Hello, I am trying to figure out if jME is the right engine I should use for a project that me and a few friends would be working on. We are looking to create a client for a post apocalyptic MMO, and we ran across this engine. Well in such a world, we will need the flexibility to have many light sources in cities, and other areas. But something worried us when we saw in the feature list:
"Handles up to eight lights at a time with utilities for optimal light selection."
Does anyone have more information on this 'limitation'; for example, does this mean 8 lights per level or 8 lights per scene? Any information would be greatly appreciated, thank you in advance :).
I believe it's more like 8 lights visible at any one time and is a limitation of OpenGL (and has been for a looong time) not of jME.
Eight lights is a lot of lights to have visible at any given moment. Bear in mind many of the lighting effects you see in current games are either some form of shader or texture trickery and not true light sources. I believe rendering with 8 true light sources would be pretty GPU intensive. Most games use a much smaller lighting budget I believe and get along just fine. And by smaller budget I mean they may have 128 lights defined in their scenegraph but they are planned so that only 3 or 4 are visible at any one time.
Thanks for the quick reply! Does this engine support pre-compiled static lighting? or are level designers forced to light their level through real-time lighting only?
What he said :lol:
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Yesod
Precompiled static lighting is created as lightmap textures by your tools and supported in the engine via texture combine. See the Quake level flythrough for example.