Problems with Building!

MrWhite

M
One Question, if I build a building with no windows, how can it be that it is still lightened up like a christmas tree? Shouldn't it be dark inside?
 

Wablamo0821

W
I guess I will answer your question two ways.

1) Yes, it should be dark inside.

2) It's a known "condition" and really the only way around this is by burying the building underground.
 

pink908

P
I've created a Dark Ride inside a big hall... I also covered the whole thing under the terrain... still during daytime its lightened up. I hope Frontier improves this so it realy is complete darkness.
 

Bullethead

Bullethead
MrWhite said:
One Question, if I build a building with no windows, how can it be that it is still lightened up like a christmas tree? Shouldn't it be dark inside?
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Ambient light penetrates everything except about 10m of dirt. So if you want a building dark inside, bury it that deep.
 

MrWhite

M
pink908 said:
I've created a Dark Ride inside a big hall... I also covered the whole thing under the terrain... still during daytime its lightened up. I hope Frontier improves this so it realy is complete darkness.
Click to expand...

I wanted to do the same thing. A Dark Ride with Lamps as Stars. Some Spaceships fighting, Explsions etc.
 

Bullethead

Bullethead
pink908 said:
I didnt know it has to be 10m :/ well i still hope they somehow improve this...
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I initially thought so myself but, after further thought, I've come think things are OK as they are. The way light, both ambient and artificial, penetrates walls and small amounts of dirt is actually very useful for every purpose except creating complete darkness. For instance, you can hide big, ugly floodlights by burying them just below the ground or by putting them in some peep-free void space of a building, and they still do their job. And also, you can exploit this property to make cool light and shadow effects in a dark ride. In fact, most of the spooky lighting in well-made dark rides relies on this property.

So all in all, I think having to bury dark rides at least 10m deep is a small price to pay for the many benefits of how things work now. 10m isn't really that far, just 2.5 stories of standard 4m-tall wall pieces. This is a pretty easy limit to work with.

Thus, rather than change how light works, I'd suggest changing how building parts (and probably art shapes, too) work. Add a toggle to them that you can set to make them impermeable to light. That way, we'd still have all the benefits of how things are now, but could optionally make specific buildings dark inside without having to bury them.
 

MrWhite

M
Bullethead said:
I
Thus, rather than change how light works, I'd suggest changing how building parts (and probably art shapes, too) work. Add a toggle to them that you can set to make them impermeable to light. That way, we'd still have all the benefits of how things are now, but could optionally make specific buildings dark inside without having to bury them.
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That would be the best. Or maybe only some Materials can impermeable to light. Would be great for the next Update.
 

AndyC1

A
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there's a technical reason why building pieces can't block out the light so it's unlikely that they'll be anything other than terrain which blocks light. The terrain geometry is built and stored in such a way that we can determine easily and quickly if a point is enclosed by terrain to the point where ambient light will not penetrate. The calculations required for building pieces to determine if they would remove the ambient light component aren't practical to perform and still maintain any kind of framerate.

It's unfortunate - we spent a bunch of time investigating possible ways to do this, but at the end of the day either locking the time of day to nighttime for the duration of your ride, setting your park opening hours to only be during the night or covering your ride with terrain are the best way around this.

Cheers

Andy
 

breezerHOG1

breezerHOG1
couldn't you give us an "invisible barrier" type of set piece that would act in the same manner as terrain, that we could manually place around walls or wherever else we wanted to block light?
 

jamesviago

jamesviago
Thanks Andy. There was a suggestion about players marking pieces as impenetrable to light. Is that no help re those calculations?

And if not...

I have an alternative idea: we can mark out a cuboid and nominate it as DARK. Anything inside that space gets no natural light.

Could that reduce the calculation issue? Detection of an object being inside a regular volume and not lighting it?

Edit: great minds think alike creaper?
 

MrAdrianSW

M
AndyC said:
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there's a technical reason why building pieces can't block out the light so it's unlikely that they'll be anything other than terrain which blocks light. The terrain geometry is built and stored in such a way that we can determine easily and quickly if a point is enclosed by terrain to the point where ambient light will not penetrate. The calculations required for building pieces to determine if they would remove the ambient light component aren't practical to perform and still maintain any kind of framerate.

It's unfortunate - we spent a bunch of time investigating possible ways to do this, but at the end of the day either locking the time of day to nighttime for the duration of your ride, setting your park opening hours to only be during the night or covering your ride with terrain are the best way around this.

Cheers

Andy
Click to expand...

I'm willing to bet one of the Devs is working on this in their spare time.. lol.
 

redrum

redrum
It's good to at least here from the devs on this topic, and at least now we know what we must work with going forward.

I've just tonight created an empty dark park and added to workshop for anyone to use as a base for large scale dark rides. Hope it helps, forum post about it over in community creations...

https://forums.planetcoaster.com/showthread.php/21481-Dark-Park-empty-enclosed-on-all-sides

I got tired of the manual effort involved in covering rides with terrain, or digging holes etc, it wasn't working with the ideas I had in mind. So I just bit the bullet and put the whole park under a roof with walls and completely dug out for more vertical space.
 
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