A 'night mode' for VAB and SPH

[Claw]

10 hours ago, Aeroboi said:

Also it is the spotlight ray that mostly cripples the performance. Neon or other forms of low level cosmetical light would only be there to add colors, airplane lights or other such things. That would have less effect on performance.

Lights are lights. And if you want them to cast real time shadows, it's going to impact performance more. Also, there's global illumination to contend with.

Emissives, on the other hand, are much less intensive. The trade off being that they don't actually cast light and, hence, won't cast shadows. But they are great for "seeing things in the dark" when you're trying to line stuff up or just generally find your way. There was a light strip mod (Glow Strips, I think) that added this sort of feature. I've also seen people add extra battery packs around docking ports so they have something to aim at in the dark. Neither of which is relevant to Editor dimming, but I digress.

 

7 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

what sort of effort  would it take to duplicate the VAB/SPH interior without the baked in lighting? 

Rebaking textures itself isn't difficult, but does take time. Also, that would be an additional set of assets to load in a game that already stresses memory limits. So there are always trade offs.

I can't recall for sure, but perhaps even a more simple thing to implement is that some of the lit areas are separate sub components of the interior model. If I'm remembering that correctly, then it would be a matter of also flipping those things off with the lights (this could be moddable). Though I think that might also cause the lighting structure itself to also disappear, which could be visually jarring.

[Stone Blue]

i probably should have linked this in my previous post, for those who have not seen it before.
its an absolute awesome piece of work, and shows just how much effort and thought went into the hangars by bac9.

 

 

[Lapis]

17 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

@Claw what sort of effort  would it take to duplicate the VAB/SPH interior without the baked in lighting?  

Quite a bit of texture rework I would think; at least to make it look natural and stock-alike.

EDIT: i was looking at the previous page.

Edited May 3, 2019 by lapis