Keepers Compound Lightmapper [v1.0] - Fast external replacement for DromEd lighting

[HavvicGames]

KCLight is an external lightmapping tool for NewDark 1.27 fan missions intended to replace DromEd's lighting step in later stages of mission development. DromEd's built-in lighting is single-threaded, has a number of minor bugs and scales extremely poorly with lightmap scale and complex large open spaces (e.g. modern city missions). KCLight takes advantage of modern CPUs with a multi-threaded approach and improves lighting times, reduces lighting artifacts, and has the potential to improve in-game performance in some complex scenes.

Features:

• Replicates all existing DromEd lighting functionality
• Massively improves lighting times
• Better light culling, improving performance in large-scale city maps and eliminating object lighting errors
• Provides additional warnings to mappers highlighting mis-configured light settings
• Generally produces more accurate shadows

Downloads:
KeepersCompound.Lightmapper v1.0.1 (Windows)
KeepersCompound.Lightmapper v1.0.1 (Linux)
Additionally you can find the source code here, and all previous versions and changelogs here.

Usage:
KCLight is a command-line tool (maybe I'll make a GUI in the future). If you've used command-line tooling before, the help screen (displayed if you run with "--help" flag) should be enough to get you going. If you've not, then don't worry it's fairly straight forward. Extract the lightmapper somewhere, and open a console in the folder. On Windows you can quickly open a console in the current folder by typing "cmd" into the file explorer address bar.

To light a mission first save it in DromEd, then type the following and press enter:

KeepersCompound.Lightmapper.exe "path/to/thief/install" "mission_folder_name" "missfile_name"

For example on my system that would look something like this:

KeepersCompound.Lightmapper.exe "C:\Mapping\Thief Gold" "Alcazar" "miss20.mis"

By default the lit mission will be saved as "kc_lit.mis/cow" alongside the original version.

Contact:
I don't use TTLG much, so I'll probably be slow to any responses. If you need help or something seems broken the best place to contact me is the DromEd discord server, my username there is Jayrude.

[Skol]

And by "improves lighting time", he means from 1 hour to 15 seconds.

[PinkDot]

Congrats! Amazing job and important milestone for the community!

[ZylonBane]

So, any plans to make an SS2 compatible version of this?

[HavvicGames]

I don't have a ShockEd setup to test with, but it may already work. If you try it/have already tried it and encounter issues could you share them?

If it's incompatible then there's three areas where I could imagine the incompatibility existing:
1. Configs. SS2 might be using some config stuff I don't know about and the game resources get loaded incorrectly
2. Properties. I know SS2 has some differing object properties, but I haven't looked into whether any of them would affect lighting
3. File formats. If there's any major differences to the parts of the various file formats I read/modify then parsing them will fail

Depending on how much work resolving the problems is (assuming it is incompatible) I can look into adding SS2 support soon.

[ZylonBane]

I tried it, but it complained that it couldn't find thief.exe.

As for the other considerations, I'd imagine that NewDark unified lighting between the two engines quite a bit.

[Kubrick]

As a total newbie, I'd really benefit from a small tutorial video on how to use. I tried it when it was first released but I shamelessly failed to use it properly the few times I tried.