Bring light in the dark

[SolarStar]

1)Formula: 5 Beewax + 3 thread = 1 candle

2)Forumla: 10 candles + 3 sulfur + 3 magic essence = Large/super-candle

 

 

Instead of equipping a sword you are able to hold a candle and light it with FE

 

With the candle you will be able to see more. (Other players see you too) /very nice for pk maps

>> you have a chance make fire-damage on your opponent

>> you have a chance to blind your opponent, so s/he can not att you for some time

>> some monstes stay away from you, because they don't like fire..

>> the candle will burn as long as a bag will exist or shorter--

>> special damage on "snow-monsters"

 

!!I want your oppinions , you can modify the ideas!! and make new suggestions(or change the forumals)

 

---

 

Here a different idea: also based on the idea to make light create a magic spell

 

1) Create - Fire

2) Create - Local - Air - Energy

x)...(your ideas for ess)

 

how i came up with the idea-- i was in the mines and i dont like to see only dark.. sometimes i turn the gamma up to see more-

[LaNora]

i like the idea, but instead of replacing your weapon for candle, you should be able to still carry a weapon or pickaxe, and hold the candle with the left hand, not because this would make anything easier per se, but because it makes more sense...if you are going to pk or into the mine, why would you go if you cannot defend yourself/work?

unless you're gonna poke someone in the eye with a hot candle, hehehe in which case it should only have damage ability when lit and only like 1 damage point, lol, and as for the mines i don't know what you could actually dig up with a melty candle

 

 

 

even smiley has it in the left hand!

[Roja]

You can like these ideas all you want, but this is currently not possible at all, and similar things have been suggested many times.

[KarenRei]

I'm just curious, Roja: when you say "not possible", do you mean "not possible to code"? It is possible to code, although I'd have to waste one of our precious lights to do so. Currently, the scene gets five lights (four scene lights plus one global light for the sun/moon/etc.) Eye candy gets three. I'm not sure I'd want to sacrifice a light from either for something like this, but if it was really in demand, I could.

Edited April 13, 2007 by KarenRei

[Roja]

I was always told that if there are more than 7 lights in a viewing area then there are problems. The lights won't all work.

[KarenRei]

Well, the way it's currently coded, light #7 is always assigned to the "global" lighting of the scene, whether it's the sun, the moon, ambient lighting, or whatnot. Before EYE_CANDY, lights #0 through #6 were assigned to the scene. Whatever seven lights were closest to you would be used at a given point in time. A coder could have taken away a light for someone to use as a candle, and that would have left the six nearest lights for the scene. Eye candy took a couple lights when it was hooked in so that it can make fires, spells, etc glow. The scene is now left with the four nearest lights to the user, plus the global ambient lighting.

 

In short, we can allocate the lights however we choose. However, we need one for the global lighting, and the more lights you leave for the other two elements, the smoother they'll run. More local scene lights will make a smoother light transition between areas as you walk around. More eye candy lights will make them flicker less (if it only had one light, that light would seem to start on a random particle, follow it until it disappeared, then follow a different particle, and so on).

 

Light candy could probably sacrifice one light (leaving it with two) and still look reasonably okay, although whether to sacrifice it to a new effect or to the scene would be a good question. Another alternative would be to let eye candy manage such a candle effect, so that when it's going, eye candy has two lights, and when it's not going, eye candy has three.

 

In short, we have 8 opengl lights total, and we get to decide how to use them, but there are tradeoffs to make.

 

Hmm, idea. While it would certainly look prettiest if the light was your typical point light, causing it to be bright near you and dimmer further away, an alternative would be to have it increase the global ambient lighting for the scene for you -- that is, if you have a candle going, we could adjust the ambient lighting coming from light 7. Your candle wouldn't make, say, the near side of trees and rocks look bright and the far side look dim (as a real candle would), but it would make the scene brighter.

 

Another option: we could use "virtualized" lights as well as the built-in lights. This means that we do some of the work ourselves instead of passing it off to the hardware. This can be done through doing actual light calculations on a per-object basis or using textured lightmaps (sort of like shadow mapping). Both of these would take a good amount of work to implement. Another option is to only use the built-in lights but to have a light-manager routine that does some math and figures out which ones are the most important, so the scene and eye candy can list as many lights as it wants, but only the eight most important at any point in time would show.

 

Anyways, I'm not going to weigh in on whether any of these things are things we'd actually want to do -- and even if we wanted to do them, they wouldn't go in the next release because of the feature freeze. I'm just pointing out what's possible and what's not.

[Entropy]

The idea won't work because the candle can't affect only you, it would have to affect everyone (it's a MMO afterall).

So what do you do whent here are 20 players in the same area, each with their own candle? How do you decide which lights to use? There will be a lot of lights poping in and out of the scene, and will look just bad.

[KarenRei]

Well, there are three options. One is to just draw other people's candle with an effect, but no light, and stick with a standard lighting model. The second is to increase the room's global lighting from GL_LIGHT7 instead of creating new lights for the candle. The last option is embodied in the several methods for light virtualization: A) manual, simplified lighting calcs, light mapping (the realtime equivalent of shadow mapping), and C) a light management system that selects the eight GL lights from all of the possibilities based on how much of an effect they'd have on the scene (few are the scenes where it's particularly critical to have many small light sources). To expound on the last option, the management could be done on per-region or even per-object basis instead of a per-scene basis: you'd have the eight most important lights for each object illuminating that object.

 

If I had to recommend one, I'd recommend the latter option, with calcs done per-object. There's usually, what, a few hundred objects per scene? If the manager takes a thousand cycles per object, and there were a thousand objects, that'd still only be 1 MHz worth of processing time. It'd probably take about a week's worth of coding/debugging time, plus testing time, assuming it was written in C++ (longer if it wasn't, since you'd have to write your own data structures and manage your own memory).

 

Again, I make no judgement as to the merits of the effort for this; I'm just stating what's possible.

Edited April 13, 2007 by KarenRei

[Learner]

Well, there are three options. One is to just draw other people's candle with an effect, but no light, and stick with a standard lighting model. The second is to increase the room's global lighting from GL_LIGHT7 instead of creating new lights for the candle. The last option is embodied in the several methods for light virtualization: manual, simplified lighting calcs, light mapping (the realtime equivalent of shadow mapping), and a light management system that selects the eight GL lights from all of the possibilities based on how much of an effect they'd have on the scene (few are the scenes where it's particularly critical to have many small light sources). To expound on the last option, the management could be done on per-region or even per-object basis instead of a per-scene basis: you'd have the eight most important lights for each object illuminating that object.

 

If I had to recommend one, I'd recommend the latter option. There's usually, what, a few hundred objects per scene? If the manager takes a thousand cycles per object, and there were a thousand objects, that'd still only be 1 MHz worth of processing time. It'd probably take about a week's worth of coding/debugging time, plus testing time, assuming it was written in C++ (longer if it wasn't, since you'd have to write your own data structures and manage your own memory)

 

Again, I make no judgement as to the merits of the effort for this; I'm just stating what's possible.

I recommend for now to K.I.S.S. and dont even consider mobile lights. or some of the work your eanting to get in will get degraded because of it.

[KarenRei]

It's not something I'd be able to work on for at least a few months anyways. There's too much higher priority stuff in the queue. I was just pointing out that it is possible.

Edited April 13, 2007 by KarenRei

[scullsyk]

isn't it possible to add more capability for lighting?

[KarenRei]

It's an opengl limitation.

It can be worked around, but only with effort (see my above posts)

[SolarStar]

The idea won't work because the candle can't affect only you, it would have to affect everyone (it's a MMO afterall).

So what do you do whent here are 20 players in the same area, each with their own candle? How do you decide which lights to use? There will be a lot of lights poping in and out of the scene, and will look just bad.

First of all thank you very much KarenRei that you were thinking so hard to make it possible!

 

What you are talking about Entro is called light-pollution or to use a new word.. light-spam

 

So here is a modified idea:

Perception is now used in the game. When you hold a candle (maybe left-hand/replacing shield not sword) you are more visible to others AND you get more percetion, the player is able to see more in the dark. The light is only visible on your screen, it will not effect screens of players standing around.

This idea is a bit limited.. but we avoid light-spam.

[Entropy]

Yes, but if this is ever going to be implemented, it needs to be implemented in a fashion consistent with the MMOs, and that is, everyone should see the same thing on the screen.

 

Now, I know this is DOABLE, with a light manager to keep track of the brightest lights closer to the player and stuff, but:

1. It's a lot of work.

2. Won;t look as good anyway when a light source dissapears and another one replaces it.

[KarenRei]

Actually, it'd probably look better than our current system because eight lights can be applied to each object, rather than to the whole scene. I've seen a demo of it before -- search for "multilight.c" or something like that. However, it would be a lot of work, as you said, so no need to worry about it for now.