ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Simple idea. Makes no sense that when my wildfire mage ignites an entire room for radius 10 on fire, and it continues to burn, that I can't see anything. Fire by it's very definition involves light.

Basically, I want any persistant fire effects on the terrain to generate light radius X around them, for the duration of their existance. (1? 2 radius?)

It's not much of a buff for anyone, but it makes no sense that if the whole room is blazing with merry flames, that you can't see ANYTHING further then your own nose, because you're using a radius 2 lantern. And it would be nice that this draws attention to enemies (or you!) when you start setting things on fire. You'd be able to follow the trail of flames back to whatever high pyromancer throw a blast of fire at you, and actually see them. (And they you, conversely.)

Should be simple to do.

This is a great idea (says the Wildfire addict).

I will also suggest that creatures who are on fire ought to be treated as though they were holding a lamp.

I agree.

Also, Faeros and Shining Mold and probably others critters should have a lite radius.

I approve this idea, along with possibly colored lights. The next version seems to have all manner of neat shaders, why not have some colored light sources that can persist on the level?

This is a good idea, and there's already a mechanism in place that could accomplish the lighting changes and triggering NPC's actions.

As far as alerting NPC's to the player, a few questions need to be answered. If an NPC sees flames (or whatever) popup, what should it do? Run towards them (to maybe get burned)? Should they automatically know about the player (and where he/she is)? This seems like a kludge.

You also have to be careful not to impact game performance with this too much.

Performance is a concern, possibly. Light from flames should probably make npc's react the same way they would to seeing sudden sources of light anywhere else. If you can currently cast illuminate around a corner and they don't run towards the light source they can't see, then I see no reason to adapt further.

As for lighting concerns, I've never noticed lag when using illuminate, but things that block light, notably creeping shadows, or druids fog, can sometimes slow things down. Will this hold the same effect?

(For what it's worth, I want it even if it does, but I bring it up anyway.)

The simplest way to have the flames lite up part of the map requires a special function be specified that is rerun every turn (to make sure the area stays lit if something unlights it later). This would be a modest amount of extra work for the game.

NPC's don't currently do anything special in response to tiles getting lit, unless it allows them to spot the player. So, if NPC's don't have to do anything special (apart from responding to any damage), there would be no performance penalty for that.

NPCs wouldn't need to do anything special, regarding the light. This would already light up the player (or not, as the case may be), affecting visibility and automatically triggering the appropriate AI response based on that visibility. The extra processing power to light the areas would be comparable to using a sun rune, which illuminates the targets already. In other words, negligible. Honestly lighting enemies on fire and having them glow isn't really that difficult from a programming perspective since the Sun Infusion already does something similar, and would really just be the same thing, from a code standpoint, minus the blinding ability.

Crim, The Red Thunder wrote:As for lighting concerns, I've never noticed lag when using illuminate, but things that block light, notably creeping shadows, or druids fog, can sometimes slow things down. Will this hold the same effect?

Quite possibly, but then that just means there is more incentive to fix that minor bug.
What is happening is it is recalculating lite every time one of the los blocking entities is deleted, when it really only needs to wait til end of turn and do it once.

Fire lighting up an area I really could care less about, since Archmage is one of the few classes I don't play at all. But I have no reason to object to the idea, certainly. ...actually, does any class besides archmage actually have any persistent flame effects? I'm trying to think of one but not coming up with anything. Wyrmic's fire tree maybe?

However the bit about the faeros and shining molds and such having a light radius I very much approve of. Would love to see more enemy critters actually giving off light.

Hmmm... Maybe extend this for the burning status effect? (and burning shock and the like)

Wyrmics do. And lots of enemies with persistent flames on the ground, so this will impact you every time you meet them.

Gatewalker wrote:Fire lighting up an area I really could care less about, since Archmage is

Wyrmics may benefit more, since Wyrmics don't have access to Illuminate.

Cool. When I was playing Wyrmic I generally went Sand/Venom focus, so couldn't remember if they had a persistent fire. Hmm. Should get back to going for that wyrmic clear, actually.