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| Kev's 22nd Century Flashlight - File Description |
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Description:
This mod replaces the flashlight in Doom 3 with one that is a bit more "realistic" and consistent with the technology of the game.
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The screenshots:
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The first one is of a completely darkened room (in Alpha Labs Sector 2). The second is of the same room with the flashlight in use at maximum intensity. If you look, you can tell that the reflected light dims with distance. The third is of a different location on the same map with the flashlight at maximum intensity.
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Compatibility:
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This mod appears to be compatible with Doom 3 and ROE. However, I've found that there are some custom shader programs, e.g. some generated by 3mood, that will cause the variable intensity function of this mod to not work properly. It will work properly with the default shader.
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| | | Kev's 22nd Century Flashlight - Screenshots | | Screenshots:
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| | | Kev's 22nd Century Flashlight - Readme | | Readme File:
Kev's 22nd Century Flashlight -- a simple flashlight mod for Doom 3
Installation instructions:
Drop the zmod-kevflashlight-v1.pk4 file either into your 'Doom
3\Gamedata\base' folder (if you want this flashlight to work with all
mods that don't define their own flashlight) or into a 'Doom
3\Gamedata\kevflashlight' folder (you'll have to create this folder
first) if you want this to act as a standalone mod.
I'm including the GIMP image source file for the flashlight's disk
image as well as the falloff image. These are the .xcf files included
in this distribution. They won't be of much use to you unless you've
used the GIMP (http://www.gimp.org) before. The rest of the mod is
already in 'source' form as such, so there's nothing else that needs
to be included for you to easily make changes to this mod.
Detailed explanation:
Ever notice how the default flashlight in Doom 3 is a little, well,
out of place? It has a few problems:
1. It doesn't obey the laws of physics. The intensity of a light's
reflection on a surface generally drops with distance, and
flashlights are no exception to this. But the one in Doom 3 is as
bright at long distances as it is at short ones.
2. The light image looks like it's coming from a cheap incandescent
flashlight. And its intensity isn't steady -- it varies over
time. It acts like a cheap 5 dollar flashlight that you can buy
at the store today. But this is the 22nd century we're talking
about here! Even the cheapest 22nd century flashlights are going
to be of much higher quality than this. The military-issued
combat ones certainly will be.
3. It's not terribly bright. Again, we're talking about the 22nd
century here. You'd expect a flashlight to be brighter than this,
especially a combat flashlight.
4. When you use it in a completely dark room, you'll probably get a
claustrophobic feeling. That's because in Doom 3, the flashlight
lights up only the circular target area and nothing else. There's
no light scattering and no leakage. But here's the thing: if
someone points a flashlight in your general direction, but not
directly at you, you can see some light coming from the end of the
flashlight, right? That means that some of the flashlight's light
is reaching you, which means it's also being reflected off you and
back at the person holding the flashlight, which means he might be
able to see you, even if only barely.
And so I present you with a flashlight that tries to address the above
problems.
This one obeys (to the degree I can make it) the laws of physics: the
brightness of the reflected light drops as the object reflecting the
light moves further away from the flashlight. In short, distant
objects will be more dimly lit than close objects, just like in real
life.
The light from this flashlight is rock-steady, as it should be (I
don't care that there are weird hellishly magical things happening in
the world, not *all* the lights in the Doom 3 world act the way the
standard Doom 3 flashlight does). It's also a little bluish. That's
because I figure they're probably going to use something like modern
high intensity discharge lights (like what you see on most higher-end
cars these days) that produce a higher energy light. And the 'circle'
is much more even, as you'd expect from decent-quality optics.
The vast majority of the light is focused into the 'circle', as you'd
expect, but as you'd expect there's still some fringe leakage, which
will cause the rest of the room ahead of you to be lit up a tiny bit.
Yeah, this might change the atmosphere of the game a little. To
compensate a little for this effect, I've reduced the size of the
bright disk relative to the one for the original flashlight.
Finally, this flashlight has three settings: low, medium, and high.
Low setting gets you an intensity value that's about the same as that
of the standard Doom 3 flashlight. Medium is 1.75 times the intensity
of Low, and High is 2.5 times the intensity of Low. You can toggle
between them by hitting the 'reload' key/button when the flashlight is
in use. Note that this feature only works in single-player mode. If
you want me to make it work in multiplayer mode as well, just let me
know. I'll be happy to, but you'll be sacrificing your ability to
turn your flashlight off without lowering it (or, alternatively, you'd
have to cycle through the various settings until it gets turned off).
Limitations on realism:
1. In the real world, the maximum distance that you can see reflected
objects with your flashlight would depend on the intensity of the
flashlight itself (so if you use the brightest setting, you should
be able to see objects further away that you wouldn't be able to
see with dimmer settings). In this mod, the maximum distance is
fixed. This is either (most likely) a limitation on my knowledge
of how to modify Doom 3 or a limitation of the engine itself. The
distance in question is defined in the flashTarget attribute of
the flashlight's entityDef. I don't know how to change that at
runtime. If anyone in the mod community has some ideas of how to
address this problem I'd like to know about it. And I couldn't
just adjust that one value either -- I'd also have to adjust the
flashUp and flashRight values to maintain the same flashlight disk
size.
2. The 'ambient light' effect is generated by having the flashlight's
'disk' be very wide compared with the normal flashlight's, and
having most of that disk comprised of very low pixel values
(the pixel value is multiplied by the light's value and then by
the falloff value to generate the final light value hitting the
target surface). The light circle you see in the shots is
actually a very small part of the actual disk. While this
method works reasonably well, the downside is that I only had
something like 4 intensity values to work with in the 'ambient
light' area, so it's possible to see where two pixel values are
adjacent to each other. I attempted to reduce the obviousness of
this by doing a dithered merge between adjacent areas of differing
pixel value, but you can still see this when shining the
flashlight on certain surfaces. It's more obvious when the
flashlight is at maximum intensity, of course. Even so, in my
experience the effect is subtle enough that you hopefully won't
notice it too much in normal gameplay.
Terms of use:
You may alter this mod to suit your own purposes as much as you like,
and you may include it in other mods as well. You may publish this
mod in any medium you like. You must give credit where it's due -- if
you publish a modified form of this mod, you must reference this mod
in your README (or equivalent).
I'd strongly prefer that if you include this mod (in altered form or
not) in your own mod, you also publish the source code of your mod, as
I have here. This isn't a requirement (proper attribution is), but it
will encourage others to create derivatives of your work and thus
enrichen us all. What goes around tends to come around: if you
publish the source to your work, it's likely that eventually you'll be
able to make use of the source to someone else's work.
Thanks to:
- ID software, for creating an excellent gaming framework.
- DC Doom, for creating the Super Flashlight mod, which inspired and
helped with the implementation of the multiple intensity settings
feature of this mod.
- Kevin Brown (My ID on d3files.com is kcbrown)
n2185x AT yahoo.com | |
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| Kev's 22nd Century Flashlight - File Download Options |
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Primary Download Locations:
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| Kev's 22nd Century Flashlight - User Comments |
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The following comments are owned by the user that posted them. Doom 3 Files is not responsible for their content.
Total comments: 13 | Last comment: 05-25-2009 at 04:23
The third screenshot actually has no flashlight.
But it looks cool anyways.
Nice, realism. Every step towards realism is a good step!
What do you mean the third one has no flashlight? I can see it.
The screenshot order was initially reversed, which is why BigRoachy didn't see a flashlight in the "third" screenshot. I had them fix that.
It is a step, but if I were to use my cheap 5 dollar (varied stability) in my black walled room at night, with all the doors shut, the windows closed with black curtains over them, now that I point at a wall 15 feet away I can see stuff off to the sides of me as well as maybe behind me (if I look) just fine.
I'd love this kind of realism in Doom3, especially sense all of the walls would reflect light extremely well being metal. (I don't have a fully metal room with metal flooring metal walls and metal ceiling to test out a cheap flashlight in)
Then again, maybe I should try out the mod itself and see if it does bring about this realism I'm posting about.
It's only "semi-realistic" counter-lighting when it comes to COMPLETELY dark rooms, then you can see everything aside from the flashlight beam slightly dimed, good for those of which have hard time with the game and it's (see to see) flashlight mode, I use the low intensity for regular searching (items-cabinets-traveling) and high for dark fighting areas.
I don't know of any game engine which properly handles secondary and tertiary light reflections.
That would probably take a raytracing engine. There's work being done on hardware-supported raytracing. See, for instance, http://www.openrt.de.
In the meantime, from the first-person perspective, my cheap little flashlight mod should come reasonably close, since the dim-light "penumbra" occupies almost the entire field of view.
well I created a new folder in my gamedata folder so I could load it up as a mod, but my game crashes. Im terrible at this sort of stuff someone please help me out if possible.
Crashes how? Does it drop you back to the desktop? Is the console window still open at the time? If so, what does it say?
the console window doesnt come up at all or anything. When I load the flashlight mod up, the loading screen is there for like a split second. Then it just exits the game.......if that helps.
hmmmm well I tried it one more time and it worked. Whatever, anyway the flashlight is awesome, ill recommend it to everyone I know who plays.
wonder if it will work with the enhanced gore mods and the Squad mod.....lets see.....and if it does then i can spray and pray with LIGHT!!! 
I tried this MOD and my game crashes out once it gets to the message about loading the menus...
ERROR: Error: file script/weapon_flashlight.script, line 24: global_flashlight_intensity redeclared
Can I edit this one myself?
All help will be appreciated.
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