Luminous Blocks

[RyGuyver]

Been playing around with the Luminous Blocks and thinking they'd be a lot more useful if, besides their luminous effect. they'd actually illuminate surrounding blocks/objects as the other light fixtures do. I was hoping to use them to create custom light fixtures, like light bars and panels, but this doesn't seem to be possible.

[AlphaGodith]

did you try increasing their brightness? probably isn't enough, but it's definitely been discussed a lot before. basically there were concerns about insane performance issues.

[Draven Crow]

I second this, I'd like to see the light blocks be made useful, perhaps design them in a way that it doesn't create an issue for the game, make them light an area just not so much that they cause the PC to crash or melt the video card. It's a thought.

[Kaeru Gaman]

I think a mayor problem for this is the amount of light sources. a light source is a completely different object than any surface polygon. giving a LS to each and every block with a luminous surface would outcount the LS queue quick, maybe resulting in near torches having no LS anymore.

but I also think creating custom lighting objects would be nice. perhaps some extra lightsource without polygons could be added, so one could add a single lightsource to some self designed lamp 'prefab' no matter how many illuminating blocks are in it.

perhaps a point-sized object that represents by an icon that could be attached to any block. (its creation could cost a bunch of lightbulbs)

there still would be the problem to define wich blocks belong to the prefab so they cast no shadow.

so perhaps creating such objects should rather belong into the some external / the steam workshop instead of into the survival mode.

[red51]

Unfortunately luminous blocks indeed do not act as light source... as mentioned by @KaeruGaman, light sources are basically independent elements. Each light source has a certain impact on performance (while the luminous blocks are essentially "free" [more or less]).

Unity has limitations about how many lights can be rendered. The HDRP (the render pipeline we're using) can only render up to 64 lights per screen tile - this limit is quickly reached in RW. Once the limit is exceeded, you will notice visual artifacts ("blocky" rendering). The game tries to avoid that though by only rendering nearby lights.

But even if there was no such limitation in Unitys HDRP, having a light source per block would still quickly kill performance (considering complex buildings often consists of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of elements).

The real solution for this would be realtime "Global Illumination" - this would take indirect lights and emissive surfaces into account, so even a luminous block would illuminate the environment. Unfortunately there is still no realtime GI solution available in Unity (except Raytracing). They announced a realtime GI solution a few years ago, but then stopped working on it. Other engines like Godot and Unreal provide a good GI solution instead (e.g. "Lumen" in Unreal)...

However, we will add support for Raytracing in the future - this will also provide GI (but right now Raytracing still has a considerable performance overhead in Unity - and it would still require a Raytracing-compatible graphics card).

[RyGuyver]

Originally posted by red51:

Unfortunately luminous blocks indeed do not act as light source... as mentioned by @KaeruGaman, light sources are basically independent elements. Each light source has a certain impact on performance (while the luminous blocks are essentially "free" [more or less]).

Unity has limitations about how many lights can be rendered. The HDRP (the render pipeline we're using) can only render up to 64 lights per screen tile - this limit is quickly reached in RW. Once the limit is exceeded, you will notice visual artifacts ("blocky" rendering). The game tries to avoid that though by only rendering nearby lights.

But even if there was no such limitation in Unitys HDRP, having a light source per block would still quickly kill performance (considering complex buildings often consists of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of elements).

The real solution for this would be realtime "Global Illumination" - this would take indirect lights and emissive surfaces into account, so even a luminous block would illuminate the environment. Unfortunately there is still no realtime GI solution available in Unity (except Raytracing). They announced a realtime GI solution a few years ago, but then stopped working on it. Other engines like Godot and Unreal provide a good GI solution instead (e.g. "Lumen" in Unreal)...

However, we will add support for Raytracing in the future - this will also provide GI (but right now Raytracing still has a considerable performance overhead in Unity - and it would still require a Raytracing-compatible graphics card).

Thank you for your detailed response on this. I was going to mention that the game Satisfactory has an interesting implementation for allowing signs to illuminate the world and other objects via Lumen and Global Illumination and not have a extreme negative impact of performance, but that game is built in UE. Hopefully Unity's tech will progress over time and offer more options for you around all this. Cheers!

[Draven Crow]

Whatever works Red51, illuminated blocks could just provide as much light as most of the light sources in the game? Or better, options. Either way, it need not impact performance so whatever path works. I'd also like to see an image that can be transparent enough for light to illuminate or even a light block to make like those electronic signs sort of like what they did in Java, can that happen?

[♥ Deirdre ♥]

I have used some of these luminous street lamps on the server. However, the effect is not the best. Looks like light but is no light with a luminous circle. The further these lamps are away, the less it lights up. You can see them in the distance but they disappear the further away you go. Real object lamps are better but need more performance and you can use as many of the luminous stones as you want you will never get the same effect. A unity update would really be desirable.