Fake paintover Thursday! Night lighting suggestion.

I may have gone a bit overboard. But considering we're using a deferred lighting system, why not.
The main thing the game is lacking in the night scene are tiny detail lights on the structures (flashing by the air pads, exit ramps etc)

I'm sure this is already planned, but i wanted to imagine how it'd look NOW!

Before


After

Cool

God no, looks aweful sorry but it does, doesn't fit in at all.

that might be because it's been painted on a screenshot. the concept is fantastic and i think it's a great idea.

neat, just needs to be white light and less pervasive like the unit lights

pretty sure all those light would have a large resource hit.

Not sure why robots need light in the first place tbh.

If it was such a huge resource hit, they wouldn't have put lights on the robots. Adding lights to the buildings is small potatoes.

So we've been talking about having the factories light up the areas around them internally. Probably wouldn't look exactly like that but it's the general idea.

I also want to put in a unit that's simply a light pole which turns on at night for lighting up an area. Yes I know robots don't need visible light.

But dynamic lighting on a sphere is awesome

Yeah but we all know that 'looking cool', 'playing well' and 'being awesome' are all more important than 'being realistic'.

i had thought of a unit like that as well, except a truck with a bunch of big lights on it and nothing else :lol:

Im sold.

Heh....then when we start hoarding resources on are massive turtle base planets.
We could build a ton of them as to cheekishly write "Feck off brah!" or "Nuke This" across the surface of our home planets. Oh the joy, it would just be begging for an asteroid.

From what i've seen on streams the dark sides of planets could do with being a bit darker, it just kinda looks like a cloudy day at the moment =P

If the "dark side" is darker then what it is right now, then I am all for the light pole! or just have factories emit light during the night cycle perhaps, if the whole let's stick lights on everything doesn't pan out. Just to give off more depth at night.

OH MY GOSH, DO THIS. I used to love light poles in the old Outpost 2 RTS.

I believe they gave a small speed buff at night to units in the lit-up area, just a thought.

What about having lights on wall pieces instead of or in addition to lightposts.

Robots need to use some kind of sensors, and visible light is a plenty useful kind of sensor to have. Can't do everything with radar. Really, it makes perfect sense for them to benefit from having plentiful lighting.

I like the idea of lit walls and/or really cheap buildable lamp posts.

YES TO ALL OF IT! Seriously I really want to see everything you mentioned in the final product. You'll probably never see this post though. :cry:

Great idea, especially if walls will be made a bit more, ahem "modern" in how they are built.
Such as from point to point, with a semi-smooth section between both end point towers.
I could definetly see some lights on that smooth section, or just the end points if need be.

For the realism junkies out there, just make up some BS lore reason why they have lights
"They are multispectrum scanners (infra-red, ultra-violet, x-ray and all between), hence a bit of the visible light spectrum is bleeding off for our pathetic human eyes to see."
or why not the all time classic
"Dat bling yo." :roll: :lol:



Seriously speaking though just food for thought, some have good points when bringing up stuff like "why would robots use lights or bridges on battleships". But all of these realism-concerns can easily be explained away. It's open to so much interpretation that there's not really a way to say for sure that either-or is more 'realistic' per say.

On the battleship bridge thing:
The thing is though, what's to say the battleship designs don't use the bridge-looking thing to house their entire cpu core or sensory databanks? For the same reason that humans put that stuff on the bridge, the rest of the ship is filled with weapons, armor and munitions. Them processors and memory units gotta be stored somewhere, right?

On the lights thing:
Again, who's to say that a simple side-effect of the technology being used, or rather the blueprints being used, do not also result in a bit of light. Perhaps it's a part of the reactor glowing, perhaps it's the guns or laser bank that's keeping a charge, perhaps it's simply a consequence of a type of sensor / radiation they emit to detect hostiles.
Heck, perhaps the 'camera' the player views the world through is specifically tuned to detect the emissions from the robots sensors, who says we're only seeing visible light?


The potential for sci-fi mumbojumbo to explain away anything is amazing.

+1 for bling