Improved Cave Lighting

[Wiro 370]

I've been working on Budda with trying to emulate real caves, or not. We've been going back and forth on this point.. maybe we can add it as an option of some sort..

Edited October 26, 2012 by Wiro

[Hussars 511]

Survival mode! Seriously though I never use lamps anywhere in the game, my screen is bright enough to see everything clearly at midnight.

Monitor tanning?

[Mattown 349]

i love you guys, thanks a ton for this

[Klaa 4,872]

Monitor tanning?

Go into the liiight.

[Yaga 2,887]

+100

Very good job!

[Sandyar 524]

Wow thats very very nice I hope that solves the problems with side tunnels as well

[Theophyla 7]

Please. Come. Soon !

So dark and icky in these caves, its such a enclosed space.. One light should make it so bright ! And you finally brought that realism to life. I love you <3

[KaiH 1,126]

The soonerâ„¢ the better!

Would fix some lighting issues outside of caves too, i would bet

[ReaverKane 363]

Looks nice, hope this solves issues with lighting, like my caver where if i step into a certain row of tiles all lights go out. Other than that i'm quite content with what we had atm, but any improvement is great. Just hope those are really high ql lamps on the pics xp, or it might be overbright, but they're also like 1 lamp per tile, so idk...

[saytheb 100]

Looks nice, hope this solves issues with lighting, like my caver where if i step into a certain row of tiles all lights go out. Other than that i'm quite content with what we had atm, but any improvement is great. Just hope those are really high ql lamps on the pics xp, or it might be overbright, but they're also like 1 lamp per tile, so idk...

Lamp quality based lighting is in the works by Budda. The test cave in that picture has an absurd amount of lights in it just for testing. You wouldn't need lamps bunched that close together in actual cave unless you wanted to waste the materials to have a super bright area.

[Keldun 335]

That's odd, it sure looks nice, but taking a closer look, the ones in the background still don't give off any light.

[Budda 2,669]

That's odd, it sure looks nice, but taking a closer look, the ones in the background still don't give off any light.

(shhhh)

[Klaa 4,872]

(shhhh)

Omg, they were trying to distract us with the pretty li... Oooo shiny!

Edited October 28, 2012 by Klaa

[Mattown 349]

hopefully it all come together nicely at 1.0

[Torgrim 403]

(shhhh)

I noticed that too. It gets darker in a distance, that's not really correct. If you have a fully lit tunnel you should be able to see a very long distance. I guess the darkness is used a bit like fog is outdoors to reduce the view distance. Maybe you should use white fog instead (moisture in caves) if the tunnel is well lit, black if it's not.

[Suntzu 644]

This is so needed! Really cool that it's being fixed after all these years.

[Budda 2,669]

I noticed that too. It gets darker in a distance, that's not really correct. If you have a fully lit tunnel you should be able to see a very long distance. I guess the darkness is used a bit like fog is outdoors to reduce the view distance. Maybe you should use white fog instead (moisture in caves) if the tunnel is well lit, black if it's not.

We're still rolling with the hard limit on the number of lights allowed per scene. It'll be less noticeable in proper caves where you don't have 10 lights within a few tiles.

[Hussars 511]

As long as I don't have the lights go out like I forgot to pay the bill, I'm happy with it

[Keldun 335]

We're still rolling with the hard limit on the number of lights allowed per scene. It'll be less noticeable in proper caves where you don't have 10 lights within a few tiles.

I thought that was dealt with a long time ago? It seems to work on the surface at least.

If you run into the problem of too many lights you are actually doing something seriously wrong, like trying to draw everything at once. Just draw every single object one at a time and only include the most relevant light sources for that object (global/sun light and three or so lamps with the strongest influence at that point.)

If you have problems with big caves, chop them up into chunks, or even go so far as to draw each single tile individually.

Afaik thats even more performant than drawing everything with 8 lights.

Edited October 30, 2012 by Keldun

[Budda 2,669]

I thought that was dealt with a long time ago? It seems to work on the surface at least.

"seems" is the key word there. The surface has some trixy pre-lighting on the terrain to make you think its all working fine - its actually doing the exact same thing as caves.

As for the rest, we do it by cell afaik, cell being 16x16 area - and it doesn't work properly. We're looking into why that is, and going to be ripping out most of the lighting code in there currently to have it more manageable - and hopefully fix a few more bugs with it - before we try for a shader approach in addition to the fixed pipeline thats currently in there.

Note: The above shader + fixed pipeline is one of the few times I will actually endorse having something as optional - though most likely the client will choose for you depending on your hardware.

P.S. If none of the above made sense to you: TL;DR: MAGIC!

[saytheb 100]

*looks up from chopping up the code*

Yeah.. what Budda said..

*goes back to work*

[Keldun 335]

is that 16x16 tiles? cause that seems rather big for 8 lights, even if it works like it should.

[Gorwst 129]

Oooh, Magic! Cool.

[Shiraek 464]

This is awesome Thanks a ton!

While you guys are going over lighting code, what about fixing up the relative brightness and radius of each light (in physics there's no difference between brightness and effective radius but in Wurm there seems to be which is fine I guess)

• Higher quality lamps currently don't shine that much brighter or further than lower quality, could make this more pronounced?
  
• Higher difficulty lamps could have a more pronounced brightness effect. Currently imperial lamps seem no brighter than regular iron lamps but require a ton more materials to make and imp and are higher difficulty. They look nice though... could they have a small brightness or radius bonus?
  
• Brass lamps are a complete cow to make, which is fine, is the brightness reward worth the effort?
  
• Sliver lamps have a point, white light, cool
  
• Gold lamps have no point. What about small radius but quite bright or something?
  
• Bronze lamps have no point, who wants brown light? What about directional light or something, like they shine directly out in a 180 degree arc a bit like a brazier with a back plate?
  

Regards,

Shiraek

[Torgrim 403]

This is awesome Thanks a ton!

While you guys are going over lighting code, what about fixing up the relative brightness and radius of each light (in physics there's no difference between brightness and effective radius but in Wurm there seems to be which is fine I guess)

• Higher quality lamps currently don't shine that much brighter or further than lower quality, could make this more pronounced?
  
• Higher difficulty lamps could have a more pronounced brightness effect. Currently imperial lamps seem no brighter than regular iron lamps but require a ton more materials to make and imp and are higher difficulty. They look nice though... could they have a small brightness or radius bonus?
  
• Brass lamps are a complete cow to make, which is fine, is the brightness reward worth the effort?
  
• Sliver lamps have a point, white light, cool
  
• Gold lamps have no point. What about small radius but quite bright or something?
  
• Bronze lamps have no point, who wants brown light? What about directional light or something, like they shine directly out in a 180 degree arc a bit like a brazier with a back plate?
  

Regards,

Shiraek

Nice ideas, not all of them are realistic, but I guess that doesn't matter too much as long as it adds to diversity and usefulness.

Some more:

* How about also adding flickering to all lamps (I know, not fun for the developers), low ql flickers alot, high ql flicker less.

* Low ql could consume a lot more fuel than high ql lamps.