Lightmap Problems [Lamp Lights]

[Chemical Crush]

Hey Guys I'm having issues with 'small lights' on a map.

 

 

Lower Brightness

 

 

 

High Brightness

 

Here are the Settings for the light

 

It looks beautiful in BrowEdit, but ingame there are these awful green rings.  I'm not sure why and ive tried fiddling with the intensity, how high the bulb is, and everything I can think of but no matter how bright it is there I always see the green rings, sometimes when its bright I dont see them 'as much' but they are still obviously visable.  

 

Anything I can do to get rid of them?

Edited May 1, 2014 by Chemical Crush

[Sage]

 Hey Chem- Sorry to disappoint, but as far as I'm aware, this is simply a product of how lights are rendered in RO, which is not necessarily how they are displayed in Browedit. If you've played the game for a long time, you may not have noticed it on Gravity maps, but when you start making maps of your own, it becomes pretty easy to see! Here are some examples, from the Ayothaya and Glastheim dungeons.

 

The Problem:

http://i.imgur.com/1xoHg40.jpg Ayothaya Dungeon F2!

 

http://i.imgur.com/73ciS6I.jpg Glastheim Castle F2!

 

Oh no! Rings! While we can't solve the technical side of this problem without some major sourcecode tinkering (I think, anyway), we can draw peoples attention away from this through good map design!

 

An improvement!

The best way I find to do this is to avoid putting lights out in the open, with no variations in the ground texture or elevation to break up the rings. Laying down multiple lights unevenly is one way to do this. Take a look ingame at Comodo, and you'll see what I mean:

 

http://i.imgur.com/l2xSCNU.jpg Comodo's beach!

 

http://i.imgur.com/wS6k2qZ.jpg Something sort of similar I did! (Probably not the best example, but this map was made a year or two ago.)

 

If you have a lot of lights close together, their edges will blend and you'll be left with peanut shapes instead of rings! Which is... an improvement, I guess?

 

Textures!

The best solution to this problem may not be applicable to every map, but where you can do this, you should! It's easy to see the rings on a flat surface, or an open area with a single texture repeated. If you place down a more complicated texture, however, it can make the the rings almost impossible to see. Having textures that compliment a light source (Like a bright floor emitting light from itself) can also do wonders to make lights look better ingame. Here are some examples in a new map I'm putting together:

 

http://i.imgur.com/1LNGqmI.jpg Snazzy blues and greens!

 

http://i.imgur.com/dOpMqry.jpg The base of the Ferris Wheel is all elevated ground and walls, which I got a bit lucky with!

 

http://i.imgur.com/iMWsgGV.jpg A lit-up keyboard! If you look closely, you can also see a bit of that light-peanutting I mentioned before. Yes, that is the technical term from now on.

 

http://i.imgur.com/Ra47Vax.jpg Even Gravity does this! Endless Tower has many great examples of this, especially with the complex floor pattern at the top of the tower. (I'd screencap that but I forgot the map name.)

 

TL;DR: Can you get rid of the rings? No, but you can make people not notice them. Consider where your light source would be in this little world you're making, explore what you can do with varied textures, ground elevations and effects, and follow this rule of thumb that you might've already caught onto: Big lights tend to have bigger rings, and more intense lights tend to have more rings, but each ring is smaller.

 

As to why your lights are green? No idea! It looks like all your color values are set evenly, and I'll assume you haven't got any green in the map's ambient lighting either, so that's probably just a distortion product of RO's light rendering.

 

Hope that helps!

Edited May 2, 2014 by Sage

[Chemical Crush]

Thanks so much sage.  =]  I will definately try to do the multiple lights and see if that helps, if not then ill try to see about doing something else.  I never noticed it in RO cause I think I had my light maps off most of the time.  =[  But that was an interesting find!  Thanks for reading this and helpin me out.  D:  

[Angelisk]

May I say it also helped me out?

Sage get all of it u just did and insert in a tut! You have some ppl waiting for it, thank you for the nice explain.  

 

Also thank you C.C. for asking it, I was for a long time asking myself about it =o, in fact I didn't noticed the Gravity Maps were like it too.

Edited May 15, 2014 by Angelisk