Horizons Planet lighting wrong in orbit - Multiple suns

[ravenstar68]

I'm out in the black exploring heading back from Colonia. I've come across a system that has a planet very close to two suns.

The locations of the suns mean that the planet should be fairly evenly lit on both sides. However as you approach the planet in supercruise, the side facing away from the planets parent side is in complete shadow.

It's only when you get down to the surface of the planet, that the lighting effect from the second star comes into play, and the surface becomes brilliantly lit as you'd expect.

This seems to suggest that when in at a distance, the light sourcing is modelled more on a single light source, rather than multiple ones. I'm not sure how much it would tax the GPU to model the light sourcing more realistically. But at the moment it does break the immersion a little.

I'll see if I can do a video later.

Tim

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

I'm out in the black exploring heading back from Colonia. I've come across a system that has a planet very close to two suns.

The locations of the suns mean that the planet should be fairly evenly lit on both sides. However as you approach the planet in supercruise, the side facing away from the planets parent side is in complete shadow.

It's only when you get down to the surface of the planet, that the lighting effect from the second star comes into play, and the surface becomes brilliantly lit as you'd expect.

This seems to suggest that when in at a distance, the light sourcing is modelled more on a single light source, rather than multiple ones. I'm not sure how much it would tax the GPU to model the light sourcing more realistically. But at the moment it does break the immersion a little.

I'll see if I can do a video later.

Tim

You are correct in saying that the game only models one major light source at a time - you notice this if you are travelling from one star to another star in the same system - at some point the light hitting your ship will jump from one to the other.

It's just how the graphical engine works at the moment - I'm sure I read a while back that maybe this will be altered in the future.

 

[Lightspeed]

I'm out in the black exploring heading back from Colonia. I've come across a system that has a planet very close to two suns.

The locations of the suns mean that the planet should be fairly evenly lit on both sides. However as you approach the planet in supercruise, the side facing away from the planets parent side is in complete shadow.

It's only when you get down to the surface of the planet, that the lighting effect from the second star comes into play, and the surface becomes brilliantly lit as you'd expect.

This seems to suggest that when in at a distance, the light sourcing is modelled more on a single light source, rather than multiple ones. I'm not sure how much it would tax the GPU to model the light sourcing more realistically. But at the moment it does break the immersion a little.

I'll see if I can do a video later.

Tim

It's a well known issue, acknowledged even by David Braben. Something that is on FD's future list of things to do that they won't get round to until we all upgrade to more powerful computers.

 

[ravenstar68]

I'd not been paying attention to it in the forums, thanks guys.

Not sure it would take that much extra computing power though.

 

[Shadowdancer]

Not sure it would take that much extra computing power though.

Lighting is, sadly, hard. Two light sources would roughly be twice-and-a-bit as expensive as one, and that's not where the in-game environments stop.

 

[CMDRhpid]

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[CMDRhpid]

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Additional accounts will result in all additional accounts to be terminated.

 

[Shadowdancer]

Forum rule 11

11) You are one person; you are allowed one forum account.

Additional accounts will result in all additional accounts to be terminated.

in this specific case when an object is lit from opposite directions, since you could omit calculations for the distant side for each light source. This, however, involves non-trivial culling (see for example one of the previous Battelfield games where it turned out that the "smart" solution for a similar problem ended up more expensive than just brute-forcing everything). In the general case, i.e., when a surface may be lit by anywhere between zero and "a lot" of light sources depending on the star system, you end up with a lighting and shadowing pass for each source, and you need to combine and level the result. This is never a free operation.