Self-lit textures

Take "Light" out of "material type"

Add two checkboxes:
[] Self-lit
[] Light source

A self-lit texture is a texture that behaves as if it has been illuminated by a light source.

The engine is capable of this. Here's how to tell:

Turn off local lighting in your preferences. Log back in

Wait until "night".

Create an object, apply a texture to it, change the material to "Light".

There you have it. Your client is rendering a self-lit texture.

You don't see light cast on other objects nearby, because you disabled local lighting, but other people who have it enabled do see this effect.

What I (and several other people in SL) want is the ability to explicitly create this effect without casting light for the people who have "Local Lighting" enabled.

Why?

Let's say you create a texture that looks like wallpaper, and you draw a lightbulb on the texture, and apply a gradient filter to make the texture appear as though the wallpaper is lit by the light.

Now you upload the texture and put it on a wall in your house.

Looks great during the day.

At night? Your "fake light" now is grey and completely loses the effect.

Why not just use lots of light sources?

Sure, you could make the wall into a light source, but now the outside of your wall is going to glow bright as well, and maybe even annoy the neighbors.

Also, if you make all of your walls light sources, and you have a big house, you're going to not only lag the people in your house down quite a bit (light sources will pull down your FPS fast), but everyone within draw distance of your house will also lag just as much as if they were inside your house.

I just want a way to make a texture appear lit indepently of the time of day, and without making it a light source.

It definitely seems to be possible.

So how about it? All the benefits of light, without the lag.

It'd be simple to implement this. The only reason we don't have it already is because people haven't bugged the Lindens about it enough yet.

I endorse this idea/feature!!

Would be VERY VERY usefull to have!

Yes, please, Lindens implement this!

Think of all the objects out there that people want to "glow" - yet they don't necessarily need to cast light. Stores with tons of clothing boxes which people set to "light" to make sure they are visible at night spring to mind. Elaborate buildings with lots of pre-rendered textures with built-in lighting like Kex described (like the gorgeous Whitestar Casino).

This kind of setting might actually make having local-lighting enabled bearable frame-rate wise.

I have this 30-meter-long laser beam. If it's not a light, it looks dull. If it is a light, it turns everything within 100 meters blood red.

And I should note that for those of you that weren't paying attention, this ought to be a per-face setting in the texture editor.

This would be wonderful,

Let me know if I'm wrong, but particles already do something like this, don't they? They glow but don't illuminate things around them I believe. I have an avatar that puts out a blinding corona of light all around it, but I've never seen the ambient light around it change. Of course it's very hard to see much of anything with this avatar on in the first place

Lumi

Yes, this would be a great feature to have for things like lit signs that don't necessarily need to cast light.

In the meantime, it'll be good if things like public light sources change to non-light-emitting during the daylight hours with llSetPrimativeParam() calls!

Make it so, Lindens. In fact, read everything that Kex has to say and make it all so.

I (yet again) throw my vote in for fullbright textures that don't cast light on surrounding objects.