Transitioning a darkly lit level to a brightly lit level with lamps

[Verdite]

For those of you who feel scene mode games ruin the progression and feel of gameplay, then read on!

Using the warp in SOM from a darkly lit cavern to a bright, sunny outdoor area can cause a harsh flicker on the screen from dim to light. So if you are warping just before a corner from the cave to the field, and you should setup warps this way from indoor to outdoor... Then setup a lamp around the corner to have say 5 intensity, and 200 in each RGB channel. Generally you'l want something that matches your overall lighting in the field.

That way the player will see the lightly lit area and the transition wont be half as bad as just jumping straight into a lightly lit area. Sadly lamps dont work the other way - you cant darken an area with 0,0,0 so you'l need to do some work with objects for your light to dark transition.

The first screen is in a very dimly lit area with a small intensity lamp.
The second shows medium intensity lamps in a walled area.
The third shows how medium intensity lights affect the rest of the cavern.
The fourth shows that, even at a low 18 draw distance and 0.4 fog, the high intensity lamps still achieve the desired effect.

[HwitVlf]

That's a nice idea. I remember the original KF games usually had an "S" shaped hallway or a couple of door locks (as in canal locks) in a ‎  row as a transition between maps. ‎  I think those games had to load area maps just like SoM, but they just did the transition without the "POP" that SoM has.

I think this would be worth linking to in your SoM tutorial thread ‎ 

[Verdite]

Does anyone know how lamps affect load times and general in-game performance? After placing lamps SOM_MAP takes time to output the data. I'm assuming that its drawing shadows?

[HwitVlf]

If you have "Apply Light Sources"checked when you compile a game, SoM does all the bake-in light calculations for Map Pieces so it takes longer, but that's just a one time thing.

I don't think lamps affect load times, but they would affect frames-per-second since your PC has to do the Enemy/Object shading calculations on the fly. It looks like Ex also sends the lamp lighting data through extra DX9 processing which probably burdens the PC a little more. But I haven't noticed any slowdown when placing 5 or 6 lamps.

In Diadem of Maunstraut, Tom got massive slowdown all of a sudden when building the lava area. I suspected it was because those "lava sheet" objects he used for his lava river were also light source lamps with a flame. It could have been the flame animation more than the Light sources; I don't really know. ‎ 

[Verdite]

I appreciate the know, because I was playing Star wars : TOR the other day during my 'procrastinating time' aka game time... When I noticed a ton of the lighting is just simple lamps. I used to wonder why such a new game featured baked-in shadows in the textures, now I realise why. So this got me enjoying SOMs shadows and as you mentioned before, SOM draws 'tree like shadows' for trees so I couldnt help but test more thoroughly.

I'll be doing a news update soon so you'l see how my lamp implementation has greatly affected my outdoor map pieces.

This is my work for today.............. I dont think ill be creating another map piece tonight. ‎