Migration doc

#1 Hi Paul,

The Migration Guide is now packaged up in the Lighting Pack 1.3.5 release (the current release), and is located in the main Lighting Pack / TGE folder. The latest Migration Guide is compatible with both versions 1.3 and 1.3.5 of the Lighting Pack, so you can download 1.3.5 for the guide and still use the 1.3 code if you want, but I do recommend using the 1.3.5 code because it has a ton of awesome new features and is solid as a rock.

Let me know if this helps!

-John

#2 God guys thanks for releasing this, it has seriously opened up new doors for us over at 11series. Were currently looking into redoing the collision code for non csg based geometry since the lighting pack does wonders with lighting meshes. If we get anywhere with it we will be most definatly releasing it as a resource for the people to use in conjunction with the lighting pack. I have to say I am thoroughly impressed. What features are you guys planning to roll out in version 1.4? Is there a link to this info?

#3 Hi Paul,

Sounds cool! TGE 1.4 allows an unlimited number of collision meshes per DTS object, I'm not sure if this is what you're shooting for, but it could help.

Hopefully I'll be releasing information on the 1.4 release in the coming weeks. The biggest change is the name; the Lighting Pack is becoming the Torque Lighting Kit to better fit into the GG product lineup (and because "pack" makes the product sound like it contains art assets instead of code :).

-John

#4 Just an inquiry, and I know you guys are probably keeping things under wrap but are you planning at any time to use stencil shadows? Because that would add an insane amount of depth I think to the lighting pack. I think theres already a resource out there for it. I was thinking it should be fairly simple because the dynamic lights are now driven by script so the stencil shadows can be cast by anything within a dynamic light, no?

Hmmm I may look into implementing that. Would you guys be interested in something like that? I mean hell if we get it working in our game, I don't see a reason I shouldn't just give it to you guys if you want it. Unless you already got it planned then I won't bother :)

#5 The stencil shadow resource only creates the stencil equivalent of TGE's existing projected shadows, which look good (referring to both types), but they cast shadows that have no real bearing on the surrounding lighting and so they really look the same.


True dynamic shadows definitely won't be added to the Lighting Pack for TGE. Unfortunately TGE is really not setup (from a pipeline perspective) to handle this - so even if an advanced dynamic shadow system is added to TGE it would still look basically the same as the existing dynamic shadows (back to the 'no real bearing on the surrounding lighting' problem :( ).

Of course the pipeline could be changed, but it would take some heavy changes to TGE and require multi-pass dynamic lighting on all object types (right now DTS objects benefit from an optimization that renders all of the dynamic lights in a single pass).

That's not to say you shouldn't take a crack at it - a better shadowing system would be very cool, and at the very least would make an awesome Lighting Pack resource (the GG site now supports product specific resources :).

#6 I can't find this migration guide for the life of me. Can someone give me a more definite directory location ?

example: "SynapseGaming\contentPacks\LightingPack\chrisisblind.txt")

I'm super excited to get this in :D

#7 Hi Chris,

It's only in the 1.3.5 release (but compatible with both 1.3.5 and 1.3), so you'll need to download that version if only for the guide.

-John