Better Lighting in Houses ... My Humble Solution

[Syna]

I think most people would agree, even those who are not into house decorating but just have one for selling, that the lighting in houses is quite bad. The lighting in the houses is so dim, that you can barely see anything in them, and at night it's even worse. You can't see any of the details in the walls, flooring, or furniture. So, with every problem, there should be a solution. Whenever I walk through my house, or any other players house, I always equipped my torch so that I can see the cool dev designs, as well as the awesome decorating done by the player. I think the lighting of an equipped torch would be the perfect default lighting for houses. I know picture(s) are worth a thousand words, so I am including some pictures showing what the house lighting currently looks like, and what the house lighting looks like with a torch equipped. I think most players would agree that the torch lighting is 100% better.<b>WITH TORCH LIGHTING: It's cool because you can really see the detail of the floor, as well as the sandalwood platform and quest items. If you look closely, you can even see the smoke on the top floor, right corner, coming from an incense. Now that's awesome lighting. </b><p><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v281/sincitydreamer/EQ2_000067.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></p><b>CURRENT LIGHTING: You can't really see anything clearly. The platform looks like a black smudge, the flooring looks blurry. Everything is just really dark, and this was taken in the daytime. Like I said before, nighttime looks much worse.</b>  <p><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v281/sincitydreamer/EQ2_000069.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></p><p>So, if torch lighting becomes the default lighting for daytime, I would recommend only slightly darkening the lighting for nighttime, while making sure that the details of items, flooring and walls are still very visible.  Or maybe just have one default lighting whether it's daytime or nighttime.</p><p>I welcome any solutions other players may have.</p><p>Thanks all!</p>

[Rainmare]

Personally, I see almost no difference between torch lighting and non torch lighting during the day, except one is darker.also, I like the darker look, because obviously, with only 2 sources of light in your room, both of which only giving off 'dim light' it shouldn't be bright like you turned on a lightswitch.could lighting be better? yes it certainly could.but it doesn't need to be a constant 'indoor electricity' look. what they need to do is simply remove this crap about things like 4 foot tall xeognite flaming freaking swords only giving off a 'gentle glow' which amounts to about 1 foot of light, and then making a 'miner's table lantern' give off enough light to be considered a small sun.Sconces/braziers/candlebras/chandiliers should give off the largest amounts of light.miner lanterns/ ornate singular candles (cobalt table candles/iksar skull candle/deaths head candle) should give off the second largest amountholiday candles should give off that 'gentle glow' look.

[Syna]

<cite>Rainmare@Oasis wrote:</cite><blockquote>Personally, I see almost no difference between torch lighting and non torch lighting during the day, except one is darker.also, I like the darker look, because obviously, with only 2 sources of light in your room, both of which only giving off 'dim light' it shouldn't be bright like you turned on a lightswitch.could lighting be better? yes it certainly could.but it doesn't need to be a constant 'indoor electricity' look. what they need to do is simply remove this crap about things like 4 foot tall xeognite flaming freaking swords only giving off a 'gentle glow' which amounts to about 1 foot of light, and then making a 'miner's table lantern' give off enough light to be considered a small sun.Sconces/braziers/candlebras/chandiliers should give off the largest amounts of light.miner lanterns/ ornate singular candles (cobalt table candles/iksar skull candle/deaths head candle) should give off the second largest amountholiday candles should give off that 'gentle glow' look.</blockquote>Almost no difference? With the torch lighting, you can clearly see the etchings on the sandalwood platform, you can see the embossed look of the floor, you can even see the rounded studs on the chest.I agree that house lighting should not be a constant 'indoor electricity' look, and I also agree that the degree of lighting should be totally dependent upon the light source. But as you stated, and again I agree, the degree of lighting is not dependent upon the light source. I just figured, instead of going into the game and trying to change the light given by every light source, it may be easier just to create a default house lighting system that allows people to easily see the things that I pointed out before. What's the point of having detailed designed items in game if you can't even see the detail. I have no problem with it being dark in a room, I just think it should not be so dark that you can't see those detailed things.Also, the reason I only have two light sources in a room brings up another issue that goes off topic, which is, there's a limit to how many items you can have in a house, and having to put 30 or more lights in each room just to brighten it up, doesn't leave very much room for anything else. But again, that's a whole another topic. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />In short, I like your solutions, and would totally like to see them implemented. They would bring a certain realness to the game.

[Transen]

For me, two things I'd like to see:  <ol><li>Certain items to give off more light than others (like Chandeliers), things that would make sense such as items that have more than 1 candle on/in them or has a larger area of lightsource such as those flaming sword sconces (which should be giving off more of an ambient purple light in the area in my opinion)</li><li>The ability to extend the chain that chandeliers hang from.  It just seems to me like most of them were designed with the Qeynos 1-room housing in mind.  Could use the same system that is now in place for moving items along the Z-axis (like books, shelves, chairs, tables, ect..) except it would instead lengthen the chain/rope/rod.</li></ol>Well, just my opinion.

[Qandor]

<p>I tend to agree that an overall brightening indoors is not the answer at all. We just need more lighting options that can perform well. Most wall sconces for example seem to give off very poor light and yet a xegonite wall sconce which has barely a small flame to it gives off stadium lighting by comparison. Chandeliers should give off a lot of light but many of them hardly give any. If you started way back in the day you received a chandelier with your first inn room. It was a little dinky thing with about a six inch chain but gave off a ton of light. Huge chandeliers that followed, hardly give off any light.</p><p>We just need more viable strong light sources in a wide range of styles. Freestanding, wall sconces, chandeliers, all kinds. If the homes were floodlit to begin with, any additional lighting would be superfluous and really limit any effect you were trying to create. They have to be rather darkish to start. Just give us the tools to brighten it as we see fit without having to devout 20% of a house item limit to lighting. Plenty of dim light sources currently. We need more options on the high end.</p>

[DamianTV]

<p>There are a couple of user controlled settings that influence poor lighting in houses.</p><p>#1  Complex Shader Distance</p><p>#2  Maximum Torch Intensity </p><p>#3  Minimum Ambient Lighting</p><p>#4  Shadows and its sub options</p><p>I think you need to play with these options on your system before taking a look at other solutions.</p><p>Theres also some things you probably dont know about, that kind of frustrated me as well.  Such as not every light model actually has a light attached to it.  Also, not every light model casts shadows.  I dont remember if the type of light source you are using in your pictures has a light source attached to it.  Now in other engines I've played with, some options they had built into their game engine for positioning lights were things like a Cast Shadows flag, Self Shadows flag (if a model is attached), and an Ambient Only flag that brighens up everything in its sphere but does not cast shadows by default making it more efficient for lighting large areas.  Our lights are small because shadow work is done on the CPU, not the GPU at this time, but I would agree that having somethign that you would expect to put out a large ammt of light, enough to illuminate a whole room doesnt, because shadow calculations increase exponentially as their diameter increases.  This may change with the devs now trying to implement multi core support.  Basically they may move where shadow calculations are done to the GPU or offload it to a secondary CPU if its available.  They still have to consider performance options on single core machines.  Im getting off topic tho, and understand your frustration in properly lighting your house.</p><p>To put this simply, if the above options dont give you the desired effect, try getting a Death's Head Candle which I know puts out a lot of light disproportionate to its model.  See if that helps you to illuminate the darnkess a bit better.  Creative positioning can hide the light model, and you can still look like you have your glowing swords as your light sources.</p>

[Araxes]

There are two different kinds of "lamps" in EQ2, in terms of what the engine renders.1.)  Lamp sconces and torches that give off no light source.  These are flat particle effects that generate no dynamic light source of their own, i.e. they are fluff lights that serve strictly for aesthetics.  The majority of sconces and lights are of this type.2.)  Lamps that actually generate dynamic light source.  If you turn up your number of rendered light sources in Options > Display > Lighting > Max number of Lights to about 13 or so, you will be able to see nearly all lights rendered in any given town interior scene.  This has a huge performance impact, mind you.  It's combined with the Complex Shader distance setting, which would need to be at 35-70 to see all lights in a scene, no matter how far.  These two settings together constitute a large chunk of CPU and VPU usage, so use them wisely.  A happy medium is the best solution.  On a modern machine, 7-9 light sources and a complex shader setting of about 25 will do you just fine for interiors.  These second type of lights are quite pretty and if you set your torch intensity to between .8 and 1.0 you will have quite bright effects, particularly if you also enable ambient lighting (see below).  However they can go for quite a lot of money on the broker as they are highly desirable for interiors.------Some other details:3.) Ambient lighting can make a huge difference, but has a moderate performance impact.  Test this out and see how it feels.  If you cans et it to max and notice little performance change, then keep it at Max ... your eyes will thank you.  You will not get the washed out "gray" effect that simply raising brightness or gamma will create.  4.)  Fiddle with your contrast settings.  This will create more rich and vibrant colors, when combined with lighting options, can make the game look WORLDS different.

[John]

Multi core would be sweet. <div></div><div>I agree with everyone, I think it would be nice that anything that should produce light SHOULD produce light.  Being a carpenter and having to be asked for for some lighting,  there's so little choices for people to get lighting.  Sucks to even have sconces, chandeliers, etc. that look nice but still have a dark room.  I think all should produce light.  And they should all vary, some have more light than others.  I really don't want to keep on suggesting Paladin braziers for light ;/</div><div></div><div>The lengthening of chain for chandeliers is a wonderful idea.  It doesn't seem too difficult to implement and it would certainly make more chandeliers viable for every house.  </div>

[DamianTV]

I dont know if every object that should produce light should be remade to be a light source, unless we had an on / off option for those lights.  Clap on, Clap off, clap on clap off, the clapper...