Lighting

Thanks. It works.

I got decent results with this:
LightColor 255 200 200
LgtIntensity 0.20

It makes a faint reddish ambient light. But it is not an even light - it seems to be weaker when the viewing direction is perpendicular to the sunlight direction, and stronger when looking at a ship with the sun behind it.

The ship models also reacts quite differently to ambient light. Some parts of some ships will light up like a bulp while other parts will be completely black. Some differences in the surface's ambient maps (or whatever it is called), I suppose.

Yeh, I noticed that too. The intensity of <fill> light seems to change depending on the viewing angle. Behaves like a directional light ... I think. At least I am sure it does not behave like the ambient lights I know.

First off:
What kind of performance hit are we looking at if we put floodlights on ships? That would give a seriously realistic and Alien-ish feel.

The problem is that the lights do not seem directional. You can add a reflective light, but it goes all directions. And because of the way shadows work, it gives some very odd effects. Lights shine through objects, to light surfaces on the far side. Which is fine for convex asteroids, but turns really wierd on the complex shapes of ships.

The light you are looking for can be found on the counter measures. I used to have some screen shots that demo'ed that idea around here someplace...

Well, the game is five years old. Back then there were extremely few games with fully dynamic shadowing. Actually, the earliest one that comes to mind is Severence: Blade of Darkness, back in early 2001.

-Ostsol

Well all this talk is over my head. If anyone could detail exactly what file, which entry, and what value I need to change to let me see a little better I would be appreciative. I like everything else... I would just like to see an object's darkside. I don't care to have the starfield back. Is there a global lighting value or something?

Apparently, you cannot make a global change. Instead, for each system find the file ..\mods\MS_Mod_Geog\geog\middle\<name_of_system>.lws

In this file, search for the text string "fill", and you will find this:
AddLight
LightName <fill>
ShowLight 1 7
LightMotion (unnamed)
9
1
0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1
0 0 0 0 0
EndBehavior 1
LightColor 255 255 255
LgtIntensity 0.005

Change LgtIntensity to a value between 0.000 and 1.000.

If you want to play with colours, change the three values after LightColor to values between 0 and 255.