Light Switch

[Spartan-228]

So I was working on a ship playing with the lights and I started thinking (hard to believe I know) what if we could switch light colors the same way we switch rails using logic.

 

[Crimson-Artist]

I believe someone suggested this before to Schema. I think he said its not possible atm. Might have something to do with the fact that lights can be turned off and on with logic.

 

[kikaha]

Might have to do with the way the light is calculated in the game right now i think... in his interview not that long ago Schema talked about the code for the lighting being worked on currently or in the future (can't remember sorry).

 

[kiddan]

Might have to do with the way the light is calculated in the game right now i think... in his interview not that long ago Schema talked about the code for the lighting being worked on currently or in the future (can't remember sorry).

Aye, in the latest new post (Universe Update Roadmap) Schema also talked about redoing the lighting system.

Spoiler: Big Quote

Additionally, I’ll put the lighting calculations on c++ to speed up chunk graphics generation. With this, all processor heavy functions will be running in native c++, while maintaining the ease of project management that java provides.

On top of that, the graphics engine will be upgraded with a lot of functionality. Starting with simplifying a lot of block graphics data management, the main upgrade would be a new pipeline containing deferred rendering and dynamic lighting. Since dynamic lighting on its own never really works for voxel games of this scale, it will be built to be used in tandem with the baked lighting. This means that everything up close (or further away depending on the power of the graphics card) will be lit dynamically, meaning that light will look a lot better as well as affect other objects (cross entity lighting), while light in far away areas will be used the baked lighting as an approximation giving us optimal performance mixed with much better-looking visuals.

 

[Spartan-228]

Just because we use logic to turn lights on and off I don't see why this would exclude use from using it to change their color. After all we can do a lot more with rails and logic then change their derection and rail type.