The new ambient light feature goes through walls and objects.

Hi decided to try using the new light feature the actually lights up an area of x radius. This is a wonderful new feature but has a few drawbacks. I found that objects do not block the light at all. I put lights inside a ship of mine and found that even through the closed walls, the light showed on the ground when I landed, setting a lower radius was sufficient to fix this. However, I put the lights on a car, and not only do the headlights light up an area of 10 meters in front of them, they also light up an area of 10 meters behind them! Including the inside of the car! The front of the driver's seat has what light projected on it and the back has red light! Would it be possible to add a new directional light feature? This would allow more flexibility with the lights. Understandably, some people may like the fact that light can go through objects. This could be fixed either witha directioinal light feature or a checkbox saying the light can or cannot go through objects. Sorry for writing so much.

I have a similar experience ... Light from spots outside my EXAKT store are lighting up the room inside. And there are a WALL between)

/Tina - EXAKT up with the roaster (he was delayed today)

Real time ray trace shadows would probably be the laggiest feature I can think of to add to SL. Real time shadow maps or stencils would be faster but would have to be blurred all to hell.

So you might ask how other games can get away with this? Most of the lighting and shadows you see in other games is pre-calculated and things like walls and floors are not movable (permanent). Game levels are required to be compiled (and can take a few days to process) and SL does not do this.

On another note, ambient lights are lights that fill the whole world with light. Everywhere. They look really ugly.

I voted for being able to have directional lights, it's the easiest and least costly solution to implement, and allows you to have lights go through walls if you really want them to (e.g a single light lighting a whole floor of your house).

Shadows are too hard. Directional lights (using the same directional behaviour as particles, perhaps) would be great.

Option 1 too costly and laggy

Implementing shadows in a polygon rendering engine will require the addition of a lot of polygons to assist in rendering what is called shadow volume. This means that EACH prim will generate an extrusion volume to render the shadow. This has the effect of doubling the number of prims that have to be processed.

To make things worse each light source will generate its own set of shadow volumes. That means that 6 light sources (the maximum) will multiply the number prims almost by 7. So 21 FPS will drop to 3 FPS.

The only good news I can write for this approach is that shadow volume rendering is fully a client-side process.

Option 3 not possible

To stop light from going through objects you have to implement ray tracing. Not possible given that SL and all the video cards we are using are on polygon rendering engines.


Option 2 is the only one with some decent chance of being implemented.

In the meantime, adjust the light radius parameter and play with the positon of your light source.

In the Second Life version release notes I saw something about them wanting to have working shadows. In my opinion, if there were shadows inmplemented, they wouldn't have to be detailed, heck they could even be for stationary objects. Not detailed as in simply a gap in the lighting. I'm not a really big programmer though so I wouldn't really know. I do understand that having detailed shadows would take a lot of resources. Directional lighting would also be really nice for things like car headlights and spot lights. Anywho keep on submitting ideas and voting.

I voted for #1, but I'm not bothered about shadows, given the technical limitations - I'd just like to see a situation where if I put a light inside a building, it doesn't light things on the roof as well.

#1 and #3 are practically the same thing.

EDIT: "practically" being choosing which prims it is that cast the shadows, of course.

Anyone here play Neverwinter Nights? It's a few years old. It has shadows. It has multi-light shadows, and this was before Pixel Shaders were even available.

So for all you 'ray tracers, too had to do' folks...Tell me why NWN can have real time shadows on a system 3 years ago but we can't have them today?

I can't be bothered to go through how totally different the way graphics in NWN and SL are generated is again. Go look at some old threads, there's hundreds of them.

1) Raytraces are not hard
2) Raytraces are merely CPU expensive
3) NWN probably didn't use raytraced shadow, but Shadow Maps.

as far as i remember NwN use some kind of shadow volumes, but the polygon count of an average NeverwinterNights scene isn even 10% of our classic SL scene

please follow a game design course before posting uninformed statements

Or alternatively, a 3D modeling course (the number of people that have said raytraced anything is easy boggles my mind).

Directional lighting would rock my socks.

Would made spotlights not have to be prim. My friend owns a club where it's impossible to hit the dance ball and such without the lights getting in the way, because he has the spots for the "rave" feel, but if he doesn't want them in the way they would have to be removed.

Directional lighting would solve this.

I wonder, would being able to have a "block light" option on certain objects cut back any lag that would be caused by lights that don't go through objects? Probably not, but it's a thought. *heh* I had an idea of what I meant just a sec ago, but it's gone now, and me not being overly technical it's probably never coming back. >.< *smacks her brain* One more week... one more week before I can start to get my sanity back...

No it wouldn't, directional lights wouldn't show up that way.

That's option 3 above, selective shadowing.


I've got a thought: if prims block light, all the insides of buildings are going to be dark during the day.

Not if they only block the hardware lighting that you toggle through preferences. If you can turn one off without turning off the other, you'd think you could also then block one without blocking the other, right?

Oh yeah, good point. Not thinking straight or something atm.

1.9.1 preview had it. a house/wall kept out the sun and so forth. i was amazed when i turned the option on. it be gone now.

*edit* come to think of it, that may have only applied to the sun and not lit objects. still it was very sexy and i look forward to its return in a later release!