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Lighting optimization, point lights and DTS interiors

by Kenneth Eves · in Torque 3D Beginner · 10/07/2012 (9:52 am) · 2 replies

One of the performance issues I've read about with deferred lighting is that light complexity in a scene increases load.

When using point lights inside a DTS interior, which is more optimal: widely spaced large radius lights or more closely spaced small ones?

#1
10/07/2012 (10:23 pm)
A couple links here at GG for Lighting questions:

http://tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/Torque/LightingSystem/Lighting_Effects

http://tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/TorqueShaderEngine/LightingSystem/Custom_Material_Lighting

#2
10/08/2012 (7:12 am)
Wow, those links are a blast from the past ...

Each object struck by a light creates overhead.
Multiple lights striking an object creates multiple overhead.
Lights with shadows create more overhead - objects being shadowed from multiple sources create more. Obviously there are mutiple shadow types, some use higher resources than others.

I had a huge corridor level with 488 lights, 131 of these lights casted shadows.
Minimizing the number of lights overlapping improved performance (and helped the overall mood/atmosphere) regardless of whether they had shadowing or not.
With all the lights casting lighting performance was poor - regardless of shadowing. I found that grouping the lights into simsets by area and then disabling them via triggers when the (single) player was not nearby greatly improved performance.

In "Basic" lighting, objects can only recieve 4 lights - which is what the priority setting is for. Read the documentation.