Say no to light!

[Legacy_henesua]

               Wow, that is interesting. Good work.

I am curious however as to what other than placeables uses the flare. My thinking is that a flare is appropriate in some circumstances and it would be worth while to use it strategically. In other engines for example I put a flare on the "sun". Anyway, I am curious how NWN uses this flare. If its just on your random placeable, I don't see any downside to this.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Pearls]

               nwn uses the flare for lots of spells in game, you would lose spell visual effects
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_WoC_Builder]

               

Tiberius_Morguhn wrote...

I poked around at this tonight and seemingly fixed it.  Exporting fx_flame01.mdl to text has a section defined for AuroraLight01.

node light AuroraLight01
  parent FX_FLAME01
  ambientonly 0
  shadow 1
  isdynamic 0
  affectdynamic 1
  lightpriority 4
  fadingLight 1
  flareradius 30
  texturenames zd
    fxpa_flare
  flaresizes zd
    3
  flarepositions zd
    1
  flarecolorshifts zd
       0.0000000    0.0000000    0.0000000
  position 0 0 0
  orientation 0 0 0 0
  radius 7
  shadowradius 5
  color 1 0.419608 0.419608
  shadowradius 15
  verticaldisplacement 2
endnode

Removing the 8 line blocks for the flare attributes and setting flareradius to 0 seemed to do the trick.  Simply setting flareradius to 0 only would crash the toolset.  The modified block for AuroraLight01 looks like this now and the whole mdl can but put in override:

node light AuroraLight01
  parent FX_FLAME01
  ambientonly 0
  shadow 1
  isdynamic 0
  affectdynamic 1
  lightpriority 4
  fadingLight 1
  flareradius 0
  position 0 0 0
  orientation 0 0 0 0
  radius 7
  shadowradius 5
  color 1 0.419608 0.419608
  shadowradius 15
  verticaldisplacement 2
endnode

which provides dynamic lights without the annoying flare like this:

Oh wow...this looks absolutely wonderful, and is a HUGE improvement to night visual with lights!  Thank you all for brainstorming and posting your work!!  '>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_WoC_Builder]

               A quick question though; what is this light that glows in the center of (in this case) a brazier?  This is what I thought was meant by flare too, but I seem to be mistaken.  This is the light you get even when the brazier is deactivated, as is the case with this particular brazier.

Tiberius, is the fix you provided in your first post in this thread the only way to address this particular issue?


               
               

               

                     Modifié par WoC_Builder, 22 décembre 2012 - 04:38 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Tiberius_Morguhn]

               

WoC_Builder wrote...

A quick question though; what is this light that glows in the center of (in this case) a brazier?  This is what I thought was meant by flare too, but I seem to be mistaken.  This is the light you get even when the brazier is deactivated, as is the case with this particular brazier.

Tiberius, is the fix you provided in your first post in this thread the only way to address this particular issue?

The fix I provided only addresses tiles that use the fx_flame01.mdl.  Placeables are their own models, so each one would need to be edited similarly to remove the flare effect.  My 1st post in this thread also addresses how to remove the flare on placeables via editing the placeables.2da file.  However, as noted, that also removes the placeables ability to generate light.  Best fix for the flare is to modify the base mdl as was done for fx_flame01.mdl and drop into override.  If I can get some time, I might dump out all mdls with light sources and put together a hak/override set with flares removed.....
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Master Jax]

               Well, I don't know about you, but I never liked the flare in any circumstance... which is why I wanted it gone. Besides, as far as I could tell, there's many different colored flares, so the spells using such wouldn't be affected. I think this one was specifically for fire effects of lighting and nothing more, but... well to each his own!
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_The Amethyst Dragon]

               Thanks, Tiberius_Morguhn.  I went ahead and made that little change to the model file for my PW, so my players will get the changed tileset flames when I give them an updated hak.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Just a ghost]

               It may be nice to make a download with those models. It's a bit of a waste of time to let everybody trace down those resources and fix them while the deed has already been done. Think of the nice new thingies you can make in the time gained!
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               I've looked into a handful of placeables, and can not find any references to the flare in their MDL files. Nor do the ones I looked at have a lightnode. I remembered that Project Q had some campfire placeables without the flare, and looked at those.

The only difference I can discern is that Project Q does not have a lightsource for its campfire in the 2da row. This makes sense since I had to add a light effect to the placeable to get the lighting I wanted when the campfire was burning.

I am by no means knowledgeable of NWN's art asset pipeline. But after looking at this I suspect that the 2da line is what needs to be edited rather than the MDL. Alternatively I suppose there might be a way to construct placeable animations to activate and deactivate a light node. But I don't know how to do that.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par henesua, 22 décembre 2012 - 02:12 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               <feeling positively...>

Master Jax wrote...
Well, I don't know about you, but I never liked the flare in any circumstance... which is why I wanted it gone. Besides, as far as I could tell, there's many different colored flares, so the spells using such wouldn't be affected. I think this one was specifically for fire effects of lighting and nothing more, but... well to each his own!

Allow me to disagree *slightly*. I would love the standard light without flare, but I would also love the flare effect for cutscenes - especially in flashback/dream sequences - and other places where I want the player to get an enhanced feeling of unreality or "something strange".

<...dreamy>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Master Jax]

               Aaaaand I have confirmed what Pearls said! The texture obscuring override does affect spells, so it is a no-no. Sigh... -__-  And as I mentioned earlier, placeables don't have flare or aurora light values, so, either they use the same values with a different name, or work differently altogether.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tiberius_Morguhn]

               I'm going to dig into this - as noted earlier and confirmed by others, the change to placeables.2da does fix the flare but removes the light generation.  I'll try to add in a light node without the flare similar to the tileset node to produce a 'hybrid' model so to speak.  I think the engine takes the placeables.2da value and slaps a light node on internally since no flare/light node references are made in any particular placeables mdl file.  Stay tuned.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               

Tiberius_Morguhn wrote...

I'm going to dig into this - as noted earlier and confirmed by others, the change to placeables.2da does fix the flare but removes the light generation.  I'll try to add in a light node without the flare similar to the tileset node to produce a 'hybrid' model so to speak.  I think the engine takes the placeables.2da value and slaps a light node on internally since no flare/light node references are made in any particular placeables mdl file.  Stay tuned.

Sound great, Tiberius.

Also, if it doesn't work. You can always change the model type to tile. '>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_WoC_Builder]

               

Tiberius_Morguhn wrote...

I'm going to dig into this - as noted earlier and confirmed by others, the change to placeables.2da does fix the flare but removes the light generation.  I'll try to add in a light node without the flare similar to the tileset node to produce a 'hybrid' model so to speak.  I think the engine takes the placeables.2da value and slaps a light node on internally since no flare/light node references are made in any particular placeables mdl file.  Stay tuned.

Thank you.  '>  While I will put your tile flare edit into our mod with a hak update, if you can figure out how to fix placeable flare that would be a huge thing for our world as well.  I have always found it annoying to turn of the placeable light but still have this annoying glow present. 
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Master Jax]

               Sounds interesting Tiberius! I hope your efforts meet success! I concur with what most have said here, and such would be a  breakthrough!