Two colored lights placed nearby removes the color

[Khoredran]

I didn't know if this was a bug and if it would be properly looked at, but I feel it is something that shouldn't be happening.

Summary: When placing two colored lights near each other, the color reverts to white automatically and we lose the color. In my test, I used the exact same color: FFFF9243
Ruleset(s): I tried in a fresh new CoreRPG and in Pathfinder 1st Ruleset campaign with no modules and no extension loaded, the result was the same.
Operating System / Language Setting: Windows 10 / English
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a new CoreRPG campaign
2. Drag and Drop BattleMap01.jpg from the FG Battle Maps into images and unlock it.
3. Enable Player Vision Preview (optional, but it let us see more clearly what happens)
4. Go in the Lighting tab and in the Add Lighting sub tab.
5. Click on the color box and copy/paste FFFF9243
6. Add two lights far from each other in different rooms; you should see this:
Far Orange lights.jpg
7. Move one of the lights close to the other and marvel at the disappearance of the color; you should see this:
Close Orange lights.jpg

Here is the CoreRPG campaign file:
Color Test CORERPG.zip

Thank you very much ^^

[darrenan]

Light sources are additive where they overlap, this is clearly called out in the wiki. Admittedly it does cause some unrealistic lighting effects. There's a note about it on this page in the wiki.

[Khoredran]

Additive is fine, but why would it revert the color to white when the lights are the same orange color? Placing yellow candles near each other would make the same issue and revert the color to white.

Nowhere is it stated that the color is removed by the additive lighting.

[Zacchaeus]

When you add light to another light it gets brighter and with enough it will go white - no matter what the original colour is.

[Khoredran]

Thank you Zacchaeus!

With your insight, I was finally able to get the effect I was looking for! My choice of color was indeed too bright.
I tried with FF9B4600 and we can see that the mix of color doesn't revert to pure white anymore! I am so happy now ^^

Color Workaround.jpg

[Zacchaeus]

It isn't just the colour. When you are lighting an area try reducing the Alpha channel and increasing the falloff of the bright and dim lights. You can also reduce the bright light to very small and have the dim light be big. Play around with the various settings until you get used to what they do.

[Khoredran]

Yup, the light tools are AWESOME!

When they came out to live, I was jumping around with joy and my wife was clueless as to the source of this burst of pure happiness.

[Tenkuya]

Turning down the Alpha doesn't really seem like a great solution. You then get two really dim lights instead of two areas of bright light with overlapping dim areas. An option to turn OFF the additive aspect of a light would go a long way to not having to spend a bunch of time fiddling around hoping to get two light green lights to not turn white or have weird areas between them.

The problem also doesn't seem to be fully understood honestly. Two lights with 255 in the green channel that overlap (or 200 lights) seem to NOT create a white light. Two lights with 100/255/100 seem to create areas of light with the value of 200/255/200 (closer to white). So if you want to have two torches placed on either side of the door they have to have 1 color channel and nothing else or those values seemingly just get x/x/x + y/y/y. This doesn't seem like a great way to handle things and just turning down the alpha just makes the lights less present.

The alpha workaround feels like it just hides the issue by making the lights harder to see/less present. Maybe I'm not understanding something but again, turning the additive feature off for at least the brightness levels would fix this. I don't mind color blending for different colors but something here is really wonky.

The outer ring of torches being prohibited from touching or they create a "bright" spot is also weird and feels like an extremely technical application of lighting rules. "Adding two dim things creates a bright area" sounds fine but when you have two people with torches standing with 5-10 feet of dim overlap and that overlap creating a bright area between the two sources makes it feel like a mystical third light source exists.

[chaiwalla]

Agree. No overlapping effect. And if two light sources of different strength overlap, just the brighter one illuminates the overlapped area.

[Moon Wizard]

As far as what I have been told, light physics are additive in nature. Since the lights in FGU are a cross between what looks good and showing game system "light regions", you may perceive that the overlaps don't look good to you, as the falloff levels in real-world lights are much different. You should play around with falloff levels and alpha levels to come up with the effect you want on your own maps.

Regards,
JPG