I don't know if this a suggestion, but I personally think the super forms should be able to glow in dark areas in the next version.
Ah, the merits of OGL strike aga—*shot*
HOWEVER since I know little to nothing about how the code works and thus cannot comment, I will still pose a little thing to contemplate on how to maybe make such a thing work:
Ok, so in the regular SRB2 world, there's a basic depth fog for darkened sectors, right? This emanates from the camera and relies on either one of the TRANSxx lumps (though those are explicitly for transparency, I'd assume) or, more likely, the COLORMAP lump to map to palette properly, yes? Either that or there's a blender directly in the software renderer that works magically somehow but I doubt that. Anyway, so what could be done is that, when a "light source" such as a super character is detected, the game grabs its depth from the camera via whatever function grabs pixel depth for the current lighting algorithm, knows that that depth should be full brightness or flashing or whatever, and then simply ramps up and down to that colormap value over a fixed depth range (or a fixed step size, which would probably look better) rather than relying on the normal light value.
In other words:
- Game grabs relative depth for light emitter
- Game begins to draw rows (floor) and columns (walls) like normal
- Each row/col's depth is checked against the ramp for the light's depth
- If the ramp for the light's depth has a higher colormap value attached to it, that value is drawn; else the regular value is used
Boom. Cheap lighting in software that would look get progressively terribler the farther from the camera the light was, but if implemented only for super characters (as static light emitters have sectors on their side), it would probably look great.
Also, my suggestion: how about a "removefile
xyz.wad" command? The game would unload a mod or reload vanilla content over it while deactivating SOCs/Lua scripts. Great for not having to exit the game everytime one wants to change something.