Is there any way to create a lantern that can be carried (by an enemy would be best) and would illuminate a dark hallway? I'd like to be able to see a glow coming around a corner and know that the enemy is on his way.

Hello!

I moved your thread to the product chat board because this is not really about 3D modeling.

To answer your question: Not yet and not to my knowledge. Lighting and lightmapping are still being worked on and while we have dynamic lights, I have not yet seen anyone getting them to move/ stick to a character.



-Wolf

But what you could do is model a lantern in the hand of your character and then use the _i texture (glow) to make the lantern glow. not the best but effective in being able to see the glow from the lantern in the AI's hand as they came closer to you.

The _i texture is a black background and white for the parts of the diffuse texture that you want to glow. You will have to use the high entity setting in the matrics mode (tab tab) to see the _i texture in effect.

I have tried that but the Illumination map doesn't give off any light, it doesn't actually "illuminate" anything but itself. Unless I am doing something wrong?

You are doing everything right. The _I only brightens the texture on the model itself, it does not give off any light.
There is no way to have moving dynamic lights just yet.



-Wolf

Hmn, I wonder, would the light markers react to the move entity scripting? ie:



If they do, then you could place a light and give it a script that moves towards the character with the lantern, so whenever it moves the light will move.

Would that work do you think?

*starts fumbling around for the ingredients to cast a summon smallg spell*

Well smallg not here yet , but no, lights don't move with MoveForward.

Cheers.

Damn, would have been awesome if they did.

How about lots of hidden lights and a script that detects the nearest one to unhide while hiding the last one already on?

@belidos love the card

like zones and such, lights do not move with MoveForward() or SetPosition(), you will however end up with zone / light markers in weird places if you try (but the actual light / zone stays put).

the nearest light thing is possible but i think this would be very impractical.... imagine trying to edit your game with 6million lights in the way

i think the best you can do is use an object and illuminate the entire thing in a decreasing intensity to simulate a "light" - similar to mykes idea of illuminating the lantern but this can kinda look ok given the right settings - i used it for a search light on my ufo in place of a moving light

can you not model the lantern and mod the flashlight .

@smallg - Love it!!! That was awesome, it's not exactly what I need but I get your point and it would work for the coming down the corridor example. I do, however, have several other uses for a glowing, light emitting object. Again, I absolutely love your UFO "searchlight".

@devlin - I have not tried that but it's definitely worth a shot, thanks for the idea.

Now I'm curious... I came across a fantasy pack character who's weapon, a staff, launches fireballs. Those fireballs seem to be lighting up the area around them as they fly towards their target. Does anybody know how they are doing that? It seems to be the effect that I need? Maybe?

found out today that the illumination .fx effect file doesn't work but entity_basic.fx should be used instead.

@ Old Dude:
The fantasy staff has a projectile for the fireball, Lee has made the code so that 1 dynamic light follows the projectile and then it flashes when the projectile explodes. This is hard coded as far as I know.

Also this only works for the player.

But the I texture for a lantern in the hand of an AI will work with the character_basic shader. Not as bright as with the entity_basic shader thou.

Thanks! I will be playing with both and see what I can come up with and that's good to know about the fireball. I wish I could have that moving light but until it's available I will see what I can do with what I've got. I am also trying to make an invisible "bubble" around the light that I can add a glow to it? I'm not sure how that's going to look but I'll keep playing with it. Again, thanks. There are so many lua files it's tough to go through them all and see what's in them, I wish there was a book cataloging all of the commands, effect files, etc. that are in game guru. It's kind of huge, however, all of the files seem to be pretty well annotated (once you find the one you are looking for) so that is very helpful. I'm starting to go back to my old code and make it more reverse engineering friendly. It's one thing when you know what your code means it's another when everybody else can read it.

Oh, and sorry I use words like "commands" I'm really old, that's the reason I don't annotate (remark) as much as I should I'm still trying to save space. I'm really, really old.

To see most the commands available for GG check out the global.lua file. Everything is in there

@DVader - Thanks! That's an awesome find.

No problem. Always happy to help when I can.

All we need to get this to work would be a way to move or position a light. I vote we storm the light voting options asap! I remember Lee talking about 1000's of lights in his blog somewhere, with no massive speed reduction. Think it was part of the DX11 stuff he was toying with. I'm pretty certain we could move lights as it is with the appropriate Lua command, but having more lights to play with in real-time would be nice

Propose some LUA command names and we'll be one step closer

Well, we could just use the regular move commands we have of course, the lights are after all classed as an entity in the editor. That, and all the SetPosition commands to work with lights, so we can do a little more than move them up, down, forward and backward.

If you want to separate them, then something like SetLightPosition(e,x,y,z) and similar commands for rotation would be good as well ( not that rotation is an issue with lights as they stand at the moment).

Brilliant.

They are entities with numbers, and you move them with the flak stuff, so the hard work is done. (Just guessing here)

Also if we could attach them to a character bone limb that would be the best.

Just need to tie them with the scripting.

And bulb/cone/photometrics lights, would be nice too.
Also being movables, like Mike suggested (I'm thinking in torches), would be great too.

3com

Good point about reusing the existing LUA commands to move the light 'entities' I will add to my Wrike list.