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Springheel

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I set up the flames on the candlebra, but I didn't add a light holder script. So that's probably it.

 

I haven't tried spawning the candle above the sconce, will try.

 

There is an ambient light in the map. The shadow just looks huge I guess because it surrounds the flame.

 

I guess we can make a wider log (I made some skinnier for Biker's stove), though in the pic the flame looks very square to me. If it wasn't so wide it would probably look more natural (flames tend to gather as they rise into more of a cone...)

Someone else should make that call.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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I'm not familiar with all the avialable options, but something with more distinct "peaks" would look more natural to me. Something like this:

 

123679-004-E841952B.jpg

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I think the sky is the limit with the particles we have, it mainly depends how many hours one wants to sink into editing them. But maybe the new particle editor in DR makes things easier? Under Linux, the other option is to edit the particle text file, reload D3 and see if it is better and then repeat this for hours.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Ok, did some more testing tonight. Not sure how many of these things are related to the entities as opposed to how the lighting system works, but a few things:

 

1. The movable torches at the beginning do not go out after lying down for 3 seconds like AI-dropped torches. Also, the torches have a shadow when lit.

 

2. A flame is off on a wall torch.

 

3. The candles in bottles are weird. The candles are clearly wider than the bottle mouth, so how are they staying on there? Also the tall thin one is longer than the bottle it's in. Doesn't look believable to me at all.

 

4 Is it just me, or are the lights on the candles lower than the flames? Maybe just perspective, but the way the wall is lit up makes it look like they're a bit low.

 

5. Is the pink light intentional? Seems like an odd colour choice. Btw, those lanterns can be picked up and turned off, so it is possible.

 

 

Image 2:

When torches and candles go out, something weird happens. The torches suddenly cast a _huge_ shadow for a second. It's as if the flame you just extinguished is casting a shadow even though the particle is gone. It then blinks out. Very distracting. I tried to catch it in the screenshot. This may be an issue with the code rather than the entity.

 

To be honest, I wouldn't use these torch entities, because the way the torch shadow snaps out of nowhere when you extinguish the light is very distracting. I'd rather see no shadow at all then have it pop suddenly into existence.

 

The candles also do something weird when extinguished. For a second there is a sliver of light on the wall which then disappears. Might be the same cause as the torch shadow.

 

Sorry for all the crits. I'm omitting all the "hey, that looks great" pics. :P

post-9-0-84495300-1332378991_thumb.jpg

post-9-0-52032600-1332379003_thumb.jpg

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3. The loooong candle one has always looked wrong to me — since it's a combo entity — you could either map it back to the shorter candle version and just remove the long one or something? The 'fat' candle issue is not something that gets to me — is it worth limiting them to only skinny candles? meh I don't think so. Could always have just used a knife to make a tapered bottom — as one does irl.

 

4. The flame glare has always seemed to low for a candle imho — however I think that's to stop the sprite from intersecting too far down the candle if it's on its side.

 

5. That might actually be a bug, I know that there's some rounding error with greys that are close to white, being managed into bright colours on nvidia cards (there's a comment somewhere in the engine code) so just check if the default pink is not specified somewhere.

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Just a quick note:

 

it's not my fault :D

 

lol, no seriously....

Most of that stuff was already there... ie: the light placement on candles, etc... So I didn't tweak it too much. Plus you are actually at the 'end' of the map. So by this point I was getting tired and just trying to wrap up as much as needed.

Though I don't mind doing some clean up, I've had a pretty long break from it, but I didn't want to change stuff as much as I was just touching up/adding.

 

The candle attachments were there, we can change them. They are entities so all existing maps will conform. But yeah, I think shorter thin candles work best for the bottles. I doubt anyone placed those specifically for light position (but who knows). Might be best just to add better ones and 'deprecate' these to a harder to find folder.

 

I can't see those new flames yet, so someone else may have to adjust the flame placement. I should have my computer up and running good within a few weeks though.

 

As far as I could tell, the lantern with the pink glass is just a color me skin. I just left it alone. We have a regular skin versions that look fine so...

 

I noticed the shadow blink out thing on the torches too, but not the light thing on the candle. I'd like to keep the shadow thing consistant, but i don't know where to start on trouble shooting that issue. It was like the candelbra taking too long to go out. Looks like Tels had the answer to that though.

 

 

Thanks for taking a look.

 

(come to think of it, I didn't notice the tall candle/bottle being that tall. And I thought something in the entity attachment said it was 'half buried in the bottle'. So only part of it was sticking out. I wonder if there's something missing there in the defs.)

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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Ok, did some more testing tonight. Not sure how many of these things are related to the entities as opposed to how the lighting system works, but a few things:

 

3. The candles in bottles are weird. The candles are clearly wider than the bottle mouth, so how are they staying on there? Also the tall thin one is longer than the bottle it's in. Doesn't look believable to me at all.

 

Glas is much harder than candle wax so you can just drive the bottle bottom into the candle, and if you light the candle before, it sticks due to the wax.

 

Anyway, I just used the candles and bottles that were available, feel free to make new models.

 

4 Is it just me, or are the lights on the candles lower than the flames? Maybe just perspective, but the way the wall is lit up makes it look like they're a bit low.

 

I think we need a way to render light sources in game, so we can see exacly where the center of the LS is. OTOH, the particle and light should be in sync, so if the light is really to low, than you cannot move it without moving the particle and I think I adjusted the positions until the particles did fit.

(Perhaps the light center needs a very slight offset to adjust for the fact that it is currently at the bottom of the particle,not 1cm further up?)

 

5. Is the pink light intentional? Seems like an odd colour choice. Btw, those lanterns can be picked up and turned off, so it is possible.

 

Again I just used what we had as skins and glass colors. That nobody notices that before just goes to show you what a grand waste it was to work on some of these entities, if they go unused for a year or two...

 

Edit: As baddcogg said, its a colorme skin, so the mapper can change the color any way he wants. Was probably not clear from the name of the entity?

 

Image 2:

When torches and candles go out, something weird happens. The torches suddenly cast a _huge_ shadow for a second. It's as if the flame you just extinguished is casting a shadow even though the particle is gone. It then blinks out. Very distracting. I tried to catch it in the screenshot. This may be an issue with the code rather than the entity.

 

To be honest, I wouldn't use these torch entities, because the way the torch shadow snaps out of nowhere when you extinguish the light is very distracting. I'd rather see no shadow at all then have it pop suddenly into existence.

 

This is an artefact of the "have shadow when extinguished, have no shadow when on". Frankly, we can't fix this issue until we get soft-shadows, so it always has to be a compromise.

 

If you:

 

* use no shadow at all, it looks wierd because the torch never casts a shadow (which is then clearly missing)

* use alwas shadow, it looks odd when lit

* if you use a shadow only when extinguishe its the best we can do

 

As for the shadow "pop", I think that can be mitigated by the code delaying turning on the shadow until the light has gone out. We cannot "fade" it in, tho, so if there is another light source, the shadow from that will be instantly there.

 

But to be frank, the issue was not that bad because the light from the flame itself was "fading" off and it did hide the shadow pop. I am not sure why or how this was changed or what happend but my guess is the light no longer "fades" out, but instantly goes off.

 

The candles also do something weird when extinguished. For a second there is a sliver of light on the wall which then disappears. Might be the same cause as the torch shadow.

 

Yep.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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As for the shadow "pop", I think that can be mitigated by the code delaying turning on the shadow until the light has gone out.

 

Tracked: #0003067

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I didn't change anything on the torches/candles. Other than shadow skins.

 

Again, I haven't gotten around to making all lights 'shadow when lit/unlit'. I didn't even find that on a light until I was almost done with this entire project as it was only on a few. So I was just fixing skins for the "lit/unlit skins" parameters. So that MIGHT help??? not sure.

 

Either way, the lights will all have both parameters when done.

-------

I don't think it was really a wast to have the color_me skin available. It might never get used. However I plan to try and fix up that model a bit. Might as well give it real wires around the glass, and I wanted to try and rebake the normals/material and see if I can make it look better. Right now the color_me thing is kind of bad anyway because the wires also get colored, which makes it look odd. Apart from being pink... It's very possible people saw it and just thought it looked weird.

I don't know, color_me is cool but it doesn't really work for everything anyway. Typically something like a lantern isn't going to have fancy glass, it's just a flame light source so it won't be colored...

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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Hm, yeah, oh, ok..well, that means I have to implement it now :ph34r: Shouldn't throw out wild ideas like willy-nilly :D

 

Anyway, I can't promise anything, because atm it is a it puzzling how to actual delay this (and not cause problem like if something else toggles the shadow in the meantime).

 

Edit: I am also puzzled why this wasn't an issue before, did nobody notice or did something change? Could someone please test if that happens in v1.07 also?

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Yes, I did all the work in 1.07. The torch did delay, never noticed the candle.

 

Like I said though, I didn't add no_shadows "lit" props to everything yet. Didn't remove it either though...

 

Probably the reason it was never noticed is that I believe the torch was no shadow all the time.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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@Springheel: I started to implement an event to delay the toggling of the shadow, but before that I looked into the light holer script and noticed two things:

 

* the light is supposed to fade on/off (esp for the flames) but this was never in, it was commented out. I *think* the problem was because I then needed a spawnarg that defines how fast the light should fade in and out, and then someone testing all this. So I left it as On(), and Off(), which means torches and candles etc toggle instantly on/off and only the particle and the human brain give the illusion that the light did indeed fade out. Do you think we should change that to a true fade? (If we do, we need a delayed shadow toggle)

* the shadow toggle was for the On() case happening after the light was On(). So first the light goes on, then the shadow off. That should all happened in the same frame, but then, I am not sure if it really worked. I have for now reversed the order in the script, can you please test and see if that already makes a difference?

 

The script event will take some more work and it also will require a recompile.

 

Edit: I think the shadow pop will not as noticable if you are running at 60 FPS (then one frame is 1/60 s), but if you run at say 15 FPS the shadow pops for 1/15 s which is 4 times as long. In any event, trying to fade in the light:

 

   // in case the light holder itself is a light?
   On();
   // TODO: make this configurable via spawnarg:
   // fadeInLight(0.5);

 

   // in case the light holder itself is a light?
   // On();
   // TODO: make this configurable via spawnarg:
   // fadeInLight(0.1);

 

And I can't compile TDM anymore since today, so the script event has to wait.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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hich means torches and candles etc toggle instantly on/off and only the particle and the human brain give the illusion that the light did indeed fade out. Do you think we should change that to a true fade? (If we do, we need a delayed shadow toggle)

 

Not sure. Just by the way you're describing it it seems like a fade would look more pleasing, but it's hard to know without seeing it in action.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The antique 4 globe entity has the light way at the top of the chain. Is that correct? Is there any reason why it's not located near the actual lights?

post-9-0-73680200-1333217418_thumb.jpg

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The shadow is turned off when the light is lit, so I don't think that's it.

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umm, I'd have to look, I don't think I adjusted that position.

 

Is the red dot not the light attachment point for in game? I believe the streetlamps also give this illusion. There is the light that is attached at the origin, then there is the dot which is the in- game position. The editor just doesn't show it correctly, hence the need for the dot. (most lights have a 'light attach position' and an 'editor attach position' . They should both be the same but the light position in editor is just buggy I guess.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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Maybe you just noticed now and didn't remember

 

The only light entities I typically use are candles, and the light isn't visible on them.

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I used the electric antique chandelier (from above) in a map, but it appears black in game when turned on.

 

The "lit" skin is "lights/chandelier_gas4" but I can't find any such skin.

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