Ok I'm not in for complaining that much but ive nearly done two big games now and I cannot get lighting to work properly, in both games and that's over 800 hours I have not managed to get them working, ive watched lees vids and baked them boiled them had em dancing live but no go? ok on the first game which is a sci fi I had to got smallg to make a temp model that kinda works (cheers m8) what is it with lights? wasn't this supposed to be already sorted? why don't they work? baked= nope realtime = erm nope ive got the lightinzone kinda working but its a memory hogger when you want like 200 street lights on map not to mention the time setting it up. we have a fantasy pack with no torch to light our way. no way of laying area lights (believe me ive tried) common guys some help here plz

Yeah, lighting is kind of an odd thing, and it's been discussed a LOT lately! (I'm learning a lot from these discussions as I'm not an artist; thanks, guys!) If you want 200 street lights, there is no alternative that I know of but to bake them, and baking is both time consuming and slows down the game a bit vs. real time. If you are referring to street lights actually emitting light, it's not there yet. An illumination map + baked lighting would be a good fake, I did it in a little test map I made before my hard drive crashed. I wish I knew more about it though, but I'm sure someone will chime in to help you! Good luck!

2 words

voting system

there is only 3 lights allowed at anyone time so things will pop in and out, anything lights orientated will have to wait

building editor i see 2 months
then ai 2 months
then it goes on till lights and shadows etc get some tlc sadly, and only one light source coming from one angle so that will work only on 2 sides at the moment and shadows will have to wait, but there is a bit of light but that is a quick fix possibly
not sure, as to baking i thnk he will look at that when the vote is top on terrain lights etc. so i think you have to sit tight and maybe design more levels, and wait till they are top i have been honing my skills in modelling while waiting and other little bits, i guess the other is someone may be better at answering this question. i did vote for lights and left alone editors etc. but many wanted building maker. so the powers that be follow the masses wishes.

200 was over exaggerating a little I do get the voting system and I do understand that we can only use 3 lights at a time, but for me no lights work, so I carnt even juggle 3? If I could get 3 to work at a time that would be fine i'd work with that for now so I'm wondering if somethings either missing in the tab menu that I need to set or if I'm bugged or what? As ive said in Lee's vid it shows them lighting up the inside and outside of buildings I put them in test them and nothing = no illumination at all the torch works but as we know its not that brill but does show that lights do work also the lightzone.lua works, just not the built in lights. What could I be missing? Edit: ok I'm making a little headway by increasing the light range a lot ive managed to get them to start to work in the editor

You do need your entity and terrain shader settings on HIGH or HIGHEST for the dynamic lighting to kick in, as its a performance hit. For a 200 street light scene, I would definitely use static lights and bake the night scene. Start with a few to get the intensity correct, then once you know the settings and good spacing you can make a nice run of them through your street scene. Maybe this can be the feature of a future Twitch Broadcast as I agree lighting and how to use it is very important for the visuals of your game.

Ive been playing around with it Lee and have it working now although I need to tweak it a little. Around 100 or so dynamic lights I had to increase the light range to 1000+ to make it work correctly entity shader was maxed, I'm not using a night scene I'm using a day/night system so I kinda have to jump in wait for dark and then do my adjustments. Is there a way to set the default lighting Range to 1000 or whatever works best and maybe even intensity? It would make placing that many lights much quicker as I have another 4 maps to do with them

Yes, place your first light and change it's range property to whatever you want (1000). Then extract it and place it again while holding shift. Keep holding shift while placing the duplicates of that light.

I've some issues placing lights, in fact with all the markers, I refer some example to explain better my point :

I place some tree in my map, after that I go far away from the tree and I can see their position, even from differents angles, while the tree remain static, does not move from their position, so I can nicely fine tune it till I'm happy with.

I place some light inside a room, let's say in a lamp (a big pain, at least for me); I go far way from the light, to see how is done the lighting, positioning better and so on, but !oh, I can't do it, because the light is no there, in their place, nor, this light now is closest to me, and even following me araound the map.

Why does not those markers stay quiets/statics/inmobile in their position, while I can see the scene from differents angles, for fine tune?

Thanks in advance.

3com

@ jerry lol should have thought of extract and shift :/ cheers m8 (still would be nice to just change the default 500 to 1.2k so you could just click and place)

@ 3com I too was having horrid results with the last game trying to get lights in buildings and lamps e.g fire in a wall lamp I have to take a top down view and zoom right in and place it otherwise its all over the place (ive actually had this also with models I created e.g a ship ive modelled the figurehead actually follows the player?) weird and kinda spooky :/
I'm going to be trying that one again after I add a load more lights lol (wasn't enough to illuminate the pathways across the map so will be around 200) I will video it and post the results of that and my attempt at using them in the knights quarters

The current shaders only really support four dynamic lights, but a system is in place to re-use them for the four nearest lights to the player, which gives the impression of them moving about. If you wanted your dynamic light to stay put, even at great distances, then you need to keep your dynamic light count to three for the whole level (not an elegant solution I agree). We have something on the voting board which will allow unlimited dynamic lights but that looks like it has a way to go up the charts still.

Yes Yes Yes to that one, lots of discussion about dynamic light and baking going on but no concrete *this is how you do it* .... I also want to setup a night scene with many street lights and lots of entities laying around but kind of feel a bit intimidated by the whole process as some very clever people here are also getting it wrong, show us how its done Lee

I managed to get them working and actually looking/working very well check my post https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/215309
Ive just completed a city which spans 2 maps with tons of lights (not tried to count them lol) and all the lights are all dynamic what ive found is that as Lee says only 3 or 4 come on at the same time which actually is fine as the ones behind you go out as you go forward, I'm getting pretty good results now ive played with them

Well once the engine updates that are actually important are voted on, we may get to see 200 lights in real-time with no restrictions like 3 lights at once, which is awful. Baking just takes way too much memory and of course can be a slow process on people with 10 year old CPU's

When I see the top items on the voting board at the moment I despair, I really do. We have:
Building Editor ( not an issue, we have been waiting a long time for this)
Bots to navigate stairs (needed. Probably ties in with the building editor.)
Menu Editing (sigh)
Talking characters quest givers (sigh again)
Free player app for non Gameguru users (for me GG is cheap enough already why cater for this? Certainly not until other more important things are addressed.)
Day and Night system (fine, but work on general lighting would be better and from what I have seen in Lee's posts, needs DX11 to shine.)

Important engine boosting features, graphical enhancements are all low down and seem a long, long way off.

I'm glad you got the lights working to your satisfaction in the end, but I just avoid them completely most of the time. Lights are just not good enough in GG. Put one in a building and it shines beyond the walls if it's set to have a long range, rather than spilling out the windows as it should. You shouldn't have to scale the range down so it barely reaches the interior walls. The Sun still shines through buildings in real-time mode. This sort of thing really should have been addressed awhile ago, but the voting board has made sure we will have to wait a long time for any real improvements. So, I continue to wait and play about with things, but never really start on an actual full game.

Agreed tbh I don't think users should be voting on core elements, just features where the devs address them when they have time, but I also personally think that it should be just up to the devs to make the decisions as to what gets implemented and when, no body knows an engine better than those that build it

@Honkeyboy - I think that TGC should remove the features that they think are critical from the voting list, and implement those as and when they see fit. The voting list could be for secondary features. I understand why they are doing it this way, though - before the voting system was implemented, if an update boosted performance, people would complain about the lack of features. If an update included new features, people would complain about the performance. At least now people know what they're getting in the next update.

Just my personal opinion Gtox they do what they do if it was my choice (which it isn't) it would be performance, stability and effects e.g lighting and volumetric effects and basically making the core of the engine solid, as we have brilliant scripters, modellers (like yourself) etc to fill in the gaps but I enjoy it none the less oh and multi single player markers lol (had to get that one in)

I don't have much luck with static lighting outdoors but I fair pretty well indoors but then that creates a new issue ...
The Video below shows Dynamic of which I can only have 3 lights ... But the Characters and models illuminate and fade as they pass through the lights



Now in the video I just made I actually have over 50 static lights that don't look to bad ....
The only problem is the model is constantly illuminated ... either way you lose something

Ive never used static lighting synchromesh as everybody seemed to say it affected performance so I just went with purely dynamic and actually had quite good results I think I maybe overkilled it a bit by increasing the range to 1000 and it sorta made night become day unless you wandered off quite far from the track (love the Dalek btw lol) I actually liked the effect of brightening the lamp idds (thanks smallg for showing me how) and adding a light over the top gave a real nice effect.

Static lighting is free according to Lee .... It doesn't touch performance ...you can have as many as you like
But its still not as good as Dynamic

After light mapping change a few of the static lights back to dynamic (reduce the range) and you should get the same results as your first video plus light map shadows. I think your characters are being constantly lit by sunlight with no other dynamic lights in scene. The real problem is shadows on floor only come from sunlight direction but I guess it wouldn't be too noticeable to most.
Without trying myself I cant be sure this would work as dynamic lighting may be turned off completely when using baked setting but certainly worth a try for you. I think it should work

Good Idea Rolfy ....worth a try
Yep your right about the shadows ... They are directional so it must be sunlight as they change when going round corners ..

I work in a warehouse twice a week and their new lighting system actually does turn the lights of behind and the forward ones on as you walk through .
So for an up to date warehouse Dynamic lights work pretty accurately ....as long as we all make Warehouses

Even if it does work you will have to keep corridors short as player distance may affect dynamic lights, so if you have more than 3 lights distance within where character can be seen they may not all show as lit

So he says, but i'm not so sure about that, quite a few people have mentioned in the past that light mapping is causing FPS drops, which it shouldn't do, but nobodies ever really looked into it as far as a I know.

I see where your coming from now about the light mapping process ....Personally for me it seems faster or at least no slower .... But I do recall users saying the light mapping seems to have slowed things down a bit for them..

The baking system actually adds extra polygons to the scene to allow the terrain shadows to be rendered efficiently compared to adding the shadows to the terrain shader itself. You can now switch this off in the latest update by setting the SETUP.INI field called lightmappingexcludeterrain=0 to one

That's very good to know, thanks Lee.