Thoughts on handling lighting/vision levels

[MostTornBrain]

Hi,

I've been thinking about the conundrum that involves trying to support "low-light vision" with FGU's light model. I'm fairly new to FG, so forgive me if this has been already proposed - I hadn't seen it in my searching of the forums, but the 60 second search frequency limit on searching posts makes it hard to be efficient searching, so I may have missed it.

Has anyone suggested using a wider light scale to represent light/darkness? For example, best I can tell, light is currently represented on a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 being darkness. How about instead represent light values from -100 to 100? Still have only values greater than 0 visible, however the negative values could be adjusted by different vision types using the "intensity" value for vision (as mentioned in CoreRPG/gameelements.xml). This would allow things like "low-light vision" to operate without having to track two redundant sets of lights, so shouldn't have an adverse effect on performance, and also would have the benefit of supporting things like magical darkness of different intensities. For example, if an area had a darkness of -100, and darkvision adds 100, someone with darkvision still wouldn't be able to see (equivalent to deeper darkness spell in Pathfinder). This would give a finer granularity to darkness, perhaps even eliminating the need for the vision flag "ignoredark".

To handle low-light vision specifically (which is defined as seeing twice as far for a given light source) if each light source effectively had a third "ring" that doubled the original range, but this new extra range was composed of values ramping down from -1 to -50, then you could define low-light vision as adding +50 to ambient light. So, in total default darkness (i.e. -50), low-light vision would still give a value of 0 (i.e. you can't see), but if there was a light source producing the -1 to -50 values, the low-light vision character could see dimly.

Anyway, just some idle late Friday night thoughts on lighting. Not knowing the internals of how the lighting is handled, it _seems_ like it might be a workable idea without a big hit on performance, but maybe this has already been considered in the past and there are reasons it wouldn't work.

Cheers,
Brian

[damned]

Dont use the forum search use the Site Search link above

[Farnaby]

That link returns a 404.

[damned]

Aye it seems its a dynamically created link with a session identifier... Use Site Search from the menu above.

[Farnaby]

:thumbsup:

[MostTornBrain]

Aye it seems its a dynamically created link with a session identifier... Use Site Search from the menu above.

Thanks for that! I had not realized that search button would search all the forums as well. That'll definitely save me a boat-load of time when trying to find older posts. That 60 second time limit was driving me batty. :-D

Cheers,
Brian