I have searched the forums and the internet for a solution to this problem. I have been unsuccessful at lighting a night scene in a city. I have played with dynamics (you only get three), but have also repeatedly placed, made static, and upped the strength to as high as 5000, and they still do not show as they should.

I have placed light objects close to sources, and close to the objects I wish them to illumine, and nothing seems to change even after I remap the lights. From some 2000 strong lights, I get merely a faint golden glow from a very pale yellow color choice.

I have used the sliders. in the tab-tab menu, followed the advice of three different tutorials, but the moonlight is far too strong, and seems to be affecting the way light is portrayed outside, and at night.

Upon testing the lights inside a building, they are FAR more effective. I'm beginning to think I will need to use multiple lights to illumine one area sufficiently. I do worry that this might cause lower fps rates in a standalone game.

Any thoughts on this situation would be greatly appreciated. I am very much a noob here, but I have created assets for other games before, so I do understand a bit about graphics.

The current lightmapping in Game Guru is very poor, worse than it was back when it was DirectX9. For reasons that cannot be adequately explained by modern science, Surface Sun Factor effects more than just the sun, it effects static lightmaps too. This means that if you 'turn up' the strength of the sun, your static lightmaps become less visible as they are hidden in shadow. Turning down the strength of the sun doesn't turn down the intensity enough, and also you lose shadows in your interiors. Likewise, playing with the Surface RGB values also effects all your lights. You'd normally want to play with those to change the colour of the sun to mimic moonlight, but doing so effects the colour of all lights in the scene.

This is without other issues like noticeable banding in lightmaps, and just the general low quality and blockiness of them, which doesn't seem to be improved regardless of what values you type in the setup.ini.

There is a way you can turn off the sun completely from your lightmapping; in the setup.ini go down and change lightmappingdeactivatedirectionallight to 1; that will help a bit. I would also advise using both a static light and a dynamic light with a smaller range in the same spot for each light source; the dynamic light will pick out the static lightmap better and make it more visible. But be careful as dynamic lights don't cast shadows you can see their illumination through nearby walls.

You should get more than 3 dynamic lights though, there was an update a while back to allow like 38 at once. But they don't have shadows so they are similarly sub-par.

If you play around with the settings enough, you can get this...which is...OK.



I really do hope they address Game Guru lighting next year. I played lots of old FPSC games recently, and I was struck by how these game (most of which are getting on for 10 years old now) have vastly superior lighting.

AE

What you say makes a lot of sense. Your image is exactly what I was going for. I am also finding that some entities do not seem to have specular maps, so there is zero light reflection, and some walls completely disappear once you light map a scene. I guess for now I will proceed with caution on entity choices.

Did you modify the setup.ini in your scene? It looks far superior to anything I have been able to come up with! Nice work.

Thanks for the help!

The only change I made was changing lightmappingdeactivatedirectionallight to 1, in an effort to turn off the sun during lightmapping - I'm experimenting with a level set at night myself and also having issues. Notice how the floor of the inside of that building is over-lit; that's annoying when 90% of your level is set indoors!

AE

Is the setup.ini file attached to the level or map? In other words, can I have night and day levels in one compiled game? Sorry to be a bother. I'm very grateful for your advice here.

Here's another issue with night time outdoor scenes. I can either have a realistic night look, OR I can see my non-player characters walking around the city. Otherwise, they look like black ghosts. Could be a cool effect for another game, but not so great for a realistic cityscape at night. It was hard to capture an image as they were moving.

Sadly, no - it's global to all levels.



This could be down to shaders. In the .fpe file of your character (located in entitybank, use Windows Explorer to navigate to it and Notepad to open .fpe files), there's a line that reads...

effect = effectbank\reloaded\character_basic.fx

Make sure the effect is set to character_basic.fx
It could also be that the character you are using doesn't have appropriate textures for the shader to work with, e.g. _D, _N, _S or _color, _gloss, _normal, _metalness. Also I tend to have issues with characters made in the Character Creator tool, but it's the opposite to your problem; mine tend to be way too bright!

AE

I'm wondering if anyone has experimented with just putting a really large entity stretched over a night scene? I suppose you could block out the sun / moonlight that way, which is kind of like being in a studio. It would have to be something very black to make it less obvious. Crazy one cannot make a lightbox that does this.

It would be no different than any indoor scene .. My levels are sealed but I still need to adjust the Surface sun factor slider.

Just a note about this issue that I found equally confounding.

Lighting the shadows of a night scene takes a LOT of fiddling. Using static spot lights takes very high power (5k and up) with placement very close to the surfaces you wish to illuminate. Dynamic lights can be used to supplement the scene, but these, too, must be extremely strong and placed close to areas in shadow. It is especially noticeable when lighting the shadow side of a building. Light sources in general, seem to need placement rather close to the surfaces they are meant to light up. It's not really how we usually think of lighting a room IRL.

I hope that was clear. I've become much more adept at light mapping since I started.

This script could help to achieve a dark environment, of course you can play with sliders to get the values that fit your scene.
I attached the script to a trigger zone.



Edit: I'm using "clear" sky.

Actually, not too bad! One note: Static lights do not map. You can only use dynamic light sources, which is fine for an outdoor scene, at least for me.



On the left side of the building is a dynamic light, while on the right, I placed a static light at 5000. I light mapped it, but there is no light source showing at all.

This is the best dark scene I have seen in the game.

Well done!

As we all know GG is about workarounds at the moment , so in your scene above I would suggest to try and but the light source on the 'sun' side or turn shadows off for a dark scene, the shadow from you hut should not be visible or barely visible with that light