Is it really true that the amount of dynamic lights is limited to 8 displayed at the same time?

Further, is it true that map entities, such as doors,lifts etc, arent affected by dynamic lights?

If so, how should it be possible to create a realistic looking game using the A6 engine?

Is it really true that the amount of dynamic lights is limited to 8 displayed at the same time?


yes, you can thank Microsoft and thier Direct X for that. nothing to do with engine

is it true that map entities, such as doors,lifts etc, arn't affected by dynamic lights?

yes and no. they are effected by dynamic flat lighting


how should it be possible to create a realistic looking game using the A6 engine?

just like its done in any other engine. planning and learning your tools and learning problem solving methodologies.

Thanks for your answer, Grimber!

You say its a DirectX limit of 8 simultanous dynamic lights?

Could you tell me the difference between "normal" and flat dynamic light and if its possible to simulate a players torch or flashlight affecting geometry as well as map entities?

I don't know, but if you plan on using shaders in your game, you could use a per-pixel lightning shader.

Correct me if I am wrong and you might want to take a look at the shader forum.

Greetings

The 8-dynamic light limitation is actually a HARDWARE limitation, so you can thank your video card developers as well .

with shaders (at least with the higher versions) you don't have the 8 light limitation anymore. it's just a fixed function limitation.

Sorry, but it dont makes sense to me that ALL video cards are limited to 8 dynamic (hardware) lights.

Thanks for the hint for using shaders, but can they help me creating a "Thief"-like environment? Imagine a room with, lets say, 10 torches, casting (dynamic) light and the player is able to extinguish the flames to make the room completely dark. Possible in A6 or not?

possible, but you have to know how to program shaders and you need a very fast gpu.



btw. i think the 8 light limitation means that you are limited to 8 lights per rendered surface. 3dgs is limited to 8 dynamic lights per level though because the light management system which can find the nearest lights of a surface isn't done yet.

The hardware limit of 8 seems strict, but really its not like that. The current A6 engine does lighting all in one pass, and only 8 light positions for the whole scene are passed for rendering.. there are ways around this, and if you look on the A6 forcast page, they mention a new light management system in the works. This will, i believe, get around the 8 light limit by calculating 8 lights per vertex or entity .. what this means is, rarely will you have more than 8 lights affecting one vertex.. so if you calculate light positions for n number of lights, you can also somehow stick a tag on each vertex that says which lights affect it. So while each entity can't be lit by more than 8 lights, you could theoretically have an unlimited number of lights on the screen at one time.

This is of course one way around the limit, the otehr is through vertex/pixel shaders as mentioned before. But frankly, calculating more than 8 or so lights per vertex in any method is slow and requires multiple passes. Basically this light limit is not a real problem, just needs some imagination to get around.

In any case, remember that you can as many lights as you want, just cant have more than 8 on at one time, so you can have a script that turns off lights when they are a certain distance fomr the camera.

Thanks all for the valuable help!