John Kabus has rolled into TGE 1.5 the several years worth of research, development, and QA he has put into the Torque Lighting Kit. John hasn't just merged the TLK into TGE 1.5, he has actually re-factored the lighting system so that it is cleaner and easier for people to use, and so that people can easily introduce their own custom lighting models. He has also added new features specific to TGE 1.5. Some of them include vastly improved interior rendering performance with dynamic lights, improved dynamic light blending on terrains, and updates to the TGE waterblock system to allow for terrains with block sizes smaller than TGE used to, allowing for higher geometry and texture detail.

Lighting Model

Enhanced lighting and rendering models create brighter and more vibrant worlds. Extended lighting intensity allows special effects such as overexposure and 'false' specular highlighting. Increased contrast creates more vivid and better defined lighting and shadows. Two per-light sub-models for creating 'sharp' (natural lighting) or 'smooth' (pseudo 'global' lighting) lighting. Interior lighting scale entity adds complex lighting detail to selected surfaces while maintaining optimal rendering and re-lighting performance.

Mission Lights

Mission light objects allow lighting to be edited in the missions editor without recompiling interiors. Mission lights also uniformly illuminate multiple interiors, DTS objects and terrain. Static light objects support omni and spotlight baked light mapping, which allows complex lighting and shadowing without impacting performance. Dynamic partlicle system light objects support flicker and flash effects that are directly related to a linked particle system's intensity. Enhanced interior dynamic lighting allows dynamic lights to illuminate dark interiors without washing out textures.

Semi Real-Time Light Editor

Light editor allows real-time editing of light object datablocks through a user friends GUI. You can view lighting changes in real-time on DTS objects and in semi real-time on interiors and terrain. Filtered re-lighting significantly increases lighting performance by only calculating interiors within the working area. Included are advanced tools for creating, editing and cloning light datablocks. Shared light datablocks allow powerful light grouping and simultaneous group light editing.

Static Objects

Static DTS objects cast shadows onto interiors and terrain. Powerful envirionmental lighting options including direct sunlight, interior/terrain light map and custom illumination. Advanced self-illumination adapts to environment for tighter integration of self-illuminated objects into the scene. Custom ambient lighting allows object lighting to be hand tuned for the special effects or complex scene lighting.