A Guide to Dynamic Lighting

This is very good news thanks.
Regardless I will probably have this thread open whenever making maps until I learn it without needing the thread open.

 

Halo 4 Forge, Shadow Glitches In Depth And No Ram Waiting Time!! - YouTube
this is the video i made about it, it includes a link to this threat as well

 

Not so much like framerate or disco problems.

You can keep all of your original items. If you set enough of them to a 2 second delayed spawn it will bring your map back to under the breaking point without reducing the piece count. The items set to delayed spawn are not counted during the "GENERATING LIGHTING" thang. The items spawn during the 10 second countdown so there is no worry of nearby players affecting the spawn in. The only caveat is you can not do this with pieces within close proximity to items which show on radar like turrets and vehicles since this will cause the item to not spawn.

You must be careful when choosing which items to select for delayed spawn as they will be MUCH brighter than surrounding pieces, and will not cast a shadow. Floors on Erosion and nebula-side walls on Impact seem to work best by not looking artificially bright.

You can also use this technique to brighten up dark areas and to highlight select parts of the map.

 

Are station cores supposed to be very white? I'm not sure if I'm having lighting issues or not.

I built an enclosed map on Impact, used all base shields, shield doors, lights, majority extraction crates, and I do have some of the pieces that cause issues but not that many really. Rest of the map is building blocks, ramps, and some platforms. Plus I don't seem to have the issue with any other piece besides cores.

 

I only have 2 and TBH the only thing that looks odd is the base but I can live with that. Thanks for the info, I was about to tear my map apart to fix it LOL.

 

Is it safe to assume that these same "expensive" pieces will also be most likely to affect the framerate? Most of the maps on here, including mine, are unplayable in splitscreen.

 

i just wish you could turn lighting on or off if it is going to be this bad where you cant even use a select number of all pieces, weather they are being light med or heavy, on off switch for lighting in options would be better than some of the lighting glitches i have seen since forging with halo 4

 

Not necessarily. Lighting is only one factor in many different aspects of the rendering pipeline that will give you a performance hit. Technically, Halo 4's dynamic lighting implementation isn't truly dynamic lighting since all the shadows or lighting values are baked into individual forge pieces after generating lighting. An example of this is picking up a forge piece after you've generated lighting; you'll see that the object retains its shadows regardless of where you move it until you generate lighting again. so I think it's safe to say there isn't too much correlation with framerate drops and "dynamic" lighting.

 

Yes! Now I can break the dynamic lighting on Impact. Thank you so much! That map is way too dark for indoor maps!

 

I had forgotten that, thanks for the reminder. But even considering the "pre-baked" lighting, it makes sense to me that at least some of the high-poly count pieces that adversely affect the lighting would similarly affect the frame rate. The bigger and/or more detailed the geometry of the item would likely hinder both, in my opinion. Isn't that why different object have different values within forge, and why there exist more stringent restrictions for those items with more detail in the first place?

 

Yeah, there's no doubt the budget system in forge is in place in case of people using objects haphazardly, but it's mostly do to hardware limitations, i.e., likely game crash if you were to place everything available to you if there were no budget. I wouldn't use the budget system to depict how resource/performance expensive an object is going to be though. When judging an object for how it could affect game performance, you'd have to look beyond just poly distribution and at things like texel resolution, collision mesh complexity, LOD model distances, and a bunch of other technicals which you can't really know without documentation. But since none of this stuff is documented for halo, It'd be cool for someone with an xbox dev kit to pull up an FPS counter of some sort and make a structured list (such as this thread's) for which objects are more likely to cause framerate drops.

 

the devs implemented limits in forge to prevent use from making maps that would be too hard to handle for the 360?
but then, it would make more sense if the least taxing objects in term of processing power were only limited by budget, because once you run out of them, you have to rely on much more taxing objects.

 

This would be an amazing thing. If anyone with a devkit investigated optimizing framerates in Forge maps, we'd all be indebted.

 

if you break the budget and then delete objects to get back under the cap will the light effects kick in again?

 

i'm confused about the naturals... rocks.

Impact specifically....

Given that visually you can see the number of edges/vertices that a bridge piece has, but then if you look at a rock, it seems impossible to determine the complexity of the piece, I would have expected a rock to cost more lighting $ than it does.

Can you shed any light (lol) on why that is? I'm not saying it's wrong, just that I don't understand.

EDIT:
Also, why do you think that bridges such as Small and Large are $1 while while Medium and XLarge are $25?

Similar suff going on with the bridge inclines...

It would seem logical that they would all be the same, or that the inside edges of the longer bridge pieces would cost more due to having those little indents with detail on them.

Thanks

 

no that helped, thanks.

I have taken your findings and done some playing in impact with making 100 of each Impact item, such as the aforementioned Corridors and Ramps. Definitely confirms that Station Ramps are better to use. Same with 90deg sections.

Using Ramps and 90deg pieces as big walls is a useful option it appears, though, as I discovered with Ramp Bridges from the Inclines pallet, it is frustrating because you can't get the ramped pieces to line up perfectly flat as if they were not inclines because or instance, 25 deg is slightly inclined one way, and 26 deg is slightly inclined the other way.

On maps that need lots and lots of wall pieces, I've had to resort to using ramps so this is something I'll just need to get used to.

ANOTHER QUESTION: Can you explain what is happening when you get past the lighting budget limitations but the new pieces do seem to be casting shadows? Some inside surfaces seem to have the coloring off, but the shadows are still there.

Another thing I'm noticing is that there seems to be a shadow draw distance that may not always be the same for each type of object.