Light Flicker On Damage

[Lone_Puppy]

Can we please have the lights flicker and turn off based on the percentage of damage on the light?

This post inspired me to think of this.
Brightness in Lighting

It would make battles look way cooler with damaged ships/stations/entities with flickering or dead lighting.

 

[33Cav]

You can actually do this already with sensor blocks other logic and display blocks.

 

[Lone_Puppy]

You can actually do this already with sensor blocks other logic and display blocks.

Sure you are right, but then what happens when the logic is destroyed?

 

[33Cav]

Same thing that would happen if your lights were destroyed

 

[nightrune]

I'll just leave this here. Recognized - No Power/No Lights

 

[Lone_Puppy]

Same thing that would happen if your lights were destroyed

Correct!
The idea is for damaged lights, not destroyed lights.
[doublepost=1478740796,1478740650][/doublepost]

I'll just leave this here. Recognized - No Power/No Lights

Achriel has the idea.

 

[33Cav]

I'll just leave this here. Recognized - No Power/No Lights

I agree with both of you. However, I think the mechanic that would make lights flicker could possibly lag the game. It would need to be tested. However, if it did not introduce any significant lag, then I say flicker while overheating, off when no power. However the "off" would still be considered "on" for logic purposes, and those lights would come back on when power is restored.

I agree with Benevolent27 when he says that flickering lights lag the game. Try making a flickering beacon now with a logic clock on a moderate sized station and fly out of load range, wait a min and fly back in. Your station won't load because of the beacon.

Correct!
The idea is for damaged lights, not destroyed lights.

So basically each light would flicker independently based on the % damage to it?
Isn't that adding too much overhead and also lights have super low HP and are destroyed by 99% of weapons anyway so you will barely get to see it at all?

 

[Lone_Puppy]

lights lag the game

If that were the case, then why have logic controlled flashing lights to begin with.

lights have super low HP and are destroyed by 99% of weapons anyway so you will barely get to see it at all

Which would moot your previous statement.

It's up to the dev's to decide whether it's a go/no go. It's only a suggestion, not a blight.
If you have nothing positive to add, add nothing at all.

 

[33Cav]

If that were the case, then why have logic controlled flashing lights to begin with.

Logic isn't the issue, it's the flashing aspect.

Which would moot your previous statement.

Not even close.

I suggest (or support rather) that the only feasible change is to turn off lights on overheat, rather than add individual checks for each light's damage level or flicker lights through some mechanism (the flickering causing unnecessary lag).

 

[nightrune]

I agree with Benevolent27 when he says that flickering lights lag the game.

There are easy ways around this. The reason its so complicated with logic is that it recalculates the lighting data on chunk updates. If you do it for a whole entity though it becomes something the shader can do each frame. Doing it per light is what gets heavy, but it depends heavily on what the rendering pipeline is doing right now.

 

[jayman38]

Direct damage causing flickering sounds like a great thing to me. At the ship level, true, you won't get a lot of use out of this feature, due to a lot of instant destruction. However, with faction and fauna updates, astronaut-level combat would be more interesting. Lights would be damaged, not always destroyed at that level of play, and would greatly improve the astronaut combat experience.

 

[Ezekial Alexander]

I'd like to see entity wide flickering on power grid damage...but not at the expense of performance