I have exactly the same problem, I recently started with 3dgs and I am working on a test level, I picked up the terrain HMP that comes with the demo, and throw in some torchs whose light flickers. The walls that holds the torches and some other objects (door arches) experience light/shadow effects, but the terrain remains unlit.

I even put a static light and guess what? terrain remains unaffected. And I must say that I get no error while building or running the level.

How would I be able to make my terrain react to light?

This might help: provided that you have some block geometry like a hollow box surrounding your level, make sure there is at leasr one static light with its range intersecting the block geometry somewhere in the level. The light can be dark and somewhere out of sight, but its colors have to be set above 32.

It has to do with the default setting used by the engine at startup, and was discussed in another thread. I'll try to find it.

cheers,
tindust

Thanks a lot tindust!

Now the terrain reacts to light, BUT, the whole terrain reacts to light, I mean, it doesn't matter the range, as long as the light intersects the terrain it will light up completely to the values specified by that light, which also looks strange.

Picture this scenario :

Starless and Moonless pitch black night, in front of an old castle which is lit only by torches. It would look strange that the grass is all lit and not just the areas where the torchs are.

to ilustrate the idea I just uploaded a picture :

http://www.hpnet.com.mx/3dgs/light.jpg

I put the torch too close to the ground to let you see what I mean. I let the terrain whit a 10,10,10 light to make it look dark.

See the wall well lit by the torch? it looks ok, but then when the wall meets the ground it looks strange.

I will appreciate any help on this subject

I'd like to take a look at that thread if you can find it, hopefully it's still floating around somewhere on the boards lol

I have a building that sits on my terrain, and it has a few lights inside of it that intersect with it's geometry but I tried placing one that intersected with the skybox as you mentioned and that didn't seem to help.

Perhaps it is because of the shader that IceX2 uses?

Thanks a lot for your help,

Here's the Thread I was referring too.

@ ReznorX. Are you using a shader? That may explain tha all-or-nothing behavior. depends on the shader. Try to turn it off if you use one & see what happens.

I know that IceX uses it's own multitexture shader for the terrain, so that must be why it's not working. Though I don't know enough about shaders to figure out how to fix this.

Have not worked with the IceX tool myself , but it seems there are some upgrade issues if you try to us it with the lastest 3DGS (6.5). If you use the lastes 3DGS you may have to wait with using IceX, and generate your terrains with the MED fo examaple. Just a thought.
cheers

I think you are right tindust. I just hope I don't have to wait too long for an update, cause I just bought it and it already doesn't work right.

Thanks a lot for all of your help, I really appreciate it.

a6 terrains and models detect dynamic lights by their vertices -- if none of the terrain's vertices are within the range of the light, it won't light up. and if they are, it will probably look jagged. that's just the way they work.

i hope this helps. i haven't had bad experiences with terrains and dynamic lights.

julz