Why can some ships light up an entire soccer stadium at night, but others can barely light five meters in front of them?
TL;DRShip lighting varies because ships were made at different times by different teams without full unification, and tech changes and the art-versus-design tension affected it; guidelines now exist to unify it as much as possible.
Things change over time. People's opinions change, tech changes. Different teams do them at different times. I think we've got to remember that there are ships that were worked on a long time ago, and there are ships that obviously we're putting out every few months. We haven't necessarily gone back and unified all of that across the board. There's a wide range of lighting on some of our ships. What I can say is we've got guidelines now that we've set in place, and we've had input from the lighting team to unify as much of this as we can. I think the other thing is, with game development of a game of our size, quite often things can be set one way and you think they're good and you move on, and you're two years down the line and you've worked on 10 different ships since then, and someone's small change in one area of the game has impacted something unexpected in other areas of the game. Everyone loves the Scout lights.
We use them in the design playtests. We send someone in a Scout ahead of everyone else at nighttime to light the way. Following up on Ben's point about people changing things in unexpected places, I'm sure years ago there was an issue where the graphics team changed something with lights, and it broke a bunch of them, and a lot of the ships at the time used them exclusively. I can't remember which way it made them go, but it either made them go really dim or really bright. So you could have two ships that were released at the same time, and the one that used projector lights with a projector texture suddenly became wildly different to the other one. And there's also the forever battle between design and art, over art wanting it to look nice and not blow out the definition of the terrain, and design going, hey, we want this bright enough that I can fly at full speed.
Yeah. I'm pretty sure I remember at some point there were some non-arty people that went in. But then I guess I'm taking the 'art is more important' route, as John's probably taking the 'no, you should be able to see where you're going' route.