Planned Better Lighting.... Again?

[DominusLux]

Greetings all,

Loving the game so far, but I'm here to suggest only one thing..... lights. We need better lights. Now, I know this was suggested in about 2014, but I started mid 2015 and I haven't seen anyone post about it since. Lights only light about 3 blocks..... its rather frustrating. its not very pleasing to have a large room with lights all over the floor and roof trying to get the place reasonably lit. I'd love it if you guys could make lights work a little better than how they are now. I saw the last post mention changing some graphics settings? But my system is not very up to date. runs the game fine, but It won't run so great with increased graphics.

so yeah, that's my suggestion. appreciate any feedback and comments.

 

[HolyCookie]

Your problem should be solved with the planned spotlights.

But know what, what about awesome dimming lights? It would work like with a rail speed controller, activators linked up to it will change the light intensity. How does that sound? any suggestions and add-ons on it? Think of the cool light propositions you can make :D
a default would be 50% light, so using light connected with logic COULD double the light. but also half for those who want less.
What ya think?

 

[ToasterBorst]

An overhaul of the lighting system has long been planned and is publicly disclosed, no idea when that will be tackled or what it will look like but many of us are looking forward to it.

Logic dimmed lights and color changing lights have long been suggested, from a brief twitch chat conversation w/ Schema about that topic awhile ago, though, I believe he mentioned that under the current lighting system each different change to the block would require another ID. ..so there is that and it certainly shut me up about it.

 

[DominusLux]

Sweet, so its in the works. thats great to know. The spotlights and those other ideas sound wonderful. they would really make a great addition and would certainly be beneficial to starships and stations.

 

[Lord_Greyscale]

"Lights only light about 3 blocks"

I don't know whether to laugh to death, or cry to death, but they do far, far more than a mere 3 blocks.

True, you have to adjust the settings to get it to be properly usefull, (and it's only about 7 or 8 in truth, for properly usefull light levels) but they DO do more.

Specifically it's the Lighting Quality (#raytrace steps) setting, the one that goes 16, 32, 64, 128, 256.

if you want the good lighting, don't play on less than 64. preferably play with it all the way up on 256.
(my dad has a shitty comp, and though it barely runs Starmade, the lighting quality make no difference to his performance. (the general lack of Memory optimizations in the current game is what forks his toaster, it just don't have enough RAM.)

Heck, turning off anti-aliasing gives an instant and obvious effect on performance, and it defaults to ON (so do shadows, and even on "best" those look terrible), so why does the one setting that basically doesn't matter to any computer with decent RAM quantity (and a CPU made within the last 5 years) start on the lowest and most useless setting?

Or, is this a matter or server stability?
Which would be odd, as everything "lighting" except the point-of-origin should be handled entirely client-side.