Lights

Lights

The game's own light, not Blender's. It carries a two-value falloff band and a pair of cone angles that a Blender light cannot hold, so it is an empty with a panel of its own — and what Blender's own lights do has no bearing on it.

Add ▸ 4DS ▸ Light builds one. It shines along local +Y.

The kinds

Three of them light geometry:

Point	shines from its position, fading across the range
Spot	shines from its position along the frame's direction, inside the cone, fading across the range
Directional	shines along the frame's direction from no particular place. Position and range are unused

Four set a sector's atmosphere rather than lighting anything, each drawn in the light's own color. Power and the cones are not used by any of them:

Fog	linear fog. Far is where it is thickest, as a percentage of the view distance; Near is where it starts, as a percentage of that
Point Ambient	exponential fog, with Near as the density. Despite the name it lights nothing
Point Fog	exponential-squared fog, with Near as the density
Layered Fog	draws no fog and lights nothing. The game only counts it, as light from around it, toward how dark a shadow is

And two more: Ambient, which adds its color times its power evenly to everything in the sectors it lights, and None, which does nothing — the type a light carries before it is given one. A light read from a file with no type set is Directional, which is the engine's own default.

What it holds

• Color and Power — the power multiplies the color.
• Near and Far — the falloff band. Full strength up to Near, fading to nothing at Far. For the fog kinds these mean what the table above says instead.
• Inner and Outer cone — for a Spot: full inside the inner angle, fading to nothing at the outer one.
• Mode — a word of switches saying what the light is counted for:

Lights Objects	ordinary objects, billboards and morphs, while the game runs
Lights Lit Objects	Lit Object meshes too, on top of the lighting baked into them. Off in the engine's default; the game turns it on for car headlights and fire lights
Vertex Bake	taken into account when a lit object's per-vertex lighting is baked
Casts Baked Shadow	casts an occlusion ray during a bake, so baked lighting shows what this light cannot reach
Affects Shadows	counted when the game picks which way a projected shadow falls and how dark it is
Affects Lightness	counts toward the lightness the game measures at a point

Bits of that word nothing reads are carried back out exactly as they came in.

Seeing it in Blender

The viewport draws what the file describes and Blender would not: the cone, the falloff band as rings, and an aim ball you can drag to point the light. Aim At Target points it at another object. Which of those is drawn depends on the kind — an atmosphere light has no cone or range to show.

Switching it on in game

A light lights the sectors that list it, and that list lives in the mission's scene2.bin, not in the model. So a light exported in a model does nothing on its own, however right its settings look: the mission that places the model has to name it as well. The add-on says the same in the light panel, under Switching It On in scene2.bin.

Two halves have to agree.

In the model's .4ds

What	Which kinds
Enable on, in the object's Culling flags	all kinds
Animated Objects 0, or the model's .5ds beside it	all kinds
Power not 0	the lighting kinds, and Layered Fog
Lights Objects on	the lighting kinds, to light ordinary meshes
Lights Lit Objects on	the lighting kinds, to light Lit Object meshes
Affects Shadows on	Layered Fog

Warning

Enable off does more than hide the light: it takes the object out of collision, lighting and sound, and hides its children with it. And a model whose Animated Objects count is above zero makes the game open a .5ds of the model's own name — if there is none, the whole model load counts as failed, the mission never records the model's frame names, and every scene2.bin entry naming them does nothing. That takes the light with it.

In the mission's scene2.bin

What	Which kinds
Placed after the model's own object	all kinds
A frame named <model object>.<light name> — no frame type	all kinds

and the light datablock on that frame holds:

What	Which kinds
Sector — the sectors it lights	all kinds
Color or Power	the lighting kinds, and Layered Fog
Range or Cone	Spot
Range	Layered Fog
Mode, if the model file is used more than once	the lighting kinds, and Layered Fog

The lighting kinds are Point, Spot, Directional and Ambient.

Note

The name is the model's object name, a dot, then the light frame's name — so a light called lamp inside a model placed as streetlamp01 is named streetlamp01.lamp. In the mission's own scene.4ds, the frame is named without the prefix.

Tip

Give the light a name you can find again before exporting. The scene2.bin entry has to match it exactly, and renaming the frame afterwards breaks the link silently — the model still loads, the light simply never comes on.