2010-02-11, 01:16 PM
The lighting of map pieces is actually very sophisticated if you make use of lamp objects and the "calculate lighting" option when building (outputting?) your map.
I can't say anything specific about details, but if you build a room full of columns and setup multi light sources, nooks, and alcoves, you can get very sophisticated shadows cast all about the room. Ie. the shadows of the columns will appear on the floors and walls etc, so I would not describe this as primitive.
The lighting to this effect is a achieved via colouring the vertices of the map pieces.
There are some drawbacks however which are really independent of the map itself. An object/monster/item can only be effected by up to four light sources at a time. You can check a box on your lamp if you want to count it towards one of these four. For a long time DX/OpenGL only supported 8 lights. So I think Som has the four map lights and these four local light sources and that's it. Unfortunately Som did not query the hardware for the number of supported active lights. These days that number appears to be unlimited (though I can't tell you what each light will do to your performance) ...but anyway I tried to make a map that made extensive use of lighting and found it nearly impossible to make the object lighting match it. You would have a well lit area with monster shaded completely black walking around in it because Som doesn't prioritize the intensity of the lights, though it does prioritize distance reasonably.
Anyway for that reason I can only recommend using lighting sparingly.
...I think it would be very easy to add an extension that never turns off lights on a map after they're turned on (seen) ...but I haven't done it yet so I can't say whether or not every light will actually be seen or not (probably)
I can also do dynamic lighting so you could turn lights on and off, but for that you would want to disable the baked in lighting (turn off "calculate lighting") ...on the plus side however the never turned off lights could also be applied to the maps themselves... which would unify the lighting for consistency purposes but sacrifice shadows via the calculate light option. I want to build an elaborate lighting extension module (called Dark Slayer) eventually which will probably start from this sort of arrangement and attempt to give authors an all new editor for applying shadows and other lighting effects to their maps... including a full map preview.
PS: *looks at Todd* Page created in 0.306 seconds with 21 queries.
I can't say anything specific about details, but if you build a room full of columns and setup multi light sources, nooks, and alcoves, you can get very sophisticated shadows cast all about the room. Ie. the shadows of the columns will appear on the floors and walls etc, so I would not describe this as primitive.
The lighting to this effect is a achieved via colouring the vertices of the map pieces.
There are some drawbacks however which are really independent of the map itself. An object/monster/item can only be effected by up to four light sources at a time. You can check a box on your lamp if you want to count it towards one of these four. For a long time DX/OpenGL only supported 8 lights. So I think Som has the four map lights and these four local light sources and that's it. Unfortunately Som did not query the hardware for the number of supported active lights. These days that number appears to be unlimited (though I can't tell you what each light will do to your performance) ...but anyway I tried to make a map that made extensive use of lighting and found it nearly impossible to make the object lighting match it. You would have a well lit area with monster shaded completely black walking around in it because Som doesn't prioritize the intensity of the lights, though it does prioritize distance reasonably.
Anyway for that reason I can only recommend using lighting sparingly.
...I think it would be very easy to add an extension that never turns off lights on a map after they're turned on (seen) ...but I haven't done it yet so I can't say whether or not every light will actually be seen or not (probably)
I can also do dynamic lighting so you could turn lights on and off, but for that you would want to disable the baked in lighting (turn off "calculate lighting") ...on the plus side however the never turned off lights could also be applied to the maps themselves... which would unify the lighting for consistency purposes but sacrifice shadows via the calculate light option. I want to build an elaborate lighting extension module (called Dark Slayer) eventually which will probably start from this sort of arrangement and attempt to give authors an all new editor for applying shadows and other lighting effects to their maps... including a full map preview.
PS: *looks at Todd* Page created in 0.306 seconds with 21 queries.