Lens flares and bloom effects are a good way of faking the appearance of a bright light. (True, eyeballs don't get lens flares -- which are caused by internal reflections in multi-element lenses.)
If you really wanted to handle lighting properly, (1) you'd make the scene DARKER when you're staring at a bright object though, (2) after someone looks at a bright scene it should get inverted and stamped onto a translucent overlay, which then fades gradually. (This would be a seriously cool effect. Filax? :) )
One thing we haven't seen in graphics pipelines yet is good (any?) support for open-ended lighting (we have floating point RGB values, but they don't deal with brightness beyond 1.0). Maybe this is because John Carmarck only does dimly lit game engines... An example of this is when you emerge from a torchlit cave into bright sunlight, the outdoor scene ought to be blindingly bright until your eyes adjust. When you look into the torchlit cave from outside it should look utterly dark.
Edit: oh yeah, lens flares should be ON TOP OF THE PICTURE. Distant objects partially obscuring a bright object will either completely eliminate the lens flare, split it into multiple lens flares, or reduce its size. The lens flare isn't part of the bright object -- it's a bunch of reflections inside your lens, and your lens is closer to you than the object.
Barliesque's examples look right, but I'm constantly amazed by lens flares that are obscured by background objects.
Edit2: oh -- the number of different elements in a lens flare should be determined by the number of lens elements, which tends to be higher for complex lens (e.g. zoom lens). Also, if a zoom lens zooms, the elements should move around and change size in some vaguely consistent manner (if you want to be really cool ;) ).
If you really wanted to handle lighting properly, (1) you'd make the scene DARKER when you're staring at a bright object though, (2) after someone looks at a bright scene it should get inverted and stamped onto a translucent overlay, which then fades gradually. (This would be a seriously cool effect. Filax? :) )
One thing we haven't seen in graphics pipelines yet is good (any?) support for open-ended lighting (we have floating point RGB values, but they don't deal with brightness beyond 1.0). Maybe this is because John Carmarck only does dimly lit game engines... An example of this is when you emerge from a torchlit cave into bright sunlight, the outdoor scene ought to be blindingly bright until your eyes adjust. When you look into the torchlit cave from outside it should look utterly dark.
Edit: oh yeah, lens flares should be ON TOP OF THE PICTURE. Distant objects partially obscuring a bright object will either completely eliminate the lens flare, split it into multiple lens flares, or reduce its size. The lens flare isn't part of the bright object -- it's a bunch of reflections inside your lens, and your lens is closer to you than the object.
Barliesque's examples look right, but I'm constantly amazed by lens flares that are obscured by background objects.
Edit2: oh -- the number of different elements in a lens flare should be determined by the number of lens elements, which tends to be higher for complex lens (e.g. zoom lens). Also, if a zoom lens zooms, the elements should move around and change size in some vaguely consistent manner (if you want to be really cool ;) ).