Caves should be dark as fook again.

[Granger]

We could disagree a long time about how much traffic it would cause, let's skip that.

I'm fine with you convincing loftar to implement it, you have my blessing - should you manage to pull that off I'll buy you a beer.

[MagicManICT]

I'm fine with you convincing loftar to implement it, you have my blessing - should you manage to pull that off I'll buy you a beer.

I could accept that!

I do miss that part of legacy first playing and not knowing about custom clients. I started about the time the first one became public. It was an awesome atmospheric thing, and miss the glowing cave bulbs.

[Yorla]

And I miss my vision. I've lost so much of it already. Please, no enforced darkness in the game.

[2d0x]

Earlier it was said a lot that donate should not influence the gameplay and will not give any advantages. There is a donate-cap "Glowing halo". Now this is a source of free "eternal" lighting?

[shubla]

An invitation to light-hacks, unfortunately. Darkness is nothing we can easily enforce.

Nonsense, sure you can do that.

Being lit can be easily checked server-side, so you could just make the character:
- stumble and faceplant for a nice concussion every few steps (possibly add a 'stumbled in the darkness' experience to this)
- unable to interact with objects and pickup items
- unable to fight but being aggroed by everything (=batcape does nothing, even rats attack) as these sense the vulnerability and the free meal

A light hack might be even contra-productive in that scenario, as one wouldn't even see where the darkness (thus the area of endless pain) begins.

These are just the first things that came to my mind, without even thinking.
I'm sure you could come up with more an better (=worse for the player) stuff.

It does not sound that easy though. How are you going to determine whether the player is in darkness or not?

[Granger]

It does not sound that easy though. How are you going to determine whether the player is in darkness or not?

The server knows which light sources exist, it knows their range, it's a trivial calculation when you cut some corners (like ignoring void tiles that would, as of being walls, block light) and it dosn't get that much more expensive when factoring such stuff in.

[shubla]

It does not sound that easy though. How are you going to determine whether the player is in darkness or not?

The server knows which light sources exist, it knows their range, it's a trivial calculation when you cut some corners (like ignoring void tiles that would, as of being walls, block light) and it dosn't get that much more expensive when factoring such stuff in.

It does get quite expensive with walls and objects blocking light. Even without them it still sounds like a very expensive calculation to make.

[MagicManICT]

It does get quite expensive with walls and objects blocking light. Even without them it still sounds like a very expensive calculation to make.

What gets expensive is lighting textures. Testing lights vs vertices and vectors is relatively cheap in the realm of 3D math. It is only a couple of floating point calculations per wall segment. When it's a 2D map, it's really cheap.

Granted that the server probably doesn't have a GPU on it for optimizing this sort of thing, which would then make such calculations so fast as to be a non-issue.

[Agame]

New improved ore/stone walls textures, anyone? Let them be dark as fook as long as they are different in RBG color on my screen

[Ysh]

It does not sound that easy though. How are you going to determine whether the player is in darkness or not?

The server knows which light sources exist, it knows their range, it's a trivial calculation when you cut some corners (like ignoring void tiles that would, as of being walls, block light) and it dosn't get that much more expensive when factoring such stuff in.

It does get quite expensive with walls and objects blocking light. Even without them it still sounds like a very expensive calculation to make.

Code: Select all

boolean inDarkness = true;
for(LightSouce s : sources) {
    if(player.getc().dist(s.getc()) <= s.getRadius()) {
        inDarkness = false;
        break;
    }
}

I think this calculation ignoring wall is O(n) with number of light source per player. When you consider that decision on which object to send to player client is already O(n) in number of total object, then I think this one is effectively O(1), since we must look at all object (including light source) anyway. This seem quite cheap to me if we do ignore walls.