Discuss.

It'd be really sweet, but there's probably a reason why the devs haven't done this already. My bet: some gibberish about server lag and calculating point source locations.

Really though... flood lights on mining ships would be awesome.

Not sure how much it would be network-related. The client already knows the class, position, and orientation of all ships in the sector that are not occluded, so it already has the data it would need to compute the lighting locally. The only thing that would need additional network data is if you wanted occluded ships to still have their lights show up on roids that are not occluded.

Real world example: Burgler is shining a flashlight and you see the light or his shadow around a corner even though you can't see him.

That would be neat, but skipping it would be forgivable.

So I'd say the reason would probably be workload or performance related.

EDIT: I'm assuming the client doesn't know the position of occluded ships at all. If it does know, and just hides it from the user, then there would be no network reason not to also do occluded ship's lights.

I would presume that dynamic lighting is not currently within the game engine's capabilities. That said, only the devs would know how difficult it may be to add it. I mentioned projectors because they're another common work-around used by many game engines to simulate the effects of dynamic lighting.

While lights on mining ships would be kinda cool, the first things that came to mind for me, would be stuff like the glow of engines, or the flash of weapons fire/explosions illuminating rocks or stations, or other "static" objects.

Eye candy, but good candy. Might I add ship shadows when flying between the sun and a static object?

Tough to do in realtime...would kill the fps of many gpus

Perhaps it could be made optional.

Shadows on objects would be difficult... perhaps another projector job from the ships based on the sector and orientation... but it's all speculation as I don't really know what the game engine could or could not be made capable of.

Aye, having it optional should go without saying.

Yeah, I was thinking more along the lines of having weapons fire light up the surroundings, so you could shoot along the side of a ship and watch it glow, or fire down a crevice in a roid to see what's down there (nothing at the moment, but maybe in the future...). Used to use my fire spell that way in Oblivion to see down long hallways before I had night vision. I always thought it was neat.

And yeah, shadows would be awesome. Some miner's working at his roid, when suddenly he notices a shadow off to the side. He starts to turn, and BLAM, is no more.

Well, prox alerts, radar, and player-entered-sector messages kind of ruin that, but yeah... Would make a good trailer anyway :)