Finding out that you're near the dark side of an asteroid by running into it kind of sucks. Perhaps having floodlights on the ships so that within a certain reasonable distance, you could see in the dark would be sane? It would also help navigate around some of the more obfuscated stations.

Give us some dark, hollowed out asteroids to play in and this could be really cool.

Are there really areas that dark? Maybe turn up your gamma a little.

Throwing mobile light sources into the game engine is a really bad idea. That's one of the hardest things to do in games, the knew UT 3 engine is the first engine (there are no games using it yet) that does it well without a dumb fake, which generally looks bad if the light is not coming from you perspective (making it not work for MMO games). If the devs have already coded in some mobile light sources, GREAT! Let's see them, but more likely this is an impossible request.

Actually, the Doom3 engine is the first one that has truly dynamic light sources. The Unreal3 engine will also feature them. But this engine does not.

To my knowledge, the game currently uses vertex lighting, which is basically a quicker way of rendering light without killing framerates. I have a feeling that you'd need a high-end system to render all those asteroids with detail lighting etc. Perhaps it might be added later for people who have high-end systems. As for mobile lighting... yeah it might be a problem when you have dozens of ships flying around pointing these lights at asteroids.

Anyway, to some extent I agree that it would be nice to have flood lights of some sort in the front of your ship, but I think the devs have been against it due to some of the mentioned constraints and more. The next best thing to do is to turn your gamma up, turn your backgrounds off, or to simply get used to it. I know it sounds like a dumb solution, but trust me it's not as big of a problem as you may think.

Roguelazer: That's not entirely true. There have been dynamic light sources in various games for quite a while; going back to Quake 1. There have also been several space combat games with dynamic lighting.

QUALITY of lighting, and whether you're doing per-pixel lighting, that's different. But dynamic lighting is not a new thing in the slightest.

Half-life had a flashlight. Also, it only has to render for the user, it's not really important for other people.

Keep in mind that 3D FPS titles have like a max of 32 players per game. Vendetta Online will eventually be populated with thousands of people. If you pack a high number of players into a sector with all these lights pointing in different directions and illuminating nearby asteroids and stations, it'll be a huge framerate killer.

octopus: But those mobile lights used pre-rendered lightmaps, didn't they? For real dynamic lighting, you can't cheat with lightmaps. :D

Roguelazer: We're talking about multiple types of rendering tech, here. Different techniques for different engines. :) Quake 1 didn't do it very well, but it all the way up to more current levels allowed arbitrary dynamic lights in arbitrary places. You got a better effect -- more immersion -- if you had a pre-planned light path, but it wasn't necessary. In-game weapons/effects could apply dynamic lights. This still applies to Doom3, as the only way to get -soft- shadows is to pre-calc the lightmap. Anything else will get hard shadows. And even Doom3's pre-calc'd lightmaps produce hard shadows on entities.

Shadowing is a different issue, but even Doom3 shows that in a current tech video game, lights and shadows are two completely unrelated things. :)

Eve has light sources of all sorts and it doesnt cause serious framerate problems. It doesnt have to volumeric light and it can have a fall off of like 300 meters. That way it can not be seen unless your close and will not affect frame rate. That is unless you have a ton of people all huddled around eachother. The light does not have to be visible. It only has to illuminate near by objects.