Lights should light other entities

[Malacodor]

I tried to make moving lights, but they don't work since block lighting doesn't work across different entities. This wasn't really an issue in the past, but with the rail system there are way more situations where it looks weird. Also, we could make so many cool things with moving lights, like disco lighting for example.

 

[Keptick]

Been suggested in the past, I think that the issue was that it'd require a massive rewrite of the lighting engine or the fact that it'd affect performance a lot.

Apart from that yes, it would be a nice feature.

 

[jayman38]

The time has come.

 

[LittleJoe]

The time has come.

time for your 1000th post?

 

[BlisAx]

Look at Space engineers with the spot light. This is dynamic lighting and with more than a few you can already notice slow down. Simply put from a programmers prospective dynamic lighting is expensive.

 

[Galladinator]

My computer already has half FPS when shadows are enabled, this is even more computer intensive.

 

[Gamel]

may be this can be an opinion, like shadow?

 

[Tobie]

It probably wouldn't be worth it performance wise if all lights could light all entities (making them all dynamic lights).

I do agree that there should be something like a spot light though. If dynamic lights had their own block, it would be relatively simple to take some measures to reduce their impact on performance. For example, limiting the number of drawn dynamic lights, the same way that the number of drawn beams are limited in the options menu.

 

[jayman38]

Maybe the game could dynamically cull lighting calculations.
1. Max Number of entities a light could illuminate: [3] closest entities
2. Max Distance Light illuminates: [5] block lengths
3. Max Number of lights effecting an entity: [3] closest lights
4. Max Number of blocks per entity illuminated by lights: [50] center-most blocks
5. Max Number of blocks (in universe) illuminated by lights: [1024]

 

[testkil]

My computer already has half FPS when shadows are enabled, this is even more computer intensive.

starmade isn't a computer intensive game and we are in 2015 those old computers are starting to be needed to replaced and laptops aren't pc's made for pure gaming