Dim modern lights

[PeterNerlich]

Hello! I have been looking for a solution to just dimly light areas, without flooding them with light. In my case, I want to use it to light train tunnels while leaving a clear distinction to the brightly lit stations.

I found there wasn't anything in morelights yet that fit my idea of being low profile like the modern barlights. So I made my own based on morelights_modern!
This is basically a copy of morelights_modern but I use the existing models as I didn't modify them. What I did modify are only the brightness levels of all lights, I decided on the ceil of one third of their original light_source value. I adjusted the textures accordingly to look half decent.
Instead of the ceiling light I introduce a light dot, an especially low profile element only sticking out one 16th, with a width and height of four 16th. The idea for the texture is that it lets light out to the side only, with a shade plate towards the room. The texture for the emitting faces might be overly dark, I tried to fit it to not draw any attention for my use case – as you see, I have quite the dark background:

Dim Light Dot

Station with tunnels lit with torches (left) vs. new dim light dots (right)

The difference looks subtle, as I originally tried to approximate the look I wanted to get with my torch placement. But the bright spots looked too busy and drew the players attention too much in my opinion. The light dots enable a smoother lighting, making really dark looking tunnels without being totally black.

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If you like this and would want to include it into the morelights modpack, I can prepare a PR for you (at the moment it's just the standalone mod in my repository).

[PeterNerlich]

I tried to have the dim barlights connect to the bright ones as well, somehow it didn't work. But I didn't look into it much.

[random-geek]

I like the idea of a low-profile lighting like that, although I might use a "light" texture (similar to stairlights, perhaps) for the sides. Since there seems to be considerable interest in dimmer lighting options, I should probably consider some kind of dimming system. I'm just not sure how to accomplish it gracefully.

[PeterNerlich]

Hm... I mean, you could introduce yet another screwdriver-like tool that lets you set the light level, or simply by right click (I think there are no right click actions yet). Offering 4 dimming options via formspec will probably already be plenty (25%, 50%, 75%, 100% or the like). It would probably also be cool to say "please make all future lights I place use this dimming level" to not make lighting big areas a pain. That would have to be a variable per player, consequently, and some mechanism to check it when a light gets placed and potentially exchange the node with a dimmed version.