Removal of the Blinking lights

The simulation is already run for each client, where the info is grabbed from currently afaik for the lights. That loop sounds like just another layer on top or replacement of current control system, just added complexity and not really resolving the need for the mentioned bookkeeping? If the loop would process each factory you'd have to bookkeep the factories to be included and run them in a batch or start a separate loop for each factory and kill it once not needed anymore.

I'm not familiar with all the technical bits regarding the lights, but in general triggers that rely on game engine functions are usually way more optimized than manual loops done on the scripting side.

And all that complexity for lights that most don't even know about

Are the lights all or nothing, could we get rid of ones some units but not others?

I think the blinking lights when storages are near empty are kinda cool

LOUD removed those lights pretty much at the first release - they were never missed. No one even noticed until it was pointed out. Just saying......it's a great deal of code execution for a whole lot of almost nothing.

Well i know those lights and saw them from the beginning.
But i am colorblind (red/green) and i never see to what color those lights change.

So my personal opinion;
I like the lights, it makes the game more "colorful", but they don't need to change
or show something special with their color, i can't see it anyway.

I'm still mourning the removal of SACU wrecks
They looked good and were removed as a balance decision due to mass on reclaim. A crime in my eyes!
(Setting the mass inside the wreck to 0 would have the same balance change without removing grafics from the game.)

Please try to hold as much effects / grafics as possible in the game.

My suggstion:
Create those lights when a unit gets created and let them shine in a fixed color.
So we still have nice grafic, and less CPU power used for unessisary colorchange checks on many events.

SACU wrecks are still part of the game.

If they wouldnt be you'd have me crying about it all day

Sleep tight blinking lights, jip is gonna flip the switch off.

@jip said in Removal of the Blinking lights:

SACU wrecks are still part of the game.

well, they were removed on 25 May 2020
https://github.com/FAForever/fa/commit/dbaf939f45671a9f77d9cabe099e25068729d452

But it looks like those changes were reverted half a year later (25 Nov 2020).

Ok, the SACU wreck question is solved, lets get back to the blinking lights.

I'm fine with having some form of lights, made once when the unit is finished and then 'forgotten'. But I'd like to stress: if only a few individuals actually knew about the lights, then why do we bother .

What the lights? Player with low graphics settings

@jip said in Removal of the Blinking lights:

But I'd like to stress: if only a few individuals actually knew about the lights, then why do we bother

Because we try to preserve the game SC:FA here. If there is no pressing reason to remove nice details then why should we do that?

If we remove the color changes that are a performance hog, then what do we actually improve if we completely remove the lights? At that point we are just taking stuff away for no good reason.

Fair enough - I'll add them back in but without the color changing. Suggestions for a color?

@jip said in Removal of the Blinking lights:

Suggestions for a color?

Well i can see yellow and blue best.

1. I would obviously vote for yellow or blue.

2. Also nice; light in faction color

3. Or just white light (in this case yellow white like an old light bulb)

4. Increase the size of the light.
   (maybe people will see a "new" feature in the game - "ambient lights" )

And thanks for keeping the lights!

Could we not do some sort of vote? I see no point in the lights if they have a performance cost.

There was some discussion on preserving current behaviour without the performance penalty. Maybe that's the best option?

The performance cost is in having the lights change. If they remain the same, then they're essentially free of charge.

The details person in me wants the blinking lights to match the faction colour if they are static. But I couldn't see a blue blinky light.

We can make them match the faction colors. Fine by me too .

I think the blinking lights should contrast the faction color— i.e. Cybran should have yellow blinking lights and Seraphim blue blinking lights. Aeon should have red lights and UEF green lights.

From what I understood of the explanation, it's possible to handle stalling/not stalling color change in a single loop instance, right? So that we pay a tiny fixed cost for the stalling/not stalling logic, and the rest is handled by some shader magic. All the other logic like building units and such could then be placed in appropriate functions instead of being polled every tick. Then we'd keep the old behaviour without polling everything all the time.