Annoying- While flying, Lights in Altis dont come on until you get close to them??

[CyberpunkDev 1]

Here is a video I recorded showing what I mean, at about 4 sec:

Can this be fixed? While flying a heli in Altis at night, lights on buildings in the town/city areas dont come on until you get really close to them, everything in the distance & even pretty close is like pitch black.

This totally kills the graphics for me, it seems almost like an engine glitch / problem and lights shouldnt be popping in like this. I could deal with it for an optimization purpose it if was further out in the distance, but they dont come on until you get so close its almost a joke..

For example if you fly around GTA 5 map at night the lights everywhere are visible very far and theres no "popping in" of lights

I tried messing with every graphics option & my game is on an ssd, great specd pc, so this has to be an engine problem, could possibly be changed by altering cfg's? Or is this how the current engine is suposed to be?

Edited October 27, 2014 by CyberpunkDev

[Gunter Severloh 4063]

Whats your view distance set to, under video?

[CyberpunkDev 1]

Whats your view distance set to, under video?

I set everything on max, just tried with the visibility sliders all the way to the max and the lights still didnt render any further, still very bad popping and dont show up until im close

I wouldnt post about it if it was a simple option I tried every single thing so I'm not sure if its fixable or if the engine is just this way...

[Gunter Severloh 4063]

Do you get the same issue when in a car or vehicle?

How about when your on foot do you see the lights in the distance?

I ask because it could be a bug with the helicopters, or that specific one you were flying in the video, have you tried other helicopters and got the same results?

Also no need to quote me my post is right above yours.

[CyberpunkDev 1]

It seems to happen with all the helis, either in editor or play/mp mode

Made another video flying above Aggelochori

At 10 seconds you can see how bad it is

[roberthammer 582]

I guess problem is with the RV engine - most likely it can't render those many lights in far distance , same with shadows

and this is why ArmA needs to revamp "again" those dynamic lights and for future add some Deferred lighting

GTA V really shows how it should be in modern games

Edited October 27, 2014 by RobertHammer

[CyberpunkDev 1]

Ah okay well thanks for the answers I was hoping maybe within some cfg's there could be a "maximum light per scene" or max lights in view variable that could be changed, setting it really high to stop this from happening, I guess that is not available to us and is deep within the engine code we cannot touch?

This along with short view distances on grass & closely popping foliage lod's are reasons that have kept me from entering the contest, I come from years of using unreal/unity engines and this engine just seems unacceptable to use for my projects

[CaptainAzimuth 714]

Ah okay well thanks for the answers I was hoping maybe within some cfg's there could be a "maximum light per scene" or max lights in view variable that could be changed, setting it really high to stop this from happening, I guess that is not available to us and is deep within the engine code we cannot touch?

This along with short view distances on grass & closely popping foliage lod's are reasons that have kept me from entering the contest, I come from years of using unreal/unity engines and this engine just seems unacceptable to use for my projects

... Ummm, you guys know this is easily fixed by putting your lights/Dynamic lighting on Ultra? You can see lots of lights on altos this way, of course, depending on your view distance too.

[St. Jimmy 272]

Number of the lights showing is limited. Sakura_Chan said that he was able to increase the number of lights so with a mod we might get more light in the future ;)

[CyberpunkDev 1]

... Ummm, you guys know this is easily fixed by putting your lights/Dynamic lighting on Ultra? You can see lots of lights on altos this way, of course, depending on your view distance too.

Like I said obviously I would set all my settings to ultra and as maximum as they can go before making a post like this, my dynamic lights were on ultra while recording the above videos as well as view distance

[das attorney 858]

You could play with this and see if it does anything for you.

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?177797-Ruin-your-copy-of-Arma-and-your-PC&highlight=ruin

[CyberpunkDev 1]

^I edited the cpp and repacked it to the mod and everything but it did not help

class DynamicLights {

class High {

value = 48; // 12

to be 48 which is much higher

so unfortunately that does not really fix the issue, the dynamic light increase did not affect the actual point lights that are in the cities, it only affects the lighting of the already in view point lights (not increasing the actual number of point lights in view)

Any other way I can increase the actual number of lights in view at night? This is so annoying and I cant even play this game at night with lights popping in everywhere, I really wanted to make some custom maps too

Edited October 30, 2014 by CyberpunkDev

[m1lkm8n 411]

If I'm not mistaken, and I need to experiment with my own houses, there is a setting in the reflector class you can set the limit for how far away the lights will show.

[CyberpunkDev 1]

Really? Where exactly can I find this reflector class? How can I go about changing this limit?

[CyberpunkDev 1]

251 days later and this issue still exists? There is no way to get the lights to render further at night time and not pop in only when you get really close? No settings or configs can help, there must be a way!

[Defunkt 431]

251 days later and this issue still exists?

And you are... disbelieving? Outraged? All games are imperfect or approximate representations of the setting they try to realise. There will always be compromises required to fit into an available performance or monetary budget. Did you actually imagine 251 days ago that all you would have to do is flag one such compromise that you didn't like and it would be magically fixed to your satisfaction in a couple of months?

[Grumpy Old Man 3546]

Don't know what OP is up to,

lights seem to be fine here.

12k view distance

12k object distance

Everything else on ultra

Vanilla A3

http://i.imgur.com/oXI5Lzm.png?1 (350 kB)

Town below is Zaros, to the upper right is Therisa at 3km distance.

You can even see the Airport lights.

So no idea where OPs issue is, maybe some mods messing with stuff.

Cheers

[fareast 20]

It's the engine limitations..fly over kavala and see the light popping.. Then let the ai in ur little bird shoot u'll see blinking street light..dev limit it so it doesn't tank fps much...with dx12 we might see thousands of light source without much performance hit

[CyberpunkDev 1]

Did you actually imagine 251 days ago that all you would have to do is flag one such compromise that you didn't like and it would be magically fixed to your satisfaction in a couple of months?

This is a huge top rendering issue on an engine level which should be addressed over anything else since it is such an obvious visual impairment of the engine. Currently its the only reason why I'm using unreal engine 4 & unity instead of modding arma3.

(Well that and the having no control over the popping of clutter as well. Should be able to alter the values of lod distance to make the smoothness of foliage better too. These are both issues that are actually pretty easy to implement which could make the engine way better instead of waiting for Arma 4, especially to prepare for the new map coming out)

Don't know what OP is up to,

lights seem to be fine here.

12k view distance

12k object distance

Everything else on ultra

Vanilla A3

So no idea where OPs issue is, maybe some mods messing with stuff.

No mods, same settings, but did you even watch my videos? I can see the same view distance in your pic but there are a TON of other lights that just randomly pop in, also many lights just go away stop lighting even when you are right above them! I have 2 machines both with nvidia & radeon with every possible setting / config.

If you flew around at night in a heli you would see the issue not sure if you were stationary or in camera mode

It's the engine limitations..fly over kavala and see the light popping.. Then let the ai in ur little bird shoot u'll see blinking street light..dev limit it so it doesn't tank fps much...with dx12 we might see thousands of light source without much performance hit

Yeah thats what I'm seeing, it is a limitation that doesnt have to exist though, it seems like its just an over-ride so people dont shoot their FPS way down. I mean in other engines just setting the render distance of dynamic/area lights and choosing how many can be seen at once is just 2 values. It is typically an unlimited amount until you start going into single digit fps.

There must be an over-ride that a dev can put in to allow more, or even a mod that nobodys done yet?

Also I can stand to lose like 30 more fps with my gpu's/pc's so thats more than enough to get even triple the amount of lights to avoid this issue almost alot then I can use a texture technique like GTA does to simulate a whole city of lights further away and have the realtime dynamic ones fade in. But currently they just pop in only when your close so its pretty nasty.

Edited July 8, 2015 by CyberpunkDev

[thefinn 3]

I get this issue too op don't worry.

[CyberpunkDev 1]

I get this issue too op don't worry.

I worried 251 days ago, now I see it probably wont be fixed, unless a dev happens to see this thread or someone can make a mod that allows it :(

[domokun 515]

I worried 251 days ago, now I see it probably wont be fixed, unless a dev happens to see this thread or someone can make a mod that allows it :(

If you want BIS to fix something in A3, then log a ticket with bug tracker. http://feedback.arma3.com/

Currently 6000+ bugs have been logged.

BIS therefore have to prioritise which of these 6000+ bugs they have to fix.

If you want they to fix your bug before someone else's then you need to:

a) create a good ticket (with repro procedure),

b) get more votes (get your friends and fellow armaholics to vote for it)

c) send BIS beer (beware most are Czech so they're epicureans)

Hope that helps

[CyberpunkDev 1]

This isnt a bug its a rendering feature for the engine to be exposed better but thanks anyways

[domokun 515]

This isnt a bug its a rendering feature for the engine to be exposed better but thanks anyways

If it's a feature then don't expect it to get fixed.

Only bugs get fixed.

Features get applause. :P

[CaptainAzimuth 714]

Well, i don't have this problem, my lights and dynamic lights are both on Ultra. I can see lights at night from far away in a jet at high altitude, as long as my view distance allows. However, i believe there's still a set limit to lights, which does need a fix.

Lights, and view distance are two things that need to be Engine side overhauled. In the case of lights, there shouldn't be a limit to light. It's not as bad as it used to be in Alpha, so i suppose the tech is there to have unlimited light sources without too much impact on the gameplay. I could be wrong though.