StarMade: It's Pretty Much Minecraft in Space

[trunk_slamchest]

so ive been playing alot of StarMade over the last couple days and decided to do a short commentary for it:

figured i would post it here.

 

[Vegeta897]

Kinda dumb that only specific light objects give off light, despite most of those textures being lit-up buttons and displays. Would make the game look a lot cooler if it had light-emitting textures. Even Half-Life had this.

 

[trunk_slamchest]

the power banks emit an ambient green light onto all the blocks around it, kind of like half life. i havent gotten into the upper levels of the game though, so im also guessing other blocks emit ambient light as well. there is block and skin editor bundled with the game, so id imagine you could easily make panels emit light as long as you can make transparent pixels.

 

[Vegeta897]

I'm looking at your video. One of the first rooms you're in has plenty of blocks with lit-up things on them that aren't actually emitting light.

 

[trunk_slamchest]

i know the only things emitting light in the cabin are the two area lights, and the line of power units on the top right. the only other light source is the sun. all the panels are just coloured pixels, but i get what youre saying about them not emitting light.

what im saying is you could put a light source within a cube, the like area lights i have in the cabin, then have the pixel's transparency control what pixels are emitting light, effectively making the buttons and panels emit light.

 

[Vegeta897]

That sounds like a really round-about way of doing it, not to mention take up tons of resources. The engine would have to change the color and intensity of each ray of light as it passes through each pixel in the texture.

I'm guessing Minecraft doesn't have texture-based lighting in its engine, so it probably wouldn't be possible for a mod to implement it. But ideally, each texture could have a "light map" that tells each pixel on the texture how bright it should glow (if at all) and what color.

Having all those different colored lights in a room would look really neat.

 

[trunk_slamchest]

thats what i came up with an alternative way of doing it. light cubes are already put in the game to emit light on ships, the only difference from that is that the decorative panels are used alot more than the light blocks, which inevitably sucks out more resources. that tells me if a server is suppose to support massive ships with possibly 100's of lights on each ship, resources might not be an issue.

techincally if all the block animations are is a slide show of pixels, you can just have the light source set at one variable and the pixels transparency and colour would dictate its power. if you set multiple light sources to a block you can have different buttons emit different colours. just like a stencil. pixel transparency has already been done with the glass blocks and all it would be down to is manipulating pixels rather than manipulating the light source.

the block editor allows you to add light sources to cubes so you can essentially use the skin and block editor to do it like i proposed, though you may be right.

like you said, i doubt minecraft/starmade have light/bump maps. theyre essentially lambert shaders.