Hi I am trying to make streets lights for my level but I can not figure out how. Could some on tell me how to do this. Also how would you make a glow map for the lights in the level? thanks
My hokey, lame, but fun attempt at streetlighting last year. Putting spotlights into every fixture head and tweaking the properties. This is a frame rate killer but it's fun in a lame way. The building lighting was just making the textures glow in the material properties and it was sheer luck any of them actually glowed. Pointless for gameplay but fun for screenies. Not really up to date on what's going on these days on the subject but scripted? streetlighting is possible.
Mecke96's Corracing map features a scripted system by which lights are enabled at sunset and disabled at sunrise. In one of my maps, I tried to take it a step further by changing out day/night meshes of a building at these times, although that system appears to be glitched. Mecke has a level design tutorial series on YouTube, where he links to his script in the lighting video.
Wow....I remember Mecke96's tut touching on that. I also remember your test map having the script and the day/night effect with the lights and textures was awesome to watch cycle. I've wondered if glowmaps? in a street light capacity could be made to emit light, merely as a more convenient way to place lots and lots of them. I'd imagine the penalty for lighting like that wouldn't change much though because Torque is Torque. Pure conjecture on my part.
It was pretty awesome, and I planned/plan to use that system again in some more 'civilized' maps that I'm kinda-sorta working on. But for some reason, the night meshes don't start in the level as hidden. I'll figure something out. Actually, it could easily be worse. Emitting from a point light is simple since it's just a single point, whereas from glowmaps it would be every x pixels of screen space or x meters of world space, as it's a surface. In fact, the only game engine I've ever seen wherein glow maps can actually light up a level is the Unreal Engine, and even then, it only works with pre-built lighting. My proposed workaround is just to be lazy. If there are three or four lights in short succession, just use one large point light to simulate them.
Couldn't you use a cookie to simulate multiple light spots from one point light? I just did a crude test and I think its something I will look into for my shitty city map. I would love to get hold of the script to make them turn on and off with the time of day. Is it available for anyone to use? Who's bum do I have to lick get get this sorcery? Here is the cookie I used and the end result when I applied it to one point light. The end result is one light emitting lots of spots of light. The hardest part would be making the cookie line up with your lamps. Food for thought
Lol.....I believe if you watch the Mecke96 tutorial he shows how it's done, #6 or something. I was intending on watching to the end of the series but my selfish ass got what I needed and stopped. That's really cool what you did there and it makes the mind wonder. Almost like a cookie as a scattering mirror. If that scheme could be used for a city full of streetlights it would be incredible. When I was putting in streetlights I noticed a section in the spotlight properties for a cookie, screwed around with it a bit but nothing came of it. I do know someone was talking in the T3D forums about using cookies to simulate long tube fluorescent lighting with one point light. As I recall the discussion didn't produce any wonderous results and the GG devs were kind of at a loss to a solution. A glowmap was brought up but like Occam stated and that idea fizzled pretty quick.
