getting the sun direction

#1 Do you use Day/Night patch ??
Isn't it in atgeDayNight.h:

extern Point3F tgeDNCurrentColor;
extern Point3F tgeDNCurrentBandColor;
extern Sun* tgeDNSun;
extern Sun* tgeDNServerSun;
extern Point3F tgeDNSunVector;

Look at game/shapeBase.cc around line 2504 for shadow rendering too.

Cheers,
Adam

I'm thinking about making shadows for my trees too.

#2 oh, scary externs!

I don't use the ND patch yet.
I guess I will have to, but I wanted to write the code so that you could use it with the lates head, without adding all sorts of extra code.

*goes too look at the DN code*

Thanks for the tip Adam!

#3 I thought those variables were exposed on the sun object itself in the HEAD code..

#4 Hey Bendik,

I'm not using the fancy Day/Night cycles either!
So, in that regard, hope this helps.

I named my sun "ScorchedSun" for the Scorched mission you get with Torque.

If you name a datablock when it's created, you can simply ask for its information, such as:

ScorchedSun.dump();
      %pos = ScorchedSun.position;
      %rot = ScorchedSun.rotation;
      %dir = ScorchedSun.direction;
      %amb = ScorchedSun.ambient;
      
      echo("Pos: " @ %pos @ " Rot: " @ %rot);
      echo("Dir: " @ %dir @ " Amb: " @ %amb);

Put that in a function, and name your sun something, such as:

//The following is in the mission file

new Sun(ScorchedSun) {
      direction = "0 -0.941742 -0.336336";
      color = "0.988000 0.980000 0.883000 1.000000";
      ambient = "0.703000 0.844000 0.910000 1.000000";
         position = "0 0 0";
         rotation = "1 0 0 0";
         locked = "true";
         scale = "1 1 1";
   };

//End mission file

Hope this help :)

#5 Now that was exactly what I was looking for!
And this method can be applied to any other object in the game, I pressume!

A very nice tip indeed.

Thank you!

:)
Bendik

#6 Yep, and I bet it would be trivial to make this a tad more dynamic.

If you were dealing with something other than a Sun, for example a Wooden Crate, you may have several Wooden Crates sitting around, all with the same name, but each one would have a different object handle(a number).

There's a few ways you can get that object number, such as a raycast. In our sun example, if you used 1233(assuming 1233 is the object number for the sun), you could replace ScorchedSun with 1233 wherever you wanted.

Take a look in game, hit F11 and you'll see what I mean about the numbers. (Sorry if you already knew this )

:)

-Jared

#7 If you're looking for the light direction, I'd suggest looking through the code where it generates the lightmap for the terrain - it needs to know where the light is, so copy-paste :)