Khas Advanced Lighting v4.2 Ultra (now with real-time shadows!)

Is there a way to bypass the plugin when showing Battle Animations?

Hey, seems like there is a bug with the size property if you use version 4.0.

Hello @Khas

It is very nice to see realtime shadows, brilliant work from you.

Anyway, because I am using bigger actors (who can go behind objects) I unfortunatelly have strange behaviour I can hardly deal with :(.

This is how it looks when actor is behind wall. So he standing on region tag 26.



I need it to work this way:



Any option to deal with it? I would love to use realtime shadows, maps look superb with it. But this is real immersion breaker....

EDIT: As it is an issue only in South part of light I tried use paralel event to switch full light circle PNG with half circle PNG every time I am in "partially behind wall" position, but it is not smooth transition between both images and do not look good.
I think I am stuck with my options. The right way would be plugin update which would consider if tileset object is a layer above actor and is cover it. Or terrain tag wit "allwayz block light" option. But I think it is big deal as @Khas is not active anymore and I am probably only one needed such feature :(.

Anyway - I would be gratefull for any advice or help with this issue.

Hey Khas,
I've a question regarding the performance of your lightning plugin since I don't know exactly how it works. For the record I'm using the 3.1 (lightweight) version. I've noticed that on my computer (which is a typical office laptop from ~2014 with no REAL graphic card, see below), just turning your advanced lightning ON with "ambient_light 15" gives me drastic lag spikes that drops my FPS from a somewhat stable 60 to 15-20 (for less than half a second each time, but still). This is without any actual light sources at all.

I'm well aware that my laptop is crap and I can't play most games in my steam library (tried to play Worms W.M.D the other day, didn't work). So the performance might not be an issue for most potential customers, and in that case that's fine I guess. But I'm mainly asking because I'm also using your Advanced fog plugin and it does not impact performance AT ALL (which I'm very grateful for btw)!
Also I imagine that a part of the market for RM games might be people who don't own good computers (like me...:kaocry:) and for the sake of those people I'm trying to make my game as lightweight as possible.
As a side-note, is there any settings or restrictions in particular you'd recommend for better performance with your Advanced Lightning plugin? Custom Blending ON/OFF? Any specific light source (such as torches?) that are more demanding than the others etc?

For the record my computer have:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4210U CPU @ 1.7GHz 2.40 GHz
Intel(R) HD Graphics Family :kaoswt2:
8 GB RAM (can't remember what type, but it's probably pretty old)
...and an SD Hard drive.

Thanks for taking your time!

Been testing out 4.0 Ultra and having these problems with a black map with random lights then it loads. Also some maps play up and have to get back into them to load up right example map is only 29x27 so any advice would be great :)

3.1 : No problems at all...


Kind regards

dragon1up

@Ally implementing game logic is the user's responsibility. I can only provide help with the available commands :)
And it's possible to use only multiples of 10 (so you can combine regions with the same "height")

@Hyouryuu-Na did you update your MV recently? It looks like your pixi.js is out of date.

@Kirika unfortunately there's no way to do that :(

@annatar nope :/

@Nicke could you elaborate on that? I can't do much without information.

@Kilitar this is expected behavior, since the algorithm is similar to the VX Ace version. I wanted to do something different for MV, but its engine won't use Z-Buffering and I can't do much without it. I know this might sound frustrating, but there's complex geometry behind shadow generation and my plugin has to simplify it to make it work.

However, a workaround would be to use a light with an offset (-25 on the Y axis).

@Parallax Panda good question! Both my plugins (lighting and fog) have the GPU to handle all the heavy stuff. This means the CPU is free to process a lot of events and game logic, but it also means that you need a somewhat good graphics card. The bottleneck could be either the shader (a small program run in your graphics card to apply lighting in the whole screen), or the blending, but a more in depth analysis would be needed.

I say my plugin is lightweight based on tests with a dedicated video card (your computer has an on-board video card) and also based on tests comparing my lighting plugin with the other options for MV (and it's incredibly faster).

Are these spikes happening with both plugins ON? Would you mind turning Fog OFF and then checking the performance? And how does the demo perform? Perhaps you could even try running the 4.0 version.

@dragon1up interesting. Could you record a video of it happening? Or maybe send me a demo.

Yes yes yes :D

Literally a test video of what happens for 4.0 but when testing the demo, this never occurs. Also did copy and paste enemy lighting from version 4.0 which was this line : SetEnemyLight 1 blue 20 -80 to version 3.1 but it didn't really work but the actor line worked fine for 3.1 except the second actor. Which I have taken screenshots for.

Kind regards

dragon1up

Does this work with the Time Fantasy tileset? Would like to use it.

@Khas , I am using 32pixel Y offset but it does not work, when actor is behind obstacles it still shine over...
a_candle: {
fileName: "candle",
intensity: 80, variation: 20,
offset_x: 0, offset_y: -32
},

EDIT: Strange - in case of EVENT - it works perfectly with offset.
in case of Actor - it does not work with offset

EDIT2: Strange even more. It works now in both cases. Dunno why it did not work before.

@Kilitar i actually use same settings as you and i managed to solve it by altering a little how top tile off wall drop shadowcasters(i use only Khas_SCFB instead of full set of shadowcasters). You need to alter script for thet.

@Khas i actually managed to achieve black square overlay above all lights, i just use black tile size square image as tile light and permanently changed blending mode of all tile lights(well... i practically sacrificed tile lights for thet option but this works perfect even with time system) would be great to have blending option in light parameters.

PS i got bug with size property to... to be precise size property do nothing at all (no scaling at all).
override
this.scale.x = size;
this.scale.y = size;
in Sprite_Light.prototype.setSize = function(size) with fixed number effect nothing to.

@Khas I haven't updated it to the latest version yet... which I should do now. Thanks for pointing it out!

A needed scenario I need to event: I have a map where a main room has a side room that is in darkness. I want the actor to open a door, and once he goes through, the Ambient Light goes down to 10 or less, and he turns on an lantern that shines for about 3 squares all around. Of course, it reverses when he leaves this area.

Any help in this will be greatly appreciated.

@Khas

I've done some extensive testing and I get 10 seconds of decent FPS, then a lag-spike that freezes the game for half a second after which the game then catches up with the game logic resulting in the player being "teleported" 1-2 tiles ahead of where you were. Then it's back to 10 seconds of decent FPS again and everything repeats itself. It's almost like clockwork although sometimes a lag-spike happens before 10 seconds have passed.

I tried all different versions of your lightning plugin available (2.1, 3.0, 3.1 and 4.0 ULTRA) and the performance is just about the same (the 2.1 release had lag spikes every ~6-7th second instead of every ~10th second. Also the 4.0 version took a little longer to load on initial startup).

During these tests I turned off all other plugins that I'm using (including your AdvancedFog). It didn't affect the performance in any significant way though.

Is there a demo? I'm sorry but I couldn't find it in your master file. In it is only "AdvancedFog", "AdvancedLightning", "Core", "Graphics" & "Hint-System"? If there is a DEMO I'd like to try that too, just in case.

But besides all that. Since your lightning plugin is clearly the only thing that is pushing the system requirements in my game (and probably most other peoples games too, at least in terms of graphics card) since RM games usually don't require much. Would you consider giving a helping hand in pinpointing the minimum system requirements for this specific plugin? I believe that this is something that would be mostly useful for those thinking about publishing on STEAM (which might not be too many, but still).

I'm not making any demands or anything, just kindly asking since I'm aware that this sort of thing is on the developer to find out and each game still needs testing. But as the one who made the plugin and know it's inner workings, your opinion would be greatly appreciated.

So, if you have time would you consider; OS, Processor, Memory, graphics card as well as maybe Direct X version requirements (for this plugin). If possible, for both 3.1 and 4.0 ULTRA since I imagine there is a big difference.:kaoswt:

Thank you very much for taking your time and reading it all!:kaoluv:

is it only me or after new update (MV 1.5.1) Khas Advanced Lighting v4.0 wont work ('Cannot read property "length" of undefined' on start new game) ?

I'm also getting the same error as @Kirika with the 1.5.1 update:
The title screen loads up as normal, but once I select "new game" it throws this error.
Turning off KhasAdvancedLighting, KhasHintSystem, KhasGraphics, and KhasAdvancedFog (since it depends on KhasGraphics) stops the error from occurring.

And with Khas retired from making/developing this script, this really creates a problem. Maybe somebody would volunteer to fix this problem.

@GameFire : Go to your KhasUltraLighting or KhasAdvancedLighting and inside there is a function called Graphics._createRenderer. Replace it with this:

That seems to work, but I have my own problem:

As of right now, the plugins will treat anyregion beyond 10 as a wall in accords to blocking light. It treats regions 11-19 as if it were region 10, for example. This is okay if you're only using regions 1-9 for important stuff. Unfortunately I have more plug-ins that use regions, and I'll be needing more than nine of them. I'd like this plugin (Khas Ultra Lighting) only to look at regions that are in the 10s (10, 20, 30, 40, and so on) to create shadows, and leave the others be.

Sorry for my bad english,
Well, the main problem of your solution is in case, when you can reach ramp you were bellow before (using stairs or ladder) - which is pretty common. Light is blocked in both cases, not only if you near wall but if you near edge of ramp as well. You also might want more types of region in each floor (not only one - 10/20/30/40)

To put it simple, look at this picture


In other case If 10 regions for each floor is not is not enough - why you dont change Khas math inside plugin?
As I read it, the responsible part is "var h = Math.floor(this.regionId(x, y) / 10) * 2;" in KhasUltraLightning.js file
I would try to replace it by var "h = Math.floor(this.regionId(x, y) / 20) * 2;" (did not tested it, but should work)
This way you should get 20 regions instead of 10 for each floor (0-19 floor one, 20-39 floor two etc..)