Will caves/mines ever be dark again?

[loftar]

I think you just evaded my point about caves should be pitch-black.

Not sure how that changes anything, though?

Not sure about that, I feel like this could be done on a tile base and cached quite effectively - depending on how you have structured your data.

Feel free to enlighten me, but I don't really see what could be cached. When a player moves around, I don't really see how any information about the last visibility calculation could be reused for the next.

[Gensokyo]

the true cave experience

[ekzarh]

... and what about the custom clients, again?
We feel strongly that the design of coherent and optimally functional user interfaces – what the client fundamentally is – leaves plenty of room for personal tastes. No one size fits all, and if you're unhappy with the standard size we provide, we take no issue with you retooling it to suit your own preferences.

Morphine is also a good medicine in right hands
The thing you are talking about in Q&A may be achieved in 2 more safe ways:
1) Allowing graphic resource modifications, but not the client behavior (Cs:Go style)
2) Making a mod framework and approving/disapproving user-submitted mods depending on are they a matter of taste or a experience breaking thing. (WoW style and WoT style).

From personal perspective it's fun to involve programming skills in a game. And beneficial.
But from Havens 'spirit', 'atmosphere' perspective, some restirctions would be better. Otherwise player is either covered by hitboxes, flat mods, hidden trees or is at disatvantage against the one who uses all that

[sMartins]

Definately customs are experience breaking ...

[Granger]

I think you just evaded my point about caves should be pitch-black.

Not sure how that changes anything, though?

Current rendering, green being the light radius and red being what could be hidden by LOS:

Light radius.jpg

Resulting render where all completely unlit objects could be culled server-side:

Culled.jpg

Not sure about that, I feel like this could be done on a tile base and cached quite effectively - depending on how you have structured your data.

Feel free to enlighten me, but I don't really see what could be cached. When a player moves around, I don't really see how any information about the last visibility calculation could be reused for the next.

While you have a point that players move around I'm quite confident that they roam the same, unchanged areas most of time, making long-term caching feasible.

The result of LOS calculation, when done based on tiles for simplification, could be stored as a b/w bitmap centered around the point of origin (which is then used to cheeck if objects should be sent to/are accessible by the client) - should compress nicely to disk with a simple RLE for most scenarios and only need to be discarded when LOS relevant objects are modified (cave walls, walls, houses, trees if you want them to block sight). In case you look for a backend to handle such a database (that can easily be called into with C) take a look at GT.M (GPLv3).

Sure, it would need additional resources (CPU for the calculations and the culling, Bandwidth because of the culling as more objects would need to be transfered, RAM and disk storage space -preferably SSD backed- for the caching), but it isn't out of the technical possibilities these days.
It would benefit from breaking up your (as you stated somehwere) currently single-threaded server into something that you can spread over multiple cores (and preferably multiple machines) while maintaining a single world (seemless handover at the server borders), so you could throw more hardware onto the world (that will distribute to where it's required) when needed - which hopefully will happen (both the 'need' as the 'could' part) at some point in time when the userbase grows some orders of magnitude.

[sMartins]

Related to my previous post, that I know is not understandable....I'd like to say to Loftar to not give up implementing nice things just cause they can be cheated, exploited, etc...
It's a game, first of all it has to be beautiful and fun ... you could always think about exploits and cheats later on ... or never at all, who cares?
This is exactly what I mean, right now (our age), if everything we do is not efficient or productive we cannot even see reasons to do it, and it's a terrible way to look at things, terrible way to think...
Do it cause is beautiful and fun, everything else is not that important how we beleive it is.
Maybe this is a bit more understandable.