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Photon Lighting Engine
The Photon Lighting Engine is a Garry's Mod addon that enables advanced emergency vehicle functionality to compatible vehicles, along-side simple universal lighting and indicators for all supported vehicles.
Photon is designed to add vehicle lighting and emergency vehicle functionality to vehicles in Garry's Mod, and was the first published addon to allow emergency vehicle lighting in Garry's Mod.
Its primarily made to mimic the equipment, emergency lights, and sirens found on emergency vehicles, and enable interested users in adding functionality to vehicles of their own.
Photon utilizes various traditional techniques to imitate how light appears through camera lenses. Effects such as bloom, glare, flares and artifacts are calculated by Photon independently of Source lighting.
Much of the lighting in Photon bypasses the traditional Source engine, so visual appearance of the effects are unique to Photon. Viewing angles, ambient light and position are placed through various equations to dynamically calculate the brightness of individual lights. As a result, Photon is generally more resource intensive than other lighting addons.
The overall effect is largely inspired by a mod for Grand Theft Auto IV called ELS, developed by Luxart. However, due to engine limitations, Photon works in an entirely different fashion.
Photon is made by a single developer, Schmal, as a hobby.
Vehicle support and features are largely driven to respond to uses in the community and to test experimental techniques.
Most vehicles are made internally as to add necessary assets and ensure quality, however certain parts of third party vehicles are sometimes imported to save time.
- Realistic light brightness and color behavior
- Camera lens effects
- Dynamic brightness calculations adjust the lights to look ideal for any environment such as dark tunnels or bright outdoors
- Comprehensive light
- Left/Right turn indicators & hazard lights
- Brake lights
- Reverse lights
- Running lights
- Multi-stage lighting (ie Code 1, Code 2, and Code 3)
- Optional traffic advisor functionality
- Integration with basic car lights (headlight wig-wags, red/blue color in reverse lights)
- Realistic lamps and takedown/scene lighting
- Press single key to enable and change direction of illumination
- Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs)
- Halogen/incandescent pulsing
- Rotating lights
- Support for red, blue, amber, white, green as well as a soft and cool white for non-LED lights
- Realistic tones from actual companies such as Whelen and Federal Signal
- Sirens used by North America, United Kingdom, Denmark, France, Germany, Australia and more
- Each set includes a Wail and Yelp tone, with most offering Pier/Phaser and Hi-Lo tones
- The siren set/driver can be switched on any car using the in-game context menu
- Federal Signal Valor
- Federal Signal Integrity
- Federal Signal Vision SLR
- Federal Signal Legend
- Whelen Liberty II
- Whelen Justice
- Whelen Legacy
- All custom vehicles will appear in vehicle spawn menu.
- Customize and pre-set the bodygroups, skin, color, siren driver.
- Add or define any custom lightbars or other warning-light equipment.
- Add additional decorative props that spawn and remain with vehicle.
- Define and apply a skin without using up any of the vehicle's skin indexes (this also means your skin would work for all players regardless of other skins they have installed).
- Any car can be added from scratch.
- Every feature available by default or demonstration vehicles can be implemented.
- Ability to add your very own custom props if desired.
- Setup your vehicle to utilize custom props, pre-defined lightbars and bodygroups that seamlessly adjust through the in-game menu.
- Change siren to any available driver.
- Swap out pre-defined lightbars through an easy-to-use menu.
- Adjust bodygroups on supported vehicles and the lights will automatically adjust to any combination.
The sirens found in Photon are taken from a wide range of sources including vendor websites, LCPD:FR mod imports, and user submissions. Sirens are used on the condition of public access and non-commercial usage, and encompass tones from several companies and nations.
The code for Photon began in August 2013 as part of a proprietary gamemode for the Noobonic Plague server dubbed Liberty.
To complement an defunct mod called Vehicle Upgrade, which added passenger seating and limited headlight support, Emergency Vehicle Upgrade was coined as a system to add basic emergency lighting.
The programming was considered highly experimental and was plagued with rendering bugs. Development was sporadic until March 2014, when implementation to Noobonic Plague's legacy DarkRP gamemode was considered. A YouTube video was released demonstrating the lighting capabilities and siren on a SentryGunMan Koenigsegg CCX.
Car support was limited and exclusive to police vehicles. In May 2014, the Emergency Vehicle Upgrade mod was released on Noobonic Plague, offering lighting on the SGM Ford Taurus, SGM Crown Victoria, SGM Ford Explorer, and SGM CCX. The support for the LoneWolfie Chevrolet Impala was added in June 2014 and subsequently demonstrated in a YouTube video.
The Impala support was never ultimately added to Noobonic Plague and further development ceased following Schmal moving.
After consistent requests on existing demo videos, progress restarted in September 2014. Most the internal code structure was scrapped and redone to support multiple third-party vehicles.
In November 2014 the name was changed from Emergency Vehicle Upgrade to Photon, an allusion to the photon, the elementary particle of light. Videos demonstrating the NYPD Impala were released as teasers to the unknown release.
In the same time, experimental support for vehicle running and brake lights were tested.
On November 17, 2014, Photon was released on Workshop along with a Seattle Police Taurus and NYPD Impala set. For the latter days in its first week, it became the most popular Garry's Mod Workshop addon.