Help With Lighting

[Nick]

I'm working on a small first person camera program and have basic (very basic) lighting. No shadows. Pretty bad. Letting OpenGL do most of it (and getting bad results). I can email you the program if you want to see it (though I'm still having trouble bundling frameworks with it). Basically I'm wondering if anybody has any tips and tricks for creating some good, realistic lighting for a first person game.

[DoG]

How to say... realistic lighting is not for the faint hearted. OpenGL's basic lighting is already fairly involved without shadows and reflections etc.

Tips and tricks? Get a computer graphics book and start reading. There is no shortcut for this trip.

[Jake]

Lightmaps are the best at quality/speed for a static environment. Every polygon on the screen has their own precalculated texture that is multitexture onto it, for example go look at quake 3.

[Blake]

Tips and tricks? Get a computer graphics book and start reading. There is no shortcut for this trip.

this could't be any closer to the truth, i would learn how to do lighting with opengl using normals and such and all about lighting in opengl (directional,positional,spotlights) then move on to shadows

[Nick]

I wasn't expecting any shortcuts. Maybe a few snippets of code but nothing more. I'll read through the redbook's section on lighting and do some googling and see what I can come up with. I want to at least have realistic lighting (with or without shadows) in a month. I just need to set a deadline so that I'll actually get it done. Thanks for advice.

[DoG]

Just in case: the NeHe tutorials http://nehe.gamedev.net/ are worth a look, they contain just about every odd GL topic out there. Lots of code, too, but the advanced stuff is still hard to comprehend.