Hey Man, (I'm Mikk from facebook/twitter etc btw)
Great engine mostly. I was quite pleasantly surprised on how you had set up the first import/setup into the engine. Very quick and easy and doesn't break anything I've already got running in the game. And the first visuals I got out of it when I loaded into my redux version of Voidship were very very promising.
I am getting some potentially weird behaviour though and have a couple questions which after digging a bit and watching half of the tutorials I'm still quite confused about:
1. How much should light intensity be doing? I see it's a value from 0 to 1 and that means I'd expect 1 to be full intensity and 0 to be off (or damn near close to it), but in my setup it's more like 1 is full intensity and 0 is just a tiny bit less than that. Very small change between them. It's making it very difficult to dim lights, I'm spoofing it a bit by combining intensity and falloff as a hack solution currently. But this feels unreliable and feels like I'm sitting on a bug potentially?
2. I have a lot of confusions with: What does light z do exactly? Is this the same as the game maker variable depth? Should light z be close to the layer depths I'm trying to light? How close? How close should different layers be to each other if I'm trying to light several with the same light... maybe the further back ones a bit less? I feel like my problem with question 1 might be affected by my setup of depths and light z's. Since if I test lighting out in realtime and move light z to a bigger number the lights start doing more weird stuff and intensity and other such values stop meaning less and less. This is fine if I know what the "proper" z is to use where all the settings work correctly. But I'm afraid that with my current just testing blindly to see what works solution I'll happen on a hacky unsustainable end point.
Any help on any of this is appreciated, thanks!