Just as I expected (the problem with dynamic lights and transitions)

I suggest to not fight the transitions directly, but
do it with smart design of the pieces.

make larger sub-levelblocks (whole sections with
their own details), and try to use things like stairs,
a different groundtexture, carpets etc to make
the seams look more "intendet", by having a designed
"break" in the transition.

Another thing is to use smaller polygons for the floor and walls,
when using dynamic lights. (ok thats the tesselation now)


Have a look at my jump and run level:

http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.p...true#Post276241

The world is build out of small square blocks. But the
ilumiation still looks even from the front view.
I did that by detaching the frontside polygons of the
block from the top and side polygons.
This way the dynamic light spreats evenly on the front.

Even if you use flat-shading there is still the prob that the textures will not be interpolated over the seams...also these chunks are surely just placeholders and the final versions will look more organic (or not?), so flat-shading would not longer give well looking results.

I still prefere the unique look of hand made environments, but actually it is possible to overcome both problems (non-seamless shading and textures) without making compromises in quality...I´ve already experience in that area because I developed a terrain editor wich can merge single chunks absolutly seamless together and I also made something similar with model chunks in the near past.
It´s a lot of work but I could do it for you if you really need it now...
just PM me...

a pic of my last small project:


there are six chunks with seamless shading

True, the flat shading only works if the parts aren't meant to be more organic. The texture interpolation can be overcome by clever texturing. Or just go hummels way, however it works. He somehow didn't show me that stuff before

Wow!

Thanks all for the comments. I think I will expand the test and create 2 parts at alpha quality so we can really look at how this would work, if there are modeling approaches to help reduce this and so on.

Hopefully I will get a chance to knock them out later today. Thanks again.

@Slin: Thanks for the PM help, although I am not up to speed with the whole A7 lite .c stuff, still an old fashioned script man

Youtube Video: R3D Lighting
:- This video shows a couple of alpha quality tile sections with normal and specular maps, straight from the wiki. Sorry the video quality is a little poor

Thoughts?

pretty good.

Hm, it doesn´t look as if the transition is the problem at the moment, but the engines light manager. Try to set max_lights higher, make sure that you build in mesh mode and check the center of the levelparts and the lightrange. And try to turn off the light maybe. You should may also think about using shadowmapping for those lights, at least if the speed of everything else does well.
And you just have to think about switching to Lite-C. It makes especially the shaderwork but also everything else a lot easier. At least if you don´t already have a big Codebase where you can use big parts from, or some other important reason I may don´t understand

And I actually don´t like that shader from the wiki, especially in terms of speed...

I think its likely that with enough of a game functioning using this method and some nice Alpha parts to show it off, I can really worry about how it looks near its completion.

I will try the suggestions about increasing number of allowed lights, I would also like to remove daylight completely, although I don't seem to be able to get a 100% dark level when only using model geom and not any of the BSP brushes.

As for why C-Script, I've simply not upgraded from pro6 to pro7 yet

Ouh, when you are still using A6 Pro, then the problem with the lights is even more strange than I expected...

You don't need real lights for ennemies !
Real lights are expensive if you don't use an AAA engine using very otpimised deferred lightning !

Even on AAA games ennemies don't cast real lights , some tricks are used :
- old method : weel done alpha light sprite
- faster : light sprite with projection shader like in Doom 3
(your game is top down view : projection shader would do
the job greatly)
With that no more need to break level in too much polygons !

Juts ideas !