This mod replaces the flashlight in Doom 3 with one that is a bit more "realistic" and consistent with the technology of the game.
The screenshots:
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.
Compatibility:
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.
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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