Light Limit?

[Spaz]

Hey guys,
Is there a limit on the number of lights that can be visible at one time?  I've got several cars running down a road, and they should all have headlights.  As you can see in the video, though, the lights flicker on and off in real goofy ways.  Sometimes a car will have no lights on, sometimes one light, and sometimes both lights.  I'm guessing it has to do with how many cars have been spawned that are trying to turn their lights on.

You can see the video here.  Watch headlights of the oncoming traffic.

[Ron]

Its limited by your graphics card. My card has a limit of 7 lights showing on a object at one time. You can check your limit by making a new blank flat terrain and then start adding lights until they start eliminating each other.

My work around was to split my object up. I used to have my track surface as one object. Now I have it split up into a Launch Pad, Track, Shutdown, Return Road and Pits.

[Spaz]

Thanks, Ron.  I'll see what kind of work-around I can find.

[Squat]

There's a chance the light limitation is per polygon instead of per object. I think I remember seeing that.

I don't think you should be using real lights for traffic headlights. Rather, i would use a muzzleflash object or polygon cone and use a faded texture set to additive. The player controlled car would be the only one using real ray casting lights.

This is another area where we could use projected images onto the surfaces of objects. Similar to decals, only that they are repositioned in real-time. I still believe this is a standard feature most prominantly put to use within the RTS genre (for troop selection icons and area attack previs markers).

[gekido]

most video cards don't support more than 8 lights (including the directional / sun light).  for headlights on a vehicle, what i would do is use the light corona and/or an actual 3d model 'cone' for the lights themselves.

To add a corona to your light, add the following line to your opr file:

LightCoronaTexture ../../../Lights/lightcorona.psd[/i]
LightCoronaRadius 1
LightCoronaColor 255 255 255 160

You can adjust the corona color to match your light color as well as the general size of the corona.