Torque Lighting Kit 1.4 is now available

Hello TLK Community,

The Torque Lighting Kit 1.4 is now available! To download it go into your GarageGames account (select "My Account" from the top of the page), and select "download" for the "Synapse Gaming: Torque Lighting Kit for TGE".

The latest additions to the Torque Lighting Kit are:

-Interior detail mapping
-Multiple dynamic DTS shadows
-Mountable lights
-Faster relights
-All new documentation and modeling guides

For more info on these features check out the TLK release notes (packaged in the TLK 1.4 release). As always there were a ton of smaller features that went into this release.


One of the biggest updates is the improved lighting performance and new lighting profiles, which make mission editing far more efficient. Here is a small excerpt from the TLK 1.4 release notes regarding these features:

Quote:
Relight Profiles

TLK's lighting profiles speed up performance by reducing lighting accuracy. This is perfect for
calculating quick and dirty lighting on newly created interiors or for quickly tweaking light
objects. TLK has three lighting profiles; Production, Design, and Draft, which are selected
through the Light Editor using the menu item "Quality" and range from the highest to lowest
quality. The selected profile is persistent, so lighting performance can be boosted during the
relight that occurs on mission load.

TLK also allows shadow casting to be disabled globally, which increases performance
considerably. Shadow casting is toggled through the Light Editor using the menu item
"Quality" and is also persistent.

As an example of the performance gains when using these options the following chart shows
the relight times for an early and highly unoptimized version of the TGE Warzone demo.

[b]Profile    Shadows   Time (seconds)[/b]

Production    Enabled   115.7
Design        Enabled    45.6
Draft         Enabled    27.7
Production    Disabled   16.1
Design        Disabled   10.6
Draft         Disabled    9.6

These times were based on full relights. Using the same profile and shadow settings with
filtered relighting speeds up lighting even more.


Relight Performance Improvements

Scene relighting in the latest TLK update is more optimized than ever. The optimizations are
most noticeable in large levels with many lights.
As an example of the performance gain over TLK 1.3.5 the following chart shows the relight
times in 1.3.5 and 1.4 for an early and highly unoptimized version of the TGE Warzone demo.

[b]TLK Version Time (seconds)[/b]
1.3.5         669 (> 11 minutes)
1.4           116 (< 2 minutes)

These represent full relight times at the highest quality settings. As mentioned above
lowering the quality settings can reduce the full relight time to less than 10 seconds. Filtered
relighting can be used in addition to these settings to reduce the time even further.

Definitely check out the release notes for even more cool info!

-John