[Valathil]

Thanks for taking the time to make the video!

1. Holy ****. Looks much better than the screenshots suggested.
2. Love the light spooling effects. However, at 0:39, the light intensity is poorly synchronized to the shrinking plasma ball. There's also some weirdness to the position of the specular highlight there. It's like it's brightest a fair distance to the left of the ball, rather than surrounding the ball. Then again, it actually looks like an artifact resulting from lack of an occlusion check, so I'm not sure if it can be fixed, or if it's worth it to fix it.
3. This is a matter of personal preference, but I think it could do with a stronger diffuse component relative to the specular component. Perhaps going so far as to have diffuse being primary, and the specular for normal map detail and cone shine awesomeness.  Are the two numbers tweakable independently by flags?

1. I know, right?

2. I use the same percentage function as the render_muzzle_glow function. However I do agree that the sprite vanishes before the light is fully spooled down. Could be because of alpha blending of the sprite ill look into it.
And the specular thing is because the muzzle light is moved like 300 units into the beam so the lightdirection is less tangential ( the same problem i had with the beam ^^) i didnt change, was always like that. But if you move it closer you get a very small specular I tried already.

3. Specular component is controllabe by -ogl_spec  and -spec_tube like always. Diffuse is not controllable.

[Kolgena]

-spec_tube, yes. But that won't change the relative contributions of diffuse light vs specular light. Yeah, it's a big nitpick, so I throw it out there more as a curious musing than a serious suggestion. Especially since none of the other light sources offer such customization.

Edit: ninja'd. :/

[Valathil]

Au Contraire Mon Frère. -spec_tube only scales the specular color. It does change the relative contribution. You just cant scale the diffuse color it stays fixed.

[Kolgena]

Er yeah. My bad. I meant that having only that one tag does not allow customization of diffuse light vs specular light and total light intensity at the same time.

My onlie english sucks apparenlty.

[Bobboau]

I could have sworn there was a defuse tag too.

[Kolgena]

Nope. The closest there is is emissive light/ambient light, but that's nondirectional.

[Sab0o]

Concerning performance: I add 2 dot products , around 5 multiplication and about 10 or so additions to the shader. I dont think that its that big of a performance hit. But this will all be have to decide when i release and people get to try it.

And as requested vid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YeZauWDKHI

The way the lights slowly fade up whilst the beam is charging looks very wrong imo.  I think it should flash on instantly the moment it fires, and fade out as it finishes firing.

It looks sick though.

[Valathil]

The way the lights slowly fade up whilst the beam is charging looks very wrong imo.  I think it should flash on instantly the moment it fires, and fade out as it finishes firing.

It looks sick though.

Thats not representive of the current situation anymore. it now fades up to about 80% then jumps to 100% when the beam turns on try the build it really looks much better then in the video

[Kolgena]

Beam lighting is pretty fantastic. It's interesting that tube-lights need to be around 1 to be realistic, whereas they had to be quite a bit lower before to avoid being overpowering.

Not that that's a bad thing.

[Valathil]

that's probably because point lights had a 0 constant attenuation which meant that as you went closer to the point light than the light radius the divisor got less than 1 which meant the the light was scaled upward which is BAD

[Kolgena]

Oooh, I see.

I bring it up mainly because most people will want to change their lighting flag if they want to have a look consistent with how it was prior. I've bumped my 0.75 up to 1.5 lol.

I'm not really noticing the jump in intensity that's supposed to happen at beam fire. Is that controlled by spec_tube or spec_static? It could just be that there are too many beams going on at once and I didn't notice something that is actually there.

[Valathil]

muzzle lights are spec_static

[Kolgena]

Any way to up their own intensity relative to things like explosions, lasers, and stuff? Perhaps something in the shader?

[Valathil]

nope, point lights are point lights are point lights. you cant expect to control every variable in the game with a cmdline or shadertweak sry