I'm making an outdoor scene which has a transition between day and night. I'm achieveing the transition by using 2 sky "spheres" which are huge spheres with normals flipped and which have day and night sky mappings as skin. To get the transition, i fade one out and fade in the other at evening and it looks okayish.

I have some foliage in the level which are .bmp sprites and the main outdoor element is a .hmp terrain. At night-time, i decrease their ambient (my.ambient-=2*time_step) so they become dark. It worked well so far.

Now i tried adding a few orange lights in the scene as lanterns at night-time. These are static lights. However these lanterns only light up the level 'blocks' and seem to have no effect on the foliage sprites or the terrain. The foliage is ok but it looks awful when the lanterns are lit and the terrain stays dark. I thought it was because of the '.ambient' but when i remove this line the lights still have no effect on the terrain.

Is there any way i can make a terrain that lights up in real-time? Any particular format i should save it in?

Static lights can not light up the foliage, better use dynamic lights for this. With A7 you can set the dynamic flag of the lights in WED. With A6 you have to create light emitting entities but that won't work well for lanterns due to the 8 lights limit of A6.

I might have another idea - it is a little bit noob-style, but how about changing the terrain at night? What I mean is: why don't you try to create another terrain-skin including the brighter spots for the laterns? You would just have to remove the "day-terrain" and switch to the "night-terrain" and vice versa. The only problem is that you have to know exactly where the laterns are before creating the night-skin for your terrain. But if you have A6, I don't see another solution because of the reasons Tobias mentioned.

Greetz!



Alan

If you do have to use dynamic lights for your terrain make it so that only the ones closest to the player arevisible to make it appear as if all the lights are on. This will get around the 8 lights problem as long as large areas are not visible at one time. You could also use a glowing BMP that makes it look like the lanterns are lit from a distance even though they are not lighting anything.