Plain and simple, please make lights light up their own fixtures and the wall its fixture is on. Directional lights will not look right unless secondary diffuse reflection of light is added to all objects in the game. Having double to triple the number of lights is having significant effects on my game performance to a degree that I can no longer leave lights on in nearby vacant rooms. This also unncesssarily increases in-game power consumption and decreases the available space for equipment and decoration placement.
Yes lights have been a problem ever since. Your idea could be the solution for everything inside rooms, simply make every surface (no matter if blocks, devices or characters) be as bright as it should be without having light sources being calculated around where they are and where they emit their lights. Would be easy in theory have a room, a light source and have the system check everything within the inner bounding box (just like O2 system) of a room be brightened up. Only problems i see is with light not in an enclosed room, such as spotlights and lights on the outside in general. Personally there are not much solutions for the "light problem" as the light eats performance like candy. Some say "just use less lights", but that solution only works on small builds or big builds with wide open spaces. I have one or two builds that need a lot more lights sadly due to its size and the fact that it contains many rooms. In fact one of my HVs is getting along wit 2 spotlights and 3 interior lights. And then i have a HV that needs over 40 interior lights to barely light up every room (not even to an optimum kind of level). Have this thing loaded up into a map and the sun going down and that thing will roast a couple of servers/computers by a simple press of a switch (literally). The engine calculating the lights in Unity might be good, but i fear for such an block building game with that scope and size there needs to be a solution that fits better. A more fitting system tailored exclusively for this game with all its features.
I don't have performance issues over lights. I have issues where I cannot see the light until I'm on top of it. I'd love a way to turn this distance up if you have a better PC. I added landing lights but it's no good because I can't zoom in enough to see them.
There are some serious issues with lights lately - not sure from when & where, and is it a some 'recurring hidden light bug' or 'Devs doing stuff in backstage', or something... but is it one of those things that comes & goes from version to version Of course some of it is connected with players PC config, and game settings. ATM there is a very high visual contrast with 'light zone' and with 'shadow zone' around light source, and lights (for me) works/looks best with lowest intensity and highest range. It was like that some time ago, then it was a (longish) period of working fine with all settings, and now its again a bit problematic. Other thing is a very steep performance drop with lights ON, but it is not a constant problem - it is more connected with specific POI or playfield. My current long game is a MP one, a some POIs are almost unplayable - the same one I visited in earlier games and they worked just fine! Drops are from 45fps to 10-12... It looks like there are some 'triggers' that make thing go bad, and number of light sources fills irrelevant (on nice desert planet where I have 60fps, I turn on 4-5 CV interior lights and it drops to 40... sometimes, and then sometimes it stays high). Things are a bit 'all over the place' with lights, so I believe that it will be fixed again... and then again... and it could not not be at all problem with lights but some temp. 'memory leak'
I do not believe a secondary diffuse relfection lighting system is realistically possible as rendering a single frame to that standard takes minutes in a home PC at the current technology level. The game calculating where the light is emitting from may not be a problem but certainly having them omnidirectional will dramatically decrease the number of lights needed and thus the performance issue therein.
I have had no issues with lots of lights but my friend did. We turned down his shadows 1 notch and his frame-rates increased dramatically.
Just to report that with new patch & reverse to previous lights settings I also don't have 'strange' problems I reported few days ago! I actually didn't noticed info on light-type change before (from 'point lights' to 'spotlights') when it happened and that's why I had such a confused reaction That was a big thing, both as performance hit for some of us and in visual quality with so much light/dark contrast - don't know, maybe all of that was looking & working good on some high-end machines...
Yeah, Im glad Eleon changed the lights back. They looked far worse and was hard for FPS, atleast for me. Much better now.
Yeah, especially since the specularity on the metal textures is still a bit too high.. but much less glare now... need to keep point lighting
lights do not cast shadows very realistically at all - which makes everything a tad flat. I want shadows.
