So the last experiment I did was to retrofit the BadMooD colour quantizer into the Q2 engine and generate palettized versions of the 24bit colour lightmaps hiding in the BSP files. With some mods to the surface cache the Falcon can now render with coloured radiosity lighting!
There are at least two caveats though:
- lightmap bilinear filtering doesn't work with this approach, so the lighting gets quite blocky in places, especially where there are hard edges in the lightmaps
- dynamic lights would require at least one extra indirection to combine them so this would be a performance question mark (esp. since a mono version isn't even working yet)
I suspect by loading the quantized lightmap palette onto the DSP it will be possible to do some or all of this quickly with less lookup/translation and maybe also do filtering for free. But I'm not sure yet - and probably a lot of work. For now its just a basic experiment to see colour (hardware GL!) radiosity lighting on the Falcon
I'm quite busy today but will get some of last night's screenshots up when I get time for it.