Light Pollution

And I'm the cause!

I decided to make a couple of formerly useless lamps in my home actually emit light, because I was tired of forcing the sun to "noon" when it was dark. I'm happily building and scripting away in my apartment when I notice that the light is spilling right through the walls, floor, and ceiling to adjacent units!

What's a considerate neighbor to do?

I got my touch on/off scripts all finished, and I make sure to turn off the lights in the apartment when I leave so they dont confuse/annoy adjacent residents. I also reduced the radius as much as aesthetically possible, but there's still spillage, though much less noticable.

So, my question is this: are there no shadows cast by objects when using hardware lighting? And, are there supposed to be? I've checked some OpenGL docs online, and I see that OpenGL doesn't directly handle object shadows, but it seems relatively straightforward (at least they make it sound that way) to calculate shadows.

This also makes me wonder, if the object casting the light is occluded and culled, should it still be casting light on non-occluded objects?

I'd like to figure out how to script my lights to turn on automatically when it's dark, but I don't want to annoy the neighbors who probably have their own ideas about lighting their apartments.

Here's also to hoping that the PRIM_POINT_LIGHT primitive parameter implies a future PRIM_SPOT_LIGHT parameter!

You can limit the range the light goes with the intensity and drop off settings. But if you set them small enough not to go into the neighbor's place, they might not be bright enough to do you any good either.

SL only renders the closest 6 lights, so if you want to kill a light source from an adjacent room / plot, make 6 things emit light with 0 intensity and place them between yourself and the lights you wish to kill.

great tip ninja

Ah, I knew there was an answer. Cool idea Ninja.