Lighting

[TattieBoJangle]

Hi guys 2 questions

First how do I get rid of the light icon P along with the light ray image.

Second how to change it so when you turn away from the light it doesn't cut off ( keeping the current settings )

[StarFire]

Thanks for the issue tatty, no really lol
This has not been worked on, basically a job that was not done as it was not needed at light dev time.
I will set up a bounds adjustment based upon light range. This should fix the problem for you

Its nice to be finding these issues as it shows where Skyline in in it development. Early development was just to get a feature implemented then move onto next task. Then came the stability then asset management. Now it looking like finer adjustments and completing features ready for full performance options, platforms and then GAMES yay!! finally

We will try to get it in the main update for you

Edit:
Just tried it with only a light in the scene and no player just scene fly cam and it works fine.
Used it with fps player and all was ok until at a distance , no clipping occured

Q - you didn't happen to put the light inside the object? can you try the test with out the object in place. Thanks

[StarFire]

Idea:
Try setting light range to 10 and Attenuation Adv to 0.01,0.04,0.03 and see what happens, thanks

[TattieBoJangle]

Thanks starfire yea it was down to the light range as I had it at 5 or something for a small light but thanks for the heads up

may I recommend when it gets done to enable some sort of range to player that way some lights can be seen from far away but still be low lights like 5 - 10

[StarFire]

We need to get a compromise between attenuation and range, but first we can try and experiment with additional bounds settings. I have some shader/shadow/light work planned so will look at it them for us all. But pleased you managed to get it to work there is some reference to light attenuation somewhere on the ogre forums that may enlighten some more info on the topic

[TattieBoJangle]

This is what I mean guys doesn't really fit in and that is the lowest it goes brightness wise the only other thing you have is light range but in turn this makes it bright :/ there should be

Brightness - this should be anything from 1 to 1000 one being like a candle light
Distance - should be range from player before it turns off even if your back is to it

also the light has a strange effect on anything with alpha.

***EDIT***

Sorry that was the wrong video I had directional light on as well there new video uploading.

[TattieBoJangle]

Here you go guys a new video

[StarFire]

Nice to see a new character, survival game may be?

For now all I can say is play with all the settings, attn, range, brightness ( note spec is not directly linked to brightness so may need tweaked) Bioshock used spotlights to get around the issues with point light shadows and only had a few visible at any one time.

One problem you are facing is DX limitation of 8 concurrent lights, game devs get around this by either using deferred or fake the lighting then only use a couple of fill lights. Obviously current gen engines use deferred or more so light baking again for the illusion of lighting.

Edit: When using deferred a lot of game tech has issues with transparency this has been a problem for a while with top tech. Although there are solution today but not as easy as forward transparency.

I am going to be doing some work on the visual mechanic for the next release but after that I will raise lighting development and look at our deferred shaders also make them GI like the Uber. We have also found some code for fake lights which if it works will work well for your corridor needs.

Light mapping/baking could be on the horizon or at the least I will add in another shader pass ( checkbox ) to allow for a light map map in an external app.

With the current advances on the characters and resources, indoor atmospheric scenes are a must ( for our in house games ). So please be assured that we will do our very best to get indoor lights working well in Skyline, just takes a bit of development time

[TattieBoJangle]

Light mapping/baking

This would be nice I know it will take time like everything in life but at least you can see the what is needed on our side and the problems we face like disappearing heads

[StarFire]

We hear you, loud and clear. Its really great that we are moving into new areas of Skyline development as its showing we are getting closer to the goal of making some cool looking games, something both myself and SP look forward to doing.

[TattieBoJangle]

Hi guys is there any eta on when the lighting will be worked on as I'm in need for some fake lighting I am using spot lights but to many is causing performance to drop.

[StarFire]

I think you could be wanting lightmapping. We will have a look at what is involved and get back to you

[TattieBoJangle]

Yea lightmapping would be amazing and perhaps that could lead to shadow baking

[TattieBoJangle]

Hi guys I am losing 709fps with one directional light it could be time to bump this one up the to to do list

[SolarPortal]

lol, thats because you have so many meshes in the scene

Each material has 2-3 passes and one of those passes is a light pass. This means if you have 1000 meshes with a light pass, the lighting has too be calculated for each material 1000x over in each frame. When no light is in the scene, this process is stopped and thus your framerate skyrockets.

In the case of deferred rendering, lighting is calculated as a post FX which means it only has too be calculated for each pixel by your resolution. so 1920 x 1080. This is why deferred is slower frames to begin with, but doesn't drop much as you add more lights as the same calculations happen regardless.

In your scenes case, if you used 2 directional lights, then the same processing occurs again 1000x more. The scene will speed up again when all the other meshes you cannot see are culled off reducing the number of meshes the directional light has to iterate over. I am guessing if you duplicated your entire building over again that you would have many many meshes now lol
Spot lights and Point lights have an attenuated range and when the objects are out of the range, they stop processing the other meshes as it is only the materials receiving light from that particular light that renders with that light. Whereas a directional light is an unlimited distance light meaning everything is affected.

Older ways of handling these sorts of levels, would be artists placing the level into a modelling application and reduce the amount of materials per mesh/per level. Inside the modelling application, they would also merge meshes together into larger chunks as in one mesh too reduce the number of batch counts and draw calls of the level. Too this day, many of the techniques are still in use for full AAA games, except now they have technology like simplygon which can do the lodding and merging for them.

We understand you don't want to have too do this and our plans with skyline is too make this possible for you without the extra effort, but these are complete tools that can take full development lifecycles to make lmao

Anyway, just thought i would mention that simplygon has a free online tool which uses the cloud and allows you to handle a certain amount of mesh data a month: https://www.simplygon.com/cloud . Check it out as it may help you.

All the plans for performance and lighting upgrades are already being discussed about and are in motion of being upgraded or integrated into the engine. We are already checking out an updated renderer which is why we are not wanting to focus on the current shader too much just in case we change, Lightmapping, batching and occlusion culling is also in motion, so we hear your concerns and feature requests and we are doing our best to sort things out. But as you know, these things take time but we will eventually deliver.

Thanks for your input m8

[epsilonion]

http://www.forum.aurasoft-skyline.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=5&p=7719#p7719

Culling would help here..

[TattieBoJangle]

lol, thats because you have so many meshes in the scene

I had to start again so only around 10-15 meshes on that scene

[SolarPortal]

ahh, lol

However, everything i said still applies and lighting will always render with much less frames than no lighting.
That drop is performance is normal and i would expect it to happen across most forward rendering software.

Yes, with light mapping you will be able to turn of the directional light and gain most of the frames back, but there will still be shadows unless these are baked. But in order to get normal maps with lightmaps with no light in the scene, we will require to use a technique known as dual lightmaps. 1 to store colour information and 1 to store normal directions for lighting.

If you stop casting shadows with the directional light, you will find that the performance will increase as shadow casting is another big problem of lighting and is probably the worst culprit if i think about it correctly.

Deferred will probably start with those frame rates and lose a little bit for each light and that's it. But it will take some doing for a deferred systems still and with massive rendering changes around the corner, the deferred shading system will most definitely be broken and need to be reworked, so in our heads its easier to work on it after than before and save some time.

I am letting you know now though that i am working on the new rendering upgrade for skyline as it is important its in ASAP as it will hold these other jobs back as a lot of core needs to change for the rendering part.

Hope this helps

Edit: To see 500+ frames anyway is really cool. A default scene for me is 300-400 frames haha...

[TattieBoJangle]

No problem m8 thanks for the info

[CreativeOcclusion]

First how do I get rid of the light icon P along with the light ray image.

I am not sure if you figured this out or not....If you set the scale of the point light to 0,0,0 in properties the "P" and the light rays disappear...

[TattieBoJangle]

Yea thanks m8 this was ages ago I just didn't want to start a new topic lazy I know

[CreativeOcclusion]

Yea thanks m8 this was ages ago I just didn't want to start a new topic lazy I know

Yeah...I've been getting a little lazy myself...

[StarFire]

lol

Anyway when you scale the point light the widget is also scaled to very small or zero size so therefore not visible. Useful if they are too big/small in the scene.

[TattieBoJangle]

Hi guys got back to it after the strange light on my scene but I was wondering how do we get rid of the lod light

[SolarPortal]

on the material editor, click on the first tab and change the mat lod distance to a higher number. It is 1 meter = 1 unit.
Save your material and it should be fine again