Skip lighting ?

#1 Hi Orion,

Are you using the Torque Lighting Kit?

The Torque Lighting Kit's content creation workflow is designed for maximum efficiency. The latest TLK (version 1.4, now available!), allows you to change the lighting and shadow quality, so relighting the mission takes only a few seconds, easily getting through the lighting phase and into the your game.

You can also tell TLK to only relight the objects you're working with, ignoring the rest of the mission, allowing you to see your changes instantaneously.

Overall these and TLK's other lighting tools and features make mission creation and editing in Torque extremely fast and easy.

-John

#2 Hi John, thanks for replying.

Yes, we are using the TLK 1.3 with TGE 1.3.

That sounds ideal,
How do i do this setting the lighting & shadow quality ?

I don't see anything blindingly obvious in client/prefs.cs..

edit:
ohh wait, do you mean Only TLK 1.4 provides this ?
that would be a bit of a bummer. Does TLK 1.4 work with TGE 1.3 without too much trouble ?

#3 Hi Orion,

The partial relights (only relighting the objects you're working on) is in TLK 1.3 and up. The lighting quality tools are in TLK 1.4.

Probably the easiest thing to do is to download the latest TLK and take a quick look at it (the lighting and shadow quality tools are in the Lighting Editor under the Quality menu) to get a feel for the new tools. Then follow the awesome new Developer's Guide on how to upgrade. If you have any questions just ask in the Torque Lighting Kit private forums and I'll be glad to help! :)

-John

#4 Hi John -
if i could continue this discussion here for a bit,
i'm not sure we're talking about the same thing.

My situation is that say i make some non-lighting change to the mission file,
like adding or modifying a trigger,
and then want to restart the client.

During startup, it's going to relight everything, which since i first posted the delay has now grown to ten minutes. (release build on a 3.2GHz machine!)

ooooh heh.

i could just note the name of the lighting file,
abort the client,
and copy the old lighting file into the new one.
.. actually, that doesn't work. somebody must be doing checksums.


okay, but hackery aside,
are you saying i can use the lighting pack to toggle some sort of "do full relight" versus "do deeply minimal relight" during client startup ? that would be great.

#5 I guess you'd like to turn off the automatic lighting.

#6 Hi Orion,

Turning automatic lighting off is an option, though it can get flaky when scene changes are made (especially in a multi-system team environment).


Overall TLK 1.4 is much faster than TGE. For instance I was testing relight times using an early and an unoptimized version of the WarZone demo, which took 11 minutes to relight - in TLK 1.4 it takes less than 2 minutes for a full relight. Using partial relights and adjusting the quality makes it even faster.

Here's a quick rundown of the lighting quality settings; when you load up a level (even a small test mission), you can open up the Light Editor and set the Quality options to higher (more accurate) or lower (faster). The settings are persistent (saved between missions), so you can then load any other mission and the same settings will apply (even on the relight during mission load).

The quality settings themselves explain their common useage; Production (highest quality for seeing what the level will look like to the end user), Design (medium quality used while adjusting lights and objects), Draft (lowest quality for super fast relights like lighting a newly created interior).

Going back to the WarZone example; setting the lighting to the lowest level took the relight time from 2 minutes down to 9 seconds - using partial relights would make that even faster.

-John