light culling on light objects is not only inconsistent between light items, but also very harsh for clients.
Example shown here as a client of someone’s condo:
4 Likes
still happens as of [1.1.2.1]
Any news on it?
There’s two things going on here and it’s specifically due to how large the map is and how dynamic lights work.
Large environments are always a challenge in games, but with Tower everything is dynamic so it’s even more of a challenge.
For one, dynamic lights have a draw distance built in, so if they are far away from your camera position, they’ll start to fade out. This helps performance significantly.
The second thing is network distance, or net relevancy. This is also handled based on distance, so the further you are as a client, the items start to cease to exist as they are no longer relevant due to being far away.
You can fix the net distance issue by making them always relevant, but that will cause performance issues if you do it for just every condo, so this would have to be done as a case-by-case, like we do when making the game ourselves.
Fading out the dynamic lights is also an adjustable value, but shouldn’t be something increased overall by default.
Unfortunately this means these values would have to be somehow exposed to the condo editor to resolve this specific issue.
The thing is that this never happened before, the light culling used to be WAY less intense.
When I’m in the Gnome Home condo, it literally takes MINUTES for the lights to load in when I’m RIGHT next to them, just because I moved to a new area.
That’s because we made changes to the light distances and networking distances for optimization reasons, it helped significantly for the majority of condos, but doesn’t work for very large environments.
Are there any plans in the future (near or far) to have some kind of way to customize this culling distance? I think the culling is pretty intense even for smaller projects.
2 Likes