A few different things.

These are just a few related things I thought of recently.

First off, have you ever noticed that the alternating sides of blocks are lighter and darker? Even in pitch black darkness? And, since I don't understand how this makes sense in the first place, should we remove it?

And a semi-related question for the devs(primarily Frostbyte) about lighting: the other day I was reading the Redpower 2 thread, someone asked about making lambs brighter, and someone replied and said that doing so would require a, and I quote, "minor" change to the lighting engine that would make saves incompatible with vanilla. So, my question is if it really is a small change going from four to five bits for lighting, if there are any significant issues(barring slightly larger saves and increased ram usage(and possibly minor performance issues)), and, since we are allready mutilating half the game and saves are garunteed to not work with vanilla, could we do this?

The weird face lighting is something Minecraft has done for ages to simulate the sun hitting at different angles. First of all, I'm not sure where that type of lighting is enabled, and secondly, those subtle differences help to make faces stand out and keep the whole thing from turning into a homogenous mess. But thanks for reminding me about that. I had forgotten it was in there.

Changing light to 5 bits would screw up saves because sky and block lighting are packed two lighting values per byte. If you are going to increase the lighting range, might as well increase it to 255, as it would take up the same amount of space. If I could remake the lighting engine however I liked, I would leave the lighting ranges at 0-15 as they currently are, but sky light and block light would be on different scales entirely and merge the two together with HDR lighting. Sunlight would overpower any block lights, but at night and in areas where there is no sunlight, block light takes up the whole spectrum. It should be possible to approximate this simply by overwriting the lighting texture with the proper formula, depending on your environment, though shaders would still be required to complete the effect.

So long answer short, yes it would be possible to extend the range of light propagation, if that is the issue, but it won't actually appear "brighter" unless you are prepared to do some serious lighting work behind the scenes.

Crash course on HDR and other fun stuff.

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

The weird face lighting is something Minecraft has done for ages to simulate the sun hitting at different angles. First of all, I'm not sure where that type of lighting is enabled, and secondly, those subtle differences help to make faces stand out and keep the whole thing from turning into a homogenous mess. But thanks for reminding me about that. I had forgotten it was in there.

Changing light to 5 bits would screw up saves because sky and block lighting are packed two lighting values per byte. If you are going to increase the lighting range, might as well increase it to 255, as it would take up the same amount of space. If I could remake the lighting engine however I liked, I would leave the lighting ranges at 0-15 as they currently are, but sky light and block light would be on different scales entirely and merge the two together with HDR lighting. Sunlight would overpower any block lights, but at night and in areas where there is no sunlight, block light takes up the whole spectrum. It should be possible to approximate this simply by overwriting the lighting texture with the proper formula, depending on your environment, though shaders would still be required to complete the effect.

So long answer short, yes it would be possible to extend the range of light propagation, if that is the issue, but it won't actually appear "brighter" unless you are prepared to do some serious lighting work behind the scenes.

Sounds right, adding more brightness and not having it look shitty would require shaders or hdr, but one think doesn't make sense. You said BL and SL both individually use 2 bits, and if we increase them we might as well do it to 256. First of all, how do they use 2 bits but store 16 values? Its impossible to do that, and if they both need the same amount of bits, why 8(256) instead of 6(64)?

Huh? They use 4 bits. 2^4 = 16.
Packing 3 light values into 2 bytes can also be done, but is harder to read to and wouldn't save much space over 8 bit light values (which I wasn't actually suggesting).

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

Huh? They use 4 bits. 2^4 = 16.
Packing 3 light values into 2 bytes can also be done, but is harder to read to and wouldn't save much space over 8 bit light values (which I wasn't actually suggesting).

Oh, I misread it, sorry, thanks for explaining it though.