Headlights

Give vehicles headlights that turn on when you activate your flashlight. This feature would be useful on a few current maps and potential future maps with dark areas (or even day and night) and also adds another coolness factor to the game which could increase its appeal to new players (ever so slightly).

Pros:
-Allows tanks to see where they are driving in dark places (like in tunnels, caves, and under structures).
-Kinda cool

Cons:
-Makes stickies harder to place if attacked head on due to being illuminated.

Alternatives:
-Allow the flashlight to be shown from the driver's seat, but make it more powerful (like a spotlight)

ARGUMENTS SUCH AS "WASTE OF TIME" ARE NOT VALID.

 

You can already do that. Press G, go inside the vehicle.

 

there is a problem with that though, that flashlight is so weak, it can hardly be seen on anything other than a wall if you drive right up to it. it cannot even be seen on the ground. the alternative I'm talking about would have it visable on a wall four to five times as far away. thats why I underlined more powerful in the first post.

 

Not to mention it's hacky and essentially a bug.

 

I like it. Would open for better night maps.

 

I like it unless it inspires more excessively dark maps.

 

Dark maps can be good too, with gameplay specificly designed around light/darkness.
Imagine that your team fights over usual Flags. Next to the flags are also spotlights, that illuminate the area. They can be turned on/off by a switch, destroyed completely. This creates for some new tactics and strategies.
Between the lit outposts, people use flashlights and vehicle headlights.
Scouts with hide would be totally fucking OP, if the map has some grass for them to hide in too.

 

All dark maps are stupid, because you can always increase your monitor brightness to maximum to see more.
And with maximum brightness the brighter part of the map looks shitty.

But I like the idea of vehicle flashlight. We don't really need them, but it will surely look good.

Maybe we can extend this to turn lights, brake light (and all the other light from normal cars).

 

Whoever does that fails anyway. I can see just fine on dark maps without even touching my monitor brightness.

 

Why doesn't anyone make a quick night map, parent a few dynamic lights to the CVs, then show us wether it's worth it? Hell, with the new vehicle spawn entities, you could possibly dynamically parent new lights to them as they spawn.

 

Turrets would need some kind of blinking light or flashlight to avoid becoming killing machines because people can't see them.

As well as this, buildings would need some floodlight style illumination.

A yes/no option in the emp_info_params "Is the map dark?" would be nice. Either that or light switches.

 

Dynamic flashlights can be a major pain to code up properly. Anyone have experience with this in the Source Engine? I know we have the built-in player flashlight, but that doesn't illuminate too much, and I'd imagine headlights are much brighter and over a larger region.

Also, as mentioned, relying on dark regions can really mess with things because people will start setting gamma and brightness to max to see further in.

 

I don't think source can really handle that many dynamic lights, not even the vertex shading point lights it's had since the start.

Maybe if episode 3 adds dynamic lights in on a larger scale it would be possible, but right now it would lag like hell.

 

so far, I hear very little opposition to this idea, only discussion as to how to go about doing it. In short, from my observations, this is a widely accepted idea and is worth posting on the "Organize stuff" thread. After more people post here, I will post this on said thread.

 

If it causes lag it isn't worth it.

 

it shouldn't cause anymore lag than it does now I think, but I'm no expert.

 

You could try using fake dynamic lights, where a model with the headlight effect on it is parented onto the vehicle, or added as a submodel to the turret/body model, and then use a fake texture like the flashlight texture to illuminate the ground, where it only really adds bright spots through the texture itself.

This can be done in a map just as easily, so if you want to check it out, just build a simple version of it, parent it to the CV, then drive around with it.

You'll need code support to project the texture onto the ground correctly, so that part won't show properly on uneven terrain, unless there's a way to do so in a map, but that requires experimentation.

 

That would be an env_projectedtexture and it would still cause lag, I don't know why, but they do lag rather badly whenever I've used them.

 

Yeah that's the problem , that and BE that have dark uniform in the dark are really hard to see.

 

Excellent point.

However, I have noticed that different maps sometimes have different uniforms. a new uniform could be introduced for dark maps in order to make things more fair.