SS4 Dungeons of Schley Lighting issues

Highland_Piper

I'm following the instructions in the pdf exactly and there is no light at all. I'm working on Battle Tiles so the space is smaller. Although I don't know why that would make a differnce. How do you get the lighting to actually work?

Monsen

Could you post the .fcw where you are trying to get it working? Might be easier to see what you do wrong.

Highland_Piper

Okay it appears to be an issue with symbols. I tried placing the light symbol ontop of the torch and I get no light. If I move it to the center of the hallway then I get light. But then the light is slightly off.

Gathar

I had the same issue when working on Shessar context. Basically, symbols stop the light. Which is nice, unless you want to put the light right on a symbol (it is then immediately stopped). The solution? Put all light emitting symbols on the SYMBOL_FLAT sheet, that way, they will stop blocking the light (they will no longer stop the light from the other torches either, but I think you can usually ignore that).

jslayton

The lighting system creates a temporary internal image from entities places on sheets with a "Wall Shadow, Point Light Setup" effect. This image contains brightness values based on the height specified for those objects. The "Wall Shadow, Point Light Finalize" effect uses that height image and the positions of lights to produce the lighting for the final image. If you put a light inside of a solid object (that is, inside of an object on a sheet with "Wall Shadow, Point Light Setup" effect), then the solid object will block all of the light.

As Gathar points out, you need to put things that shouldn't block light onto a sheet without a "Wall Shadow, Point Light Setup" effect. There isn't an attribute for symbols that directly says whether the light should be emissive or not. I once considered extending the symbol system with a height map channel (in addition to the existing image, varicolor, and map channels) to let folks directly specify which parts of the symbol should block light and by how much. Emissive objects would have empty height information, houses could have rooflines built into them, the shadow halo around a lot of dungeon symbols wouldn't block light, and so on. I am not sure when I might get around to such a thing, though.