Blockland and light.

[yuki]

Seriously, what's with Blockland's really amazingly terrible lighting system?
I mean, it works fine for most small bricks, and in small areas, but it forgets up so much it's ridiculous, even at highest possible settings.

Here's me simply rotating a few degrees on GREEN grass:

Now it's blue.


How about moving a few studs?


My light is gone!

What the stuff is this?


The ground is dark, while everything else is lit:


What.

[Ad Bot]

[Regulith]

I noticed that :(

[BobSevenSevens]

I noticed that :(

Are you listening, Badspot?

[Kalphiter]

When you have your light on and you get no light hitting the ground, that's because of too many lights on-screen I believe.

[yuki]

When you have your light on and you get no light hitting the ground, that's because of too many lights on-screen I believe.

Do you see too many lights?

[Kalphiter]

Do you see too many lights?

Sorry, by on-screen I mean in your draw distance.

[yuki]

Sorry, by on-screen I mean in your draw distance.

My draw distance was at a bare minimum in the top-down screenshots. There was no other light sources rendered at the time.

[Marcem]

Yeah, light needs some fixing.  Dynamic shadows would be lovey, too. :P

[Kalphiter]

My draw distance was at a bare minimum in the top-down screenshots. There was no other light sources rendered at the time.

Then it's a different reason, but I know too many lights = glitch

[yuki]

Yeah, light needs some fixing.  Dynamic shadows would be lovey, too. :P

and laggy.

Then it's a different reason, but I know too many lights = glitch

I know that well.

[Marcem]

and laggy.

But it would be cool if you could bake shadows on bricks if you place a light.  Sure there would be a lot of lag when you place a light, but it would look quite nice. But that wouldn't fix the player light.

[Chrono]

and laggy.

Lighting quality. o:

[yuki]

But it would be cool if you could bake shadows on bricks if you place a light.  Sure there would be a lot of lag when you place a light, but it would look quite nice. But that wouldn't fix the player light.

I like the idea of a quick moment of lag to bake the shadows, but not immediately. More like a button to bake shadows. That way people could place lights, then when the build is done, bake the shadows.

[Menen]

This game does have some really bad lighting systems, such as lights going through bricks and things

There should be light emmiters without the shine also.

[kompressor]

It is using vertex lighting; you have enumerated the problems with vertex lighting. Good work.

Specifically, lighting is only calculated at each vertex and interpolated between; if the vertices are far apart the approximation is bad and it looks weird.

There are many other fancy lighting technologies out there. They all require faster, newer, and better video cards. Many Blockland users still have old, slow, lame video cards, and would not be able to use them. Most of the time, vertex lighting looks good - specifically it only looks bad on these very large bricks.

Lightmapping the whole world would not be "a moment of lag", it would be minutes of agonizing delay for every single person who connected to a large server. It would require much more RAM than most people have. It would also be very problematic if someone made a bunch of bricks with lights that turned off and on.

So this gives us a choice - spend a lot of effort adding fancy new lighting only some users will be able to see, or focus on adding fixes and features that benefit everyone. Or in the case of lightmapping, features that would actually make the game worse for everyone.