Lighting is far too dim.

[BoogieMan]

I think most light sources do not cast enough light. You can put light sources inside your house but they're basically cosmetic and don't really light beyond the wall they are on.

[Oga]

I personally prefer the light range to be small.
Since lighting causes exponential resource usage when the range increases making it reach too farm would result in more lagginess.
Especially with the hundreds of lights that would pop on every night

[BoogieMan]

Originally posted by Oga:

I personally prefer the light range to be small.
Since lighting causes exponential resource usage when the range increases making it reach too farm would result in more lagginess.
Especially with the hundreds of lights that would pop on every night

I don't see the point in having light sources that aren't actual light sources.

The game isn't demanding, at ultra it's glassy smooth. And there are settings for lower end systems. Light sourcing isn't as demanding as it used to be, and the game can be designed so only lights near the player get the extra processing required. There are ways to make it work without issue. Most games do.

[Oga]

As stated above, this is my personal opinion and you're free to disagree with me.
Let me explain my point of view tho,

The game isn't too demanding because the devs took many negative performance triggers in to account while setting limits.

That said, depending on the engine, I agree with your statement.
But when on this engine and running dynamic lights, even on tougher rigs, there's a huge performance impact.
If we would go static to reduce performance impact we run in to the issue of max overlap (4 static sources iirc) or suffer weird visual issues.

So for the case described, without going in depth, lets say we grab the 320 light sources currently in my village and in render range, if we give them a 50 meter radius for example and decide to ignore the visual issues caused by overlap.
Every shadow cast has to be calculated many times and at high frequency, there is no way that will not result into to a performance bottleneck on any rig currently available.

My assumption is that many people playing the game do not want to worry about what choices will impact their performance, I know I don't want too, and thus I favor the lower range.

[Lailantie]

Though I didn't ask that question, I am very happy with the answer. I never thought about it that way, thank you Oga.

[BoogieMan]

Originally posted by Oga:

As stated above, this is my personal opinion and you're free to disagree with me.
Let me explain my point of view tho,

The game isn't too demanding because the devs took many negative performance triggers in to account while setting limits.

That said, depending on the engine, I agree with your statement.
But when on this engine and running dynamic lights, even on tougher rigs, there's a huge performance impact.
If we would go static to reduce performance impact we run in to the issue of max overlap (4 static sources iirc) or suffer weird visual issues.

So for the case described, without going in depth, lets say we grab the 320 light sources currently in my village and in render range, if we give them a 50 meter radius for example and decide to ignore the visual issues caused by overlap.
Every shadow cast has to be calculated many times and at high frequency, there is no way that will not result into to a performance bottleneck on any rig currently available.

My assumption is that many people playing the game do not want to worry about what choices will impact their performance, I know I don't want too, and thus I favor the lower range.

All I know is a great many games do real time lighting or fake it convincingly enough and it's not a problem, even with many light sources, and even moving light sources. It's not an insurmountable problem because it's commonplace and has been for quite a long time. It's actually more rare to see the simplistic lighting we have here.

[Oga]

Originally posted by BoogieMan:

All I know is a great many games do real time lighting or fake it convincingly enough and it's not a problem, even with many light sources, and even moving light sources. It's not an insurmountable problem because it's commonplace and has been for quite a long time. It's actually more rare to see the simplistic lighting we have here.

This is true, there's many games that do support it. (Moving lightsources take as much resources as any other dynamic ones btw.)
There's many games that support maps over 20x20km as well, but it simply won't work in the engine used for this game and that's what it all comes down too to be honest.
The game runs on a 10-year-old engine which comes with a lot of favorable outcomes like for example proven technology, well experienced devs, easier troubleshooting, well documented and known limitations and whatnot.

It all comes down to the choices made and the goal set to achieve with a game to pick the right engine for the job, because every choice brings limitations (positive ones and negative ones) one can't expect the same strong points everywhere.
Don't get me wrong, I do not say there isn't room for improvement, but I can't simply state the lightning as simplistic here either.

I guess we just have a different viewpoint on this matter and I'll stop bugging you with my opinion on it and leave the next comment(s) to those who better know what they are talking about than I do.