Indoor lighting

I didn't see this anywhere on the first page or anything so hopefully this isn't a repeat of something that's been discussed. But something my friends and I have been discussing is how much we'd love to have indoor lighting options. I mean, sure, we could force sunset or something, but I think it would be nice to have light inside even if we want to leave the outside as night. See, some friends recently bought a plot of land, and our house has a balcony. So we sit out on the balcony and don't mind the dark out there, but inside we want to be able to see our furniture.

I wondered if it was possible to make some sort of artificial light available (which wouldn't just cause a false glow effect, but actually light the area), or if there is a way already, does anybody know how that works so we can put some lamps around the house or something?

You can create objects with the material set to "Light", then go into your graphics preferences abd turn "local lighting" on, and they'll bring light to the darkness.

Unfortunately...

Your frame rate will crash in many (if not most) areas because zillions of people who didn't know or didn't care what "light" meant, or who had high end video cards and didn't care, have created zillions of "light" objects, and your video card now has to do lighting calculations for EVERY "light" object inside your draw distance, whether you're looking at them or not, because Linden Labs didn't go "oh, we'll only render "light" objects within 10 meters of the camera because anything further away shouldn't be having an effect anyway".

So my feature suggestion would be cull "light" 10 meters from the camera. Mark the objects as having "full bright" textures instead of making them lights in the OpenGL model. Then people could actually use local lighting for indoor lighting without going nuts.

Ahh thanks for the info. And for honing down my suggestion, since you seem to actually know more about what you're talking about. ^^ I'll have to check out that local lighting thing, and just turn it on and off based on where I am.

10m seems a bit arbitrary.

Better to have the "lighting" distance settable like the draw distance, and make the "reduce distance if FPS drops below..." option apply to it as well.

I've put 5 votes on your prop 1031.

And 5 more on prop 812. Hardware lighting would help too, but it should be an option (the new Intel Mac mini does software lighting twice as fast as hardware).

Yes, this would be nice, but this would be a rather large technical jump for the engine. Recomputing lighting becomes very difficult when virtually everything is dynamic, as it is in SL. With a FPS, the engine can calculate certain things, like inside and outside, and knows that it can ignore certain things. With SL, the client renders basically everything, because it's never quite sure if something matters or not.

It's very hard to tell "inside" from "outside" in SL.

It seems like the most recent work on the engine has been tweaking shininess for no apparent reason (useless), adding full bright (useful and simple), and adding a new culling technique that renders small objects invisible (annoying and complex). But completely revamping the lighting engine would require a much deeper change to SL, and possibly make it run even slower.

Argent has a few good suggestions on how to manage this without major changes.