Artificial Sun

1st Official Post

    I was thinking since you already had lights, there should be an artificial sun with much longer range. I build big buildings, and there is no easy way to light up the whole interior. It could be powered electrically, and would have a much better light level than what currently exists in-game. Any thoughts on this?

    Couldn't you just use RP2 lamps or the slightly more complex IC2 Illuminators? There kind of has to be a demand for a unique thing to be added to the game for a suggestion to be added, and so far your idea, while an extension of a current in-game thing, is in my opinion still an in-game thing.

    Is the answer to this question no?


    Quote

    Hey don't take it so hard. Ignorance is part of this generation it seems. -the wise words of XFmax-o-l

    When i saw the title i thought some solar spammer wants a sun at night so he can produce solar energy 24/7 ee2 style.
    But it's just another luminator suggestion and as they are under a massive rework all luminator suggestions are blacklisted.

    • Official Post
    Quote from FenixR

    Range is fixed to 15 blocks from the source by the current lightning engine. And no the dev team will not rewrite the engine.

    Let's see what the new light engine changes bring us, maybe there's something you can do with that (hack-ish ways)
    I highly doubt they will (ever) change that, why would they even want to ;)

    Quote from imer

    Let's see what the new light engine changes bring us, maybe there's something you can do with that (hack-ish ways)
    I highly doubt they will (ever) change that, why would they even want to ;)


    They are also hackish ways to do so now like the post above yours show, theres also the yellow laser of the lasercraft mod.

    From my point of view, the problem is that MC’s lighting engine doesn’t support enough brightness values. Currently there are only 16 – for the whole range from darkest black to brightest light.
    It has been annoying me for a long time already, but I didn’t get to fixing it myself (or even write a feature request – maybe there are already some pending?) and won’t for at least two to three months. (And then I’ll have to learn modding first)
    Sure, 16 fits nicely into half a byte, but come on … have you never been in a desert and, instead of thinking “Aaargh, it’s burning my eyes!!”, thought “Meh, seems to be a bit cloudy *looks up* oh, it isn’t …”? (Applies to snowy landscapes, too)
    Having 16 shades is just not enough, if it was doubled (a big improvement) or quadrupled (even better), we probably wouldn’t have such problems. :)
    With 32 shades (equalling five bits*), the torch's light level could remain at its current value (or maybe boosted to 15-17), Lava could emit some amount around 23 to 25, glowstone would probably reside at 27 and finally sunlight would get intensity 31 (the maximum).
    Lamps would then emit above 21 at max brightness, I’d say. (These values are not yet fixed, at all, I’m just trying to imagine some plausible ones).
    Also, if spawn rate wasn’t dependant on light value, torches could be made darker instead (maybe only in percepted brightness, that means shifting the mapping around), as having dimly lit to dark mines seemes far more realistic to me.
    The previously mentioned shift of mapping of value to percepted brightness would probably be required anyways, because one will have to fill the new upper range with something.
    I currently don’t know how sunlight could be made to appear much brighter. In other games, I have seen some form of bloom shaders in deserts, which gave the sand an orange glow, which looked rather weird, so adding them is supposedly not the right thing to do. The only different approach which came to my mind would be just increasing the brightness of the displayed texture, which also won’t look that appealing, I think (adding a bit of white could work, nevertheless).
    *(in the current map format, the extra bit unfortunately can’t be shaved off anywhere, as far as I can tell, so it will need eight anyways)

    after byte (currently used) short follow, with 2 times more bits allocated.
    this means two times more memory req to store chunk object in memory.
    your suggestion not implementable without major side effects.

    Don’t forget that there is still some other data included in the save files ;)
    My proposal would only double the amount of space used for lighting data (not the one for the other stuff) and I was well aware thereof.
    Additionally, it would slow down lighting calculations where sunlight is cast into dark caves (for example) because MC would have to walk longer until the current value equals the one already there (in this case likely zero).

    Biggest issue with a lighting engine rework is that it would cause significantly larger amounts of lag, especially with redstone circutry which already causes nasty light update lag, which can in some cases cause crashing of the game.