FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

As some of you may or may not have noticed, areas that are not lit have very dark colors, but they are not truly pitch-black. This is easy to see with the stairs in the re-added dungeons as well as with strata generated by the darkage and technic mods. It should be possible to make areas that are not lit pitch-black. Any ideas how this could be done?

It depends on your screen.

On most screens with mediocre contrast (and/or high gamma), it is perfectly normal you'll see stuff in the dark.

On my desktop's screen, I can't see anything when there is no light. It looks better, but makes the game harder. ;)

Try decreasing brightness and/or increasing contrast of your screen.

Calinou wrote:It depends on your screen.

On most screens with mediocre contrast (and/or high gamma), it is perfectly normal you'll see stuff in the dark.

On my desktop's screen, I can't see anything when there is no light. It looks better, but makes the game harder. ;)

Try decreasing brightness and/or increasing contrast of your screen.

In some game engines, like Quake 3 Arena's, unlit areas that appear to be pitch-black actually are. Even if you increase the brightness to max, the areas that are pitch-black are still either that or a dark and solid shade of grey. Very dark colors that are not black do not look good on my monitor, so I have to have my brightness set a certain way.

Actually, I believe this is due to a bug. The nodes you are talking about are drawn using the "nodebox" draw type. Unless the node is also defined with the "light" paramtype, it is ALWAYS drawn with almost black texture lighting, even in full sunlight at high noon (that's the bug), so all the "nodebox" nodes you find currently will use the "light" paramtype. And the "light" paramtype makes the object glow in the dark (more or less depending on the value of the node's "param1" attribute).

Someone did confirm that the persistently dark node box lighting is a bug at one point. I'm not sure if the bug is being tracked or worked on though.

The lack of true pitch-black is due to a bug? Most interesting. I hope that the bug is eventually fixed, for even the game Manic Digger is capable of making unlit caves pitch-black. Blocks like clay, mese, and white wool are rather easy to see in areas that are supposed to have no light whatsoever.

Oh. Not sure about clay, mese, and wool. I do know the bug affects the stairs and some of the other nodes you were talking about, which use node boxes to have a non-cubic shape. The bug isn't what causes them to glow; it is what forces people to use the setting that causes them to glow.

Are there plans to fix any of these issues?

Inocudom wrote:The lack of true pitch-black is due to a bug? Most interesting. I hope that the bug is eventually fixed, for even the game Manic Digger is capable of making unlit caves pitch-black. Blocks like clay, mese, and white wool are rather easy to see in areas that are supposed to have no light whatsoever.

Just edit light.cpp(the first table), and change the 8 to a 0. Then recompile.

rarkenin wrote:

Inocudom wrote:The lack of true pitch-black is due to a bug? Most interesting. I hope that the bug is eventually fixed, for even the game Manic Digger is capable of making unlit caves pitch-black. Blocks like clay, mese, and white wool are rather easy to see in areas that are supposed to have no light whatsoever.

Just edit light.cpp(the first table), and change the 8 to a 0. Then recompile.

Does this make areas that are unlit pitch-black? If so, it might be possible to make a mod that does that.

Inocudom wrote:

rarkenin wrote:

Inocudom wrote:The lack of true pitch-black is due to a bug? Most interesting. I hope that the bug is eventually fixed, for even the game Manic Digger is capable of making unlit caves pitch-black. Blocks like clay, mese, and white wool are rather easy to see in areas that are supposed to have no light whatsoever.

Just edit light.cpp(the first table), and change the 8 to a 0. Then recompile.

Does this make areas that are unlit pitch-black? If so, it might be possible to make a mod that does that.

A mod can't do that since it requires source code changes.

This is how it works:
Each node has a light level from 0-14 IIRC. This is diminished by one with each node, and affected by light sources and the map.

In order to render an image, the client has a table of light levels to physical lumonisities. By changing the 8 to a 0, you are instructing the client to "render any nodes with light level of 0 using brightness 0 in the graphics system". If you were to change this to 255, it would be insanely bright.

Interesting. If the developers wanted to do so, this could be configured by means of the configuration file for Minetest (or made as an option.)