Maximum Lights to Render with local lighting enabled

A good way to provide a useful display quality/performance trade-off would be to add a "maximum lights to render" option when local lighting is enabled. This way people can decide for themselves how many lights to render at a time to subvert the massive frame-rate reduction that occurs when a massively-lit build appears on-screen. Only the N closest lights are rendered.

i was thinking somethin along those lines... lighting is causing *ALOT* of client slowdown now... half our neighbors building is set light, as well as many many things in it, and with lighting enabled it really kills performance.

another idea, (not sure how practical) may be to treat it like sound.. have it so you only render local lighting from lots on the plot yer in, or at least make it an option.

yet another idea i had would be to drastically reduce the distance light can be 'cast'.. currently as far as i know 10m on a side objects set light basically cast that light (calculation wise at least) infinitely... if they are on yer screen, even 250m away, they are casting light to you and everyone else around you.

Somethin is going to need to be done though... back before 1.2, on OLDER hardware, even on packed sims i would run 192m draw distance and it ran okay... now even 96m draw chokes me, on more modern hardware even.. a *BIG* part of that was the light taxes.. that resulted in only 5-10 lights in a given sim, rather than 500

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Also, I'd like a SLIDER on an item to indicate how much light it produces, rather than arbitrarily on its size.

i still want to see a small twinkling light from that lighthouse a sim away.

chances are, if you turn on light traces, you'll find out you alaready are

The kind of light that a lighthouse emanates would be best duplicated in SL by the use of particles instead of the rotating, lit, alpha-gradient cone we see now. Optionally a particle system and specially-textured gradient hollow cone could look very nice, and if done properly may even be capable of mimicking a light glare effect when the light is "shining" toward you.

I would suggest using Cross Lament's lighting discovery and make the cone's face 0 black and 100% transparent (I would guess it's the "top" face of the cylinder) so the prim will not actually cast light on the lighthouse for greatest realism.

Regardless of all the cone stuff, a realistic lighthouse effect is possible with a simple luminous white particle that flashes every few seconds. This is not a light source, so it would still be visible.

that style of lighting cannot work under the current particle system, because there is no 'follow rotation' parameter, aka while the particle emitter could spin with the light-house, the particles themselves would make for a kinda twisting spiral, not straight cone

also for the second idea the real problem would be LOD killing the particle emitter, particles are particularly succeptable to it because no matter how big *they* are, if the client stops drawin the emitter prim, the effect dissapears... to compensate for it you'd need the emitte to be a 10m long spire probably.. and even then it would still be problematic.. but yes.. for specific flickering lighting effects, particles generally will do better than in game lighting (and they lag the client much less when done properly)

Oh contraire, just use some imagination.

Oh, I see now. No, I didn't mean the cone itself should be made of particles... Just the light shining from inside the lighthouse. It wouldn't need to follow any rotation.

I've been working around this problem by making visible prims as emitters whenever possible. For instance, the hollowed cylinder that makes up the top of the light house could be the emitter. The particles would be created at dead-center, right where we need them.

Something I was actually wondering about that: if an object is coloured black and set to 'light', do people viewing it still get the performance hit of rendering local lighting from it, despite the fact that it isn't casting any visible light?

I'm not quite sure how to go about testing that.

Being able to set faces as unlit would cut down on people (like me) turning a painting into a light so that it looks brighter. I've had local lighting turned off for the last half year - it is just too much of a FPS killer.

Personally, I'd be content if there was some way to allow us to turn local lighting on and off without having to restart the client. That way I can admire builds as they were designed and if I happen to wander into a bogged down, overly illuminated area, I could simply unclick the local lighting option (prolly wait for the view to re-render) and then keep going about my business.

-Meiyo

being able to toggle local lighting without restarting would be a nice feature. does anybody know why we have to restart? i don't.

i keep it off too because of the enourmous load it puts on the card. additionally, most of the lighting bleeds over into the landscape and surrounding builds to the point that the effect is not worth the ugly perimeter it creats. i don't know how to fix these problems. i hope ll are able to figure it out eventually.

Heh, I found a neat trick to 'simulate' unlit textures, assuming you have local lighting turned on. Prims only cast light of the same colour as their side #0; all the other sides' colours are irrelevant. So if you have a red prim with side 0 coloured black, it will be fully-lit red, but cast no local light.

Again, I have no idea how this is going to impact the client... it's local lighting, but since it's black, it doesn't actually render any light. Lindenzzzzzzz?