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Needing some advice for adding day/night to TGE 1.5.2

by Jason Gossiaux · in Torque Game Engine · 10/24/2007 (9:07 pm) · 4 replies

Howdy everyone,

I've spent the past few days scouring the site/TDN for information on Day/Night implementation... and have kind of turned up short for the newest release. It seems the addition of the lightpack is causing older resources to have problems, and is preventing folks from designed new day/night systems.

This pack would seem ideal, but it is a patch (pain in the butt to figure out) and hasn't been touched in almost 2 years...

This showed some promise, but has been delayed indefinately because the successor to this resource has never been released.

Something simple would suit me just fine such as this from 2002... again I see no linked explaination, code or anything.

Is it possible I am missing some other resource here that would get me started on the right track? Any help would be appreciated.
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Torque Owner Kevin Summers
#1
10/25/2007 (10:19 am)
I've been looking for the same thing for quite some time, as have others.

The links you mention above are basically all that's out there at the moment. The
video for the second link was awesome, but the code was never released. Not
sure why it wasn't just released as it was and let the community help work out
the kinks.

Basically it seems like the best you can do is take what little resources that exist
and modify them to work the way you want. I'm still hopefull that one of the more
in depth resources will be posted, but it's been long enough that it doesn't seem
very likely.

The enviroTorque resource might be the best thing to start out with. Then modify
to your liking.

Torque Owner The Fallen
#2
02/13/2008 (7:21 am)
Eheh like all the other 80% of resources, this one is way outdated #) I never get it to work with 1.4 and now with 1.5.2 either.

Torque Owner Prairie Games
Prairie Games, Inc.
#3
02/13/2008 (7:24 am)
The Torque MMO Kit available at http://www.mmoworkshop.com has an excellent day and night system.

If you are an ArcaneFX owner, you can find download information to the C++ code in this thread:

http://www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=66412

Torque Owner Jason Gossiaux
Indie Dev
#4
02/14/2008 (7:20 am)
Interesting. I'd researched it but never found mention of such a thing. I guess it would depend on what is included. Does it have any of the following?

1). Changing sky/cloud colors as the sun rises and sets?

2). Changing terrain color/shading as the light level/color changes?

3). Changing building color/shading as the light level/color changes?

4). Changing lightmaps?

5). How much overhead does it invoke?

I was able to do #1 alright. You'd have thought #2 and 3 were simple due to all the videos floating around showcasing it - but I never figured it out. #4 is harder due to the computation time involved. I ended up being able to selectively relight buildings over time to update their shadowmaps seamlessly. The terrain proved to be more difficult and never reached a speed I was happy with. The lightmap on the terrain updated every minute, but the background processing involved small pauses with the engine every 5 seconds. If only it could have been thrown into a background thread :mutter:

Thanks for the info. Once my project is farther along I plan to invest in the AFX. I'm not sure the MMO toolkit can offer anything I don't already have. I decided for the moment to go with a different - almost unique route for my lighting.