Lighting your ages

[Trylon]

Upon watching a number of (very nice) screenshots posted by people around here, I noticed that most don't feature lighting of the area.
I'd like to take the opportunity to remind that lighting of textured objects is indeed possible, and highly recommended to make your age come to life more.

After you've textured your material, you can use the "ambient" slider in the blender material tab to define the ratio between unlit and lit colors (setting the ambient slider to 1.0 makes the texture fully lit always, while setting it to 0.0 makes viewing it fully dependant on lighting.

To make an object lit by a light, you need to add the following logic property:
string lights00X = [Name of light]
Where you replace X by any number from 0 to 7 (in order of course).

I know that this process is still a little dodgy, and might not always work in the way it is supposed to. My guess at the moment is that it is related to blender somehow.

[Kierra]

*nods* lighting is often times what makes a really nice age into a really awesome age.

What I'm curious about is creating visible light sources, for instance, firemarbles or the light nimbus around lamps, etc. Is anything like that available yet?

~Kia

[Paradox]

Yes, in addition to an actual lamp source, you'll need to create a plane that rotates on the (Blender) Z axis.

There's a tutorial on the Alcugs Wiki about "Rotating Sprites". That's what you're looking for

[Kierra]

Thanks, I'll look into it

~Kia

[JulyForToday]

Figured this would be a good place for now, but how would you make a kickable (or any object for that matter) be affected by any light? We know the avatar is affected by any light we place in a scene, on any page. How would you make a kickable do the same thing? It would make it a lot easier than setting 50 different flags to make sure it stays lit properly.

[Trylon]

As far as I know, you can't makean object be affected in the same way the avatar is, you'll just have to add a "light00X" property to the object for aach lamp yo uwant to affect the object.

[Kato]

So I suppose you must limit the area that the kickable is in then, eh? Considering there's only 8 lighting spots. But, then again, I guess you'd want to do that anyway.

-Kato

[Paradox]

Oh, you can have far more than 8 lights in your Age, but DirectX will only allow an object to be lit my 8 lights at once.

I experienced this when I created a large plane with 18 spot lights, and inly the first 8 were casting light. If I split the terrain into 5 pieces, then the lights work as expected (provided than no more than 8 are shining on any single part).

Might it be possible to set every light in the Age as a lightXXX property on the kickable? (if no more than 8 lights are shining on it at once, it should work)

[Trylon]

Ok, good to know!
I misunderstood that 8 lights DX situation. Thanks for clarifying!

[Nadnerb]

Might it be possible to set every light in the Age as a lightXXX property on the kickable? (if no more than 8 lights are shining on it at once, it should work)

Yes, this works. What happens in plasma is that the first 8 lights that actually affect the object will work, and the rest will be ignored. So as long as there is no area where the effective region of more than 8 lights converges, everything should work properly.

(In fact, there are a few places ingame where you can actually see this happen, such as Jalak. Get enough light blocks illuminating one square, and it will suddenly get darker rather than lighter, as the underlighting stops affecting it.)

Oh, and everyone knows how to copy the logic properties in blender, right?
- hold shift
- select a bunch of objects that you want to copy to
- select the object you want to copy from (the last object selected will appear a slightly different color)
- press Ctrl C, 9, or use the menus Object > Copy Attributes > Properties
- select which property you want to copy
So if you want to make everything in your age solid, or affected by light, or whatever, hit A to select all, then copy the attribute from an object with that property.