Lights.. in AP?
I hope you won't mind if I run away screaming?
The thing with lights and AP is that the Age wasn't done at all with lighting in mind initially, because 'back then' there was no lights support in PyPRP, so to make up for this I did a lot of vertex painting. And I fear that if some real lights are added in there the whole thing will look weird.. But then again, it may not. I have never done any lighting test in this Age so I can't really say.. What I do know is that the addition of real lighting in the Age would tremendously enhance it. But lighting isn't exactly my greatest skill..
Paradox wrote:With animations that are capable of being stretched to last the length of the day, I'm curious as to what the actual day length in Pahts is set to. Is it the default 24 hours?
Since I never touched it, I'd assume so.
Personally I'm not a big fan of day/night cycle in Ages for several reasons: 1) As the Age author it is much harder to control the mood of your Age when you know that the lighting will change all the time. (how would Gehn's 233 look if it weren't for its eternal dusk? What about Tay?) 2) As a player this is annoying because you can't control it.
I like to spend long stretch of time in some Ages because I like the atmosphere there, but if the light changes, so does the atmosphere, and that kinda breaks the whole thing. Sometimes I want to go to Gira to enjoy some hot sunny relaxing place only to link to some cold rocky Age..
If there was a way to control that somehow that'd be cool with me. In fact I tried to give that some thought in the past but there really is no way to do that unless you use some slightly wonky devices like some time travelling thing (Todelmer), or some sun/gravity controlling machine.. Or you have somehow to base your whole Age design around this (like Teledahn)
Anyhow that's my personal opinion.. But if other people like the idea it could be interesting to give it a try.. If only to see how it turns out, so that it may be used in other Ages.
Are there plans to animate the sky for a day/night transition, and have streetlamps react to the hour?
While I'm thinking of crazy nearly-impossible stuff, it would be cool for Pahts to have random storms independent of the day and time, and have those cause the canals to rise and affect the wavesets like Kemo's storm...
That'd indeed be really cool.
(I especially like the storm idea -- I love rain) That'd be a lot of work; but that could be worth it.. It'd add a lot to the Age; it lacks animation as it is.
May you could try out some of these ideas in a test Age as a proof of concept?
I also tried to make it into a single mesh with a complex stencil-powered shaders, but I couldn\\\'t get it to animate because of the stencils.. Not sure if I did something wrong here.. I did that a while ago already, that might work with PyPRP 1.5. I don\\\'t know.
