I thought the plan all along was to allow direct CON control of Polymer lights, but so far that hasn't happened. It is possible to have some control over lights indirectly by spawning and manipulating SE sprites, but this is hackish and somewhat limiting.
On a related topic, there has been a lot of discussion lately about the need to optimize/overhaul Polymer so that it runs better. I've been thinking about this, and it seems to me that huge gains could be made if it were possible to make lights or surfaces temporarily ignore any changes, thereby saving a lot of calculation. Obviously, a lot of calculation is required with every frame, to figure out the effect of every light on every rendered surface. But in many (most?) cases, nothing is actually changing from frame to frame, so all that calculation is being wasted and the lights might as well be baked on. For example, if there is a static point light in a hallway, and nothing is moving near it, then it will have the same effect on the scene from one frame to the next and it would be very beneficial if there was a way to save and apply what it did the last time, instead of doing the calculations again. I know next to nothing about renderers and about how Polymer works, so what I'm suggesting might not even make sense. But if there is some kind of update function that does the calculations, and if that function could be suspended for certain lights and/or surfaces, then that would be all we need to make some big optimizations. Obviously, some thought has to go into when to suspend updating, but I would be willing to try my hand at that on the CON end of things, if that's possible. For example, I could code a flag that mappers put on point lights which would make the game treat them more like baked on light (they would seldom update or only update under certain conditions).
I know I'm probably making an ass of myself and revealing my ignorance of how the renderer works, but I'm willing to do that because I care a lot about EDuke32 and I want to see Polymer shine so we can continue to make great projects with it.
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