Forgive me if this has been covered. I searched the forums and did find bits and pieces of intel but I'm honestly still confused.

I'm working on my first game and honestly loving every damn minute I just found out that GG can only seem to have 3 dynamic lights running at the same time. I'm working on a parking lot and it has about 6 parking lot lights and of course only 3 seem to show as being on and lite up until you start walking and get close to the other 3 then the first 3 turn off and the other 3 start turning on. Its alittle strange from the gamers point of view I would imagine. So I'm trying to learn about pre-baking the lights. I've tried F1 and F2 and it doesn't seem to do anything atleast not when I'm 'testing' the game from within GG. I've not exported a stand alone just yet. I also tried F3 and F4 and it doesn't seem to ever finish or does it take a very very long time? Any help or insights on pre-bake methods and/or expectations of GG and lighting would be incredibly appreciated!

Cheers!

Yes, f3 and f4 take some time. Are you making your lights static before baking them?

oh man :facepalm: so you are supposed to make them static and not dynamic and then do the prebake? lol if so I've definitely been going about all this wrong which would explain why I get no results lol

yeah, for a lot of simeltaneous lights, do static lights. only use dynamic lights for scriptable stuff or "dynamic" stuff: light flickering or moving for instance.

so place the light in the map and change it over to static. Then in the test mode of the game hit F1 to bake and thats all to it?

ah I think the entities I'm trying to prebake into are not supported. Other entities I've just tried with work with the same process. Thank you for the help guys!

you need to make sure all entities you use for a lightmapped scene are normal/specular maps (and complain to lee that such things were not included for what is now half of the gameguru media after the "expansion")

I hit f3 to lightmap my levels. f4 doesnt look any better IMO and takes longer, f2 doesnt look good enough IMO. IDK what f1 does but it doesnt lightmap anything but the sun i think.

Roughly a guess how long does your F3 take to complete?

for stuff like THIS which i map with reshade on (idk why but whatever) it can take anywhere from 30 mins to an hour. I've had maps take as long as 2 or 3 hours. the smaller the quicker but after a certain point it doesnt care and lightmaps the whole grid anyways

It depends in how powerful your PC is and how many entities are in the level, on my machine with about twenty models it takes a little under three minutes.

Thank you guys I'll just be patient and standby. I've probably got 100 models on this map.

I'm running a 3ghz i5, 8gb ram, 3 evo 850 ssd's, and gtx 980. All water cooled. But with 100 will be a few hours I think.

Looks like it just sits at 'waiting for threads to finish' huh

I'll check back on it in an hour.

my maps usually have upwards of 700 lightmap objects
it just takes forever, but trust me its worth it when its done.

700 whoa!! Awesome

Thank you all for your time, help, and info! I really appreciate it a ton!

I see real time shadow for the palm tree unpon the baked lightmap, it is normal ?
I think it's because it's pre baked.

This thread has been helpful. I actually didn't know about this.

One problem I still have is when I do any type of light baking some of my models rotate. I'll have to post that in the bugs section.

dynamic objects will continue to cast dynamic shadows in pre-baked levels. animated trees are dynamic.

Bugsy you use F3 for your lighting, correct? I'd like to do the same as you. You're lighting is beautiful!

it'll take more than just hitting f3 to create beautiful lighting. there is a technique of placement, colouring, and texturing the scenery to match the lights that will need to be learned. it also helps to mess with the surface and ambience sliders to create a more convincing pallette.

just keep trying different things with your lighting until you find the best fit for you.

Forgive me if this is a dumb question lol

but having too many dynamic lights does kill your FPS, correct? So the more you can get pre-baked the better for performance on FPS?

Not really as only 4 dynamic lights can be lit at the same time anyway so the main reason to use static is simply so you can have more lit at once (plus the shadows).

Correct ... I often mix and match which seems to work well .