Power outage

[karapus78]

Is it possible to turn off electricity in the selected city after the destruction of an electrical substation (for example)? In the game)

[razo+r]

No. 

[upyr1]

 

9 hours ago, razo+r said:

No. 

this needs to be added then

[MAXsenna]

14 minutes ago, upyr1 said:

 

this needs to be added then

When we get dynamic lighting. 

[Ducksen]

I have requested this before. I want this feature. Not knowing ANYTHING of the coding involved. I would hope to be able to draw a zone and say turn off city lights in zone.

That would be nice for WW2 and for modern.

Say you have a mission to strike a transformer. And when the bomb hits you trigger a power outage ine the0 zone(s). Boom, then black.

Would be nice.

[cfrag]

4 hours ago, Ducksen said:

Boom, then black.

I'd love that as well.

Currently, night lighting in most maps is (for performance reasons) merely 'painted' on the map (using special textures). So the terrain looks lit, but does really light things up, it does not eat up performance in light/shadow calculations. Try in in Senaki Kolkhi: place your cold/dark aircraft under a floodlight on the tarmac, and enter the cockpit. No light inside from the flood lights. No real shadow on the ground, but the ground looks brightly lit. This works well for most fixed-wing planes who move fast and high, but can be really frustrating for whirly-drivers flying low and slow. 

To implement your idea, I guess a selective, alternate 'dark' texture for a specific region could suffice, but it is a very specific change with only a few applications and would need to be applied throughout the entire map. For WWII maps, where blackouts were ordered for cities, it could make a lot of sense. 

I hope that when more lighting options become available with newer versions, the situation will improve; blacking out whole sections of populated areas will still have to rely on textures until we get GPUs that can quickly process thousands of simultaneous real light sources (I think we are currently at around 20)

[draconus]

On 8/28/2022 at 12:37 PM, Ducksen said:

Not knowing ANYTHING of the coding involved.

Currently it is done like that: Objects that turn on the "lights" (lightpoles, buildings, etc. plus the lit ground under them) just spawn another texture and light glow point when near the sunset and get rid of it after sunrise, like cfrag said.

Now, to depend on the power source, they need additional argument added. Then the map will have to be updated with database which will connect each object dependency on power station and power line - which will now need destruction model and their own DB as they connect areas with objects to the power stations. The DB can be created by map coordinates or zones like in ME. When all this is done the game loop will check for the light pole:

- is it after sunset and before sunrise?

- yes? so, is the right power station on/intact? (can be off by a trigger or destroyed)

- yes? so, is the right power line intact? (can be destroyed)

- yes? Let there be light!

Any time answer is no - there is no "light" added.

I might have complicated it a bit with powerlines but I see no reason to leave it behind when implementing power outage.

[Ducksen]

2 hours ago, draconus said:

Now, to depend on the power source, they need additional argument added. Then the map will have to be updated with database which will connect each object dependency on power station and power line

 

Well, no. We as mission creators can just make that happen our selves if we can do it by zone. All we need is to be able to deactivate lighting within a zone.
We set up a trigger that is when bomb in zone then turn off lights. We have that today, but not the "turn off lights" part.
If we can turn off all lights in a zone we are there. That is what is needed. Can it be done? weeelll that is is another discussion all together.

[draconus]

6 hours ago, Ducksen said:

Can it be done?

I just explained that it can but the "lights" need new argument added and new function to ME.