. I wouldn’t exactly call these high-end GPU’s. Valve software also maintains a hardware survey for their games. See here .

Personally I’d just go with a shader based solution. But that’s just me though :slight_smile: If you decide to go with shaders then be sure to check out the GLSL code on my site .

HTH.