Author Topic: The future of lighting flags in FSO  (Read 6307 times)

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Re: The future of lighting flags in FSO
https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Lighting_Profiles.tbl has a full description. By making such a table and putting it in your root data/tables directory it will overwrite/modify any downstream mod.

 
Re: The future of lighting flags in FSO
There are still command line options for lighting. It's mainly the specular lighting command line flags that have been depreciated. There are also several new command line flags. I believe the idea is for mod creators to lean toward using the tables, though any one can as Asteroth points out.

 

Offline Trivial Psychic

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Re: The future of lighting flags in FSO
I've been testing out the Command Line flags (thanks for that Dragon, BTW), though I'm still having difficulty getting things to match up with how I had it before.  It'll take more trial end error to get it how I want it.
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Offline EatThePath

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Re: The future of lighting flags in FSO
Can you post a screenshot or old flags? I'd not mind trying to help, and if there's a gap I'll see if I can help fill it.
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Offline Trivial Psychic

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Re: The future of lighting flags in FSO
This is what I used:

-ambient_factor 75 -spec_point 1.5 -spec_static 2.0 -spec_tube 2.0 -shadow_quality 3

I'm currently using this:

-ambient 0.1 -light 0.1 -emissive 0.15 -shadow_quality 3

The lighting in the cockpit (flying TBP you get cockpit view by default on most fighters) is different.  There are a hell of a lot more shadows and shifting light sources.  I also get some ripply rainbow pattern on some of the cockpit as well.
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Offline EatThePath

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Re: The future of lighting flags in FSO
Alright, well, I'm not sure about the rainbow ripples, if you let me know what fighter and level it was on I'd like to take a look and see it myself. But also there was a bug with the changes that was fixed yesterday that could cause all sorts of unpredictable artifacts, s o if you could check with the most recent nightly first I'd appreciate it.

As to the actual flags... -ambient_factor 75 is on a typical level going to be around -ambient 0.125 so you're good there. -light 0.1 is going to make all your scenes 10% as brightly light as they should be, though, while your old settings were making everything brighter. In most cases the new factors are going to have more impact than the old, so I'd suggest trying -light 1.2. With the scene so dimly lit the envmap lighting is going to be much more dominant, which might be the rainbowy look you're seeing in the right cases. If you really hate the look of the enviromental reflections then -noenv is an option. This might be desirable if you're trying to closely recapture the look of B5, but only due to b5's rendering limits at the time...

Finally, if you're getting rid of ambient it doesn't make much sense to use -emissive at all. It just adds white light to all scenes, and is probably the only reason you're getting much light at all with the -light 0.1 you're using.

Let me know if that helps any.
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Offline Galemp

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Re: The future of lighting flags in FSO
I'm also not sure what the effective difference is between ambient and emissive. Would ambient light be increased in the nebula, perhaps?
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Offline EatThePath

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Re: The future of lighting flags in FSO
The main difference is that the ambient setting depends on the ambient light in every level. -Ambient 0.5 is always half of what the ambient would be without it, -ambient 2 is double. -Emissive on the other hand always adds white ambient to everything, untouched by the other modifiers. If you want a bit of ambient in every level even if a mission designer zeroed it out, emissive can do that for you.
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Offline EatThePath

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Re: The future of lighting flags in FSO
https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Lighting_Profiles.tbl has a full description. By making such a table and putting it in your root data/tables directory it will overwrite/modify any downstream mod.

If anyone ends up feeling they really,really need that fine grained control of making different lights brighter, dimming all the suns and boosting the dynamic lights or whatnot, an important piece of the planned feature set is going in tonight.

What Asteroth suggests to do is common wisdom, I've seen it suggested for various things over time by many people since I joined the community, but it is not actually correct. Sticking things in that location is fine for adding to mods or overiding the base game, but both reading the code and trying some clear test cases has shown me that if you have the same file, or the same value, in both a mod's data/tables and fs2/data/tables, the mod wins. So that's no good for user customization if mods start adopting tables.

The feature added tonight is a new flag, -override_data. When present this activates a new step in the load order that will always be after the mods. With this flag active, anything in fs2/_override/data/ will be loaded after the base game and all mods, so people can put tweak tables in there, and share those tables, if they feel that need. This opens up a lot more fine grained tuning over things like light sizes, or lights from different types of weapons, that the specular flags did not provide at all.

I hope to eventually add some more features to lighting profiles intended to be used with this, so you can adjust relative to the mod's choices rather than just hard set your own values, but for now you have this at least. Mods can set their lighting identity more concretely, without the need for launcher flags, and tweakers can still take that control back if they feel the need.
Name your damn turrets and sounds! Numbers alone aren't helpful!
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Offline Nyctaeus

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Re: The future of lighting flags in FSO
Love that stuff so far. Ez to produce cursed results, but overally awesome. May I have a setting to control how much light is being emitted by background? So far it seems to be fixed by brightness of the skybox bitmap itself.

Edit: And glowmap/emissivemap intensity pls.
« Last Edit: September 29, 2022, 06:00:13 pm by Nyctaeus »
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Offline Galemp

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Re: The future of lighting flags in FSO
The main difference is that the ambient setting depends on the ambient light in every level. -Ambient 0.5 is always half of what the ambient would be without it, -ambient 2 is double. -Emissive on the other hand always adds white ambient to everything, untouched by the other modifiers. If you want a bit of ambient in every level even if a mission designer zeroed it out, emissive can do that for you.

Very helpful, thank you :yes:
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