[Taristin]

Duh. They're faking it.

It'd be a major toll on performance if they were actual cast lights.

[Gregster2k]

That's what I thought.

Meh. Screw performance. LOL.

Can't the engine be told not to even render the individual lighting at a certain distance and compensate by replacing or fading it out to use this type instead?  that way it doesnt even bother to cast the light at all if you can't see the effects at the distance you're at...and it could have certain lights rendered on further away ships because they're bright...the brightness of a glowpoint would affect the distance it is cast and if the engine cant find anything within that distance to cast the light on it reverts to using standard glowmap/glowpoint rendering to save resources?

Also, I've played games that have the kind of lighting I want and they aint bad in the FPS department, you know. Descent 3 i'm pretty darn sure had thrusters that lit up hallways and I've NEVER understood why FreeSpace 2 which came out around the same time never had that either. Even harder to understand why the SCP even now doesn't have that (try flying in an engine wake, your ship stays dark WTH?!).

[Ransom]

Dynamic lighting shouldn't change performance that much. In fact I thought we already had it thanks to shinemaps...

[WMCoolmon]

Direct3D only supports 8 lights, without pixel shaders. I'm not sure about OpenGL.

Right now, things that cast light are beams and suns (I think); other stuff might cast light but I haven't noticed it. I think there is some sort of implementation to give ships lights, but I've no clue if it actually does anything.

Anyway, what that means is that it'd be hard to implement it for engines without having sudden lighting oddities whenever a battle started up.

[Gregster2k]

All I want is to be able to see a GVS Nephthys cause a green glow on any ship that flies near a dark ship next to it. Just a single smooth light given off upon other ships, from near the top of the Nephthys where those green lights are.

I'm talking about the EXACT same lighting used to illuminate a surface that a weapon projectile surges past. Like how a surface is illuminated purple or whatever when a Subach HL-7 shot passes close to it.

Don't tell me this isn't possible and that Direct3D supports only 8 lights, I've played Direct3D games with TONS of the type of light I want onscreen(cough)Descent3(cough). Games as far back as 1998 had this. I'm surprised the SCP still does not. In a nutshell, if you have a ship with glowing green lights and fly over a dark ship with it you should illuminate THE OTHER SHIP green.

With what we're doing right now, PAINT that looks like lighting, the beauty of it, the believability/credibility, its DESTROYED, the realism utterly annihilated, whenever I switch to exterior view and see for example that the red lighted nose of a Lucifer I'm flying by isn't lighting up my ship red.

Weapons light up surfaces they fly by, so why don't thrusters and ship-mounted lights?
There's far more weapon projectiles in combat than actual ships.
What I suggest is that a glowpoint color creates the SAME sort of glow a weapon shot does. LOL, I don't see anyone complaining about dynamic lighting of weapons fire...

----

That said, plz plz plz plz do what ur doing for the Typhon? LOL

[Taristin]

Well, Turumbar just posted on GW that he's been grounded beyone belief. So Don't expect much more from him on this for a while...

[taylor]

Originally posted by Gregster2k
Don't tell me this isn't possible and that Direct3D supports only 8 lights, I've played Direct3D games with TONS of the type of light I want onscreen(cough)Descent3(cough).

OGL (typically, better hardware == more lights) only supports 8 lights as well and it's the same with D3D.  So it can only render 8 lights at a time.  To get more than 8 lights we have to render them in additional passes.  This is already done in FSO but it's a performance tradeoff like most everything else.  The engine itself support 256 lights at the moment.

To render 20 lights, as an example, we render all textures with the first 8 lights, turn those off and turn on the next 8 for another pass of just lights, then turn those off and render the last 4.  The more lights to render the more render passes that are needed and the slower each frame gets.

[Gregster2k]

oh  

is that how sixteen Subach shots onscreen all glow up things around them or do they use a different form of lighting? I always was sure they were different somehow

[taylor]

Eh, I wasn't very clear.  It's 8 lights applied to an object at the time, not 8 total lights per scene.  So it's not the sixteen Subach shots in general but the sixteen Subach shots passing near a ship that's important.  Counting light emitted from one sun you can have 7 of those shots cast light on that model at the time for 8 total lights.  That ship may need an extra render pass to get the other lights but it really doesn't happen that often with the current graphics.  I haven't kept track of it in big battles but when I do look it seldomly takes even one extra render pass for the lights.  Does that make any more sense?

[Turambar]

yeah, sorry guys, but i am grounded, i can post regularly on game warden at school, but HLP is blocked

i'm sneaking right now

no more comp for me, if anyone wants to continue this, i'll send the files their way when i can (will involve more sneaking)

and StratComm, post when you finish the rest of the strike craft, in case i'm able to sneak more

[Deepblue]

BTW Turambar, I think the glows look bloody fantastic.

[StratComm]

I'm still 2 out from that point, but I'll let you know.  I'll probably have the models themselves added to the VPs as soon as I get them all done, and let you update the glows as you get time.

[Taristin]

I hope the lows are ** smaller than in the images Turumbar posted...

[Gank]

Me too, they're not very subtle right now, they kindof distract fom the ship, rather than compliment it, if you get what I mean.

[Gregster2k]

Meh. Release em like that anyway...someone who loves a higher ambient factor could prolly use em

[StratComm]

Well Turambar can't get to the glows right now, but I've got all of the ships glowpointed and ready to add to the media VP.

Get them all here.

Also included are an updated Arcadia and an Argo with dockpoints to all of it's airlocks.  The Perseus may or may not be stable (I can't find anything wrong with it, but apparently Nico has found a flaw... I'll update it if I ever get a confirmed-stable copy).

EDIT: Those glowpoints might actually belong in effects.  They work out of maps so that's where I've been keeping them, but I don't know what convention is on these things.

[StratComm]

Someone just asked, so until this goes in the media vp, I'm bumping it back to the first page.  This is a release and everyone should probably grab it, unless you're Raa and passionately hate glowpoints.

[Deepblue]

How big?

[Ransom]

I don't hate glowpoints, but I don't like these ones either. They're way too large and all the different colours make it look christmassy.

[StratComm]

Originally posted by Ransom Arceihn
I don't hate glowpoints, but I don't like these ones either. They're way too large and all the different colours make it look christmassy.

It's precisely comments like these that make me think people aren't actually trying these in game.  And I don't mean the techroom, I'm talking about flying a mission involving (preferably hostile) terran fighters.  The glows don't jump out at the size they are now; if I shrink them any more to make the techroom look prettier then they dissapear in-game altogether.  The Loki could be accused of being the most egregious of any of these glowpoint jobs; I just ran a mission involving a half-dozen wings of them and, looking for the glowpoints, only had my attention drawn to them once or twice.