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Lighting is slow

by Andy Smith · in Torque Game Engine · 12/03/2001 (2:19 pm) · 9 replies

I have been having a good play with the TGE and are starting to think that the lighting phase is too slow, especially if you use a large number of BSP objects with interior access.

Is there any method (or is anyone working on it) to pre-calculate the lighting phase and just load this up instead of doing it at load time?

Any suggestions would be greatly appeciated.
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Torque Owner Tim "Zear" Hammock
#1
12/03/2001 (2:45 pm)
Once you have calculated it once, if no changes are made to the mission or constituent objects, it should just load the already-created lighting data back in, which should be much faster. That is - it should only do the full lighting phase when necessary.

Associate Justin Mette
Default Studio Name
#2
12/03/2001 (3:10 pm)
That's right, in fact the *.ML files in the mission directory are the cached lighting files.

Justin Mette
21-6 Productions

Torque Owner Jeff Trier
Simple Distractions Software
#3
12/03/2001 (4:11 pm)
Ahh, thats good news. That means the end-user wont have to relight when playing the game. I was wondering about that.

Torque 3D Owner Xavier "eXoDuS" Amado
Default Studio Name
#4
12/03/2001 (4:42 pm)
Well, actually you should let the end-user ligth the maps ...
obiusly only the first time they play each map...
this would save cd space or download bandwith :)

Torque Owner Jeff Trier
Simple Distractions Software
#5
12/03/2001 (5:11 pm)
Thats true for small maps, but if some maps take 10 minutes to render, as an end-user I would rather have the light already rendered and in a file.

Associate Ken Finney
Tubetti World
#6
12/17/2001 (9:52 pm)
I would like to revive this discussion.

Is there any "reasonably" achievable way to make a relight happen faster ? How about limiting it to only the visible terrain ? or within a certain radius ? or maybe limiting the range of the lighting delta, or the step, etc ? I would really like to be able to relight any scene within 1 second...

What about relighting without stopping motion ... ?
or genning shadows for only certain item classes ?

arggggghhhh !

Associate James Lupiani
Sickhead Games
#7
12/18/2001 (6:15 am)
What about keeping track of what changes and only relighting the area that would be affected by the change?

Torque Owner Love "hyzen" Florg
#8
12/18/2001 (8:32 am)
I suppose a couple of different relighting methods would be useful.
Slow relighting for daylight change working in the background (mentioned in another thread) and the methods mentioned above for fast small-area relighting.

Torque Owner Tim Gift
#9
12/18/2001 (9:08 am)
One thing to watch out for on the lighting... the mission lighter only lights the exterior faces of a shape. So the the more complex the exterior, the more time it will take. I've also noticed that many people aren't portalizing their interiors, which effectively means the mission lighter will try to light the interior of the building as well, that's a big cause of slow downs.