Lighting help

hey. Does the lighting you can buy in game actually light up a room?

depends on how it is made

the lamps i have in my furniture sets have the lighting feature in them and will light up a room

But only people who have lighting set to "Nearby Local Lights" in Preferences will see this.

You can experiment by creating a prim and enabling the light feature. There are settings you can change that make the lighted area bigger or smaller, change it to colored light, or change the drop-off. Lighting is a really great thing - I am trying to use it more as I enjoy it so much.

Between doing what Osprey said, and looking at a few scripts here on the forums, I've actually made myself a few simple (1 prim) lights, linked them together, and made a light switch for them to hang in my home. Helps when you have company over and the sim slips into the wee hours of the night and you don't want to be sitting there gabbing in the dark.

Another thing I like to do is make small orangish lights, turn them invisible, toy with the radius and drop off, and then set them in front of fireplaces and above free standing fires and candles and such. My mind, for whatever reason, isn't comfortable with the idea that fires don't give off a soft glow of some sort. And best thing is, unlike lamps and such that you have to turn on with a click of or command, my little "firelights" are on all the time. So while they're invisible during daylight hours, as the sim gets darker and darker we still have those soft glows around the house without having to click a lamp or anything. And since they don't use any sort of script..they're lag free.

This page in the knowledgebase gives a good run-down of lighting.

http://secondlife.com/knowledgebase/article.php?id=069

Anything that you have Modify rights to, you can turn into a lighted object.