how would I make a cog that changes the Extra Light on multiple faces of a 3do depending on whether or not that surface is facing a certain thing. (The thing would be the light source, but wouldn't emit any light in reality. So when a surface is facing it, it will illuminate the surface.)
I would edit the 3do file and make it prelit, but the thing will be rotating so I want it's lit faces to change based on it's rotation....

Three ways to do this:

• Gobally animated mats
• Changing the model (3d0) of the thing
• Changing the template of the thing

The problem is that you cant change properties of individual surfaces on a thing in cog, you can only change properties on the thing as a whole.

I may be mistaken, but I think Zeq added some cogs to the JKUP that let you do that. If not, then I know they are planned.

But yeah lexen, gbk is right.

Why not just have your thinglight emit light? Then let it be your light source. You'll have to have at least one light object in your level. Just make it really small, really weak, and in a corner somewhere out of the way. Then calculate lighting. From there on out, just adjust your thing light or the surface light of your 3dos.

It would help to know what you're trying to accomplish. You may be making it harder than what it needs to be. Just about any special effects technique you can think of has already been tried and we can give you advice based off what we've learned through past experience (so you don't have to go through the frustration of trial and error). We can tell you what works, what doesn't, and how you can get pretty darn close.

I've done this. OTS (see link in sig) was entirely lit with dynamic lights (thinglight). AFAIK it was the only released JK level lit this way. I learned quite a few things about JK's dynamic lighting in the process:

1) JK can only handle ~6-8 dynamic lights visible at once, any more and they all start to flicker. IIRC, thing lights not visible (out of range) do not count against this, but I could be wrong. IN any event, I had to write a cog to turn off lights in an area when the player left to prevent problems. Feel free to use any of the cogs in OTS.

2) JK only lights surfaces from its edges, so you'll have to cleave the smegging hell out each and every surface in your level to get them to take lighting well.

3) JK lights objects almost properly -- the side away from the light will be dimmer, but there are no shadows at all.

4) Dont think for a minute that you can use a single large thinglight to light a level - level architecture does not block dynamic lighting.

Also, you dont see dynamic lights themselves, only the effects they have on the level.

Friend14 beat you by about 5 months, I think.

There are some limitations. For purely outdoor areas, you can use 1 dynamic light (like I'm doing with my tatooine level). For interior areas, it really takes a combination of finely tuned dynamic, architectural lighting (especially if JK archi is used instead of 3do's), surface lighting (tweaks), and cleave light (or variation there of). You can even have dynamic colored lighting in JK by changing the sector tint.

It's unfortunate that JK's lighting was never fully appreciated when it was in it's prime. It tried to make a come back in 2002, but I think it has gone quietly into the night.

The Dynamic light limit is 32 lights in a level before everything starts to flicker.

Use a dynamic light flicker cog to fix this, you can find it on JKHub.

JK uses a depth-first search to decide visible sectors and things. I imagine this would be a list of the 'most visible' dynamic lights, which would essentially be a random set in situations with large numbers of them.

JK uses vertex color interpolation for lighting. As such, JK lights surfaces from the vertices.

Models are lit the same way levels are.

Not to mention that this is impossible, unless you write a cog to reset the large thinglight's sector to the current player's sector.

I don't get why people care so much about lighting JK levels. JK is not good at lighting, which is why the normal LEC levels use sector lighting except where the vertices were manually painted by the JK team. Personally I think it's a lot better than having random pitch black surfaces all over a level.

Because we're perfectionists... and when people do great lighting it's appreciated because it's hard to do.

Oh no, I can understand that, but what most editors consider great lighting disagrees with my sense of aesthetics. My wish is simply that people would go back to using original LEC-style understated lighting.

Well, at best you can get good enough lighting to hide some hideous mistakes you don't want to fix with some shadows >_>

I thought the lighter provided some really nice shadows.

Looks far better than those in games like Half-Life, heck, even Counter-Strike Source.