Powering of worldspace lighting assets

[restive sierra]

Streetlights are all over the place, lining roads and filling out car parks, while flood lights loom over ports, industrial parks and military bases alike.

A simple suggestion is to make it so that any lights within range of a generator or its powered network will also be considered to be powered and will turn on.

Besides being a neat cosmetic detail, it would make for a pretty immersive and distinctive way to visualise your presence on the map at a distance, with the added bonus of not requiring the player to go out of your way to place a bunch of decorative lights manually to enjoy it.

Image includes examples of various possible light sources, and an image of the Sentinel North bridge checkpoint which has active lighting effects ingame already, serving as a good example of how powered lights could look

[fierce bridge]

Hm, maybe there could even be a side objective to secure a power plant and turn on power again or smth, like a bonus for taking the initiative.

Regardless I love this idea

[pallid kite]

Performance reasons

[restive sierra]

Ive seperately considered the idea of both needing to supply power to civilian occupied buildings as a strategic resource objective, and regions with exclusive resources such as the powerplant island actually being a powerplant

I think both would be cool but they werent entitely related to this suggestion and I wasnt confident in having developed the ideas enough to suggest independently lol

[restive sierra]

tbf the only performance concern would be the lighting effects, and there could always be an adjustable graphical setting for them

the highest setting lights would look like that bridge checkpoint does in game now, while the lowest setting could essentially be the same as how powered buildings emit an area of bluish light in game already

[pallid kite]

I mean it’s just what they confirmed on why they haven’t did it . Dynamic shadows, and the lighting eat up the system . Thats why you can’t overlap lights

[restive sierra]

if the game cant handle it at scale thats fair enough, but tbf the lights on the bridge just use simple light hazes and dont cast dynamic shadows but still look pretty great, the faint blue lights of powered structures are even simpler yet would still be suitable for the intended effect since at night you can see the blue glow even when really zoomed out

[tired pendant]

We are hesitant towards ambient lighting for the city for GPU reasons

It might be possible in the future if Epic Games has a breakthrough on Dynamic Overlapping lights

[eager whale]

I still think that removing the brightness, 🔅 making it just explore the area, and turning up the darkness on the unexplored zones could be a good alternative