Flashlight

Small Hytale plugin experiment for a player flashlight effect for future projects.

Right now the flashlight is not rendered as a real projected beam. Instead, it is simulated by tracing the player view direction, finding impact points in the world, and spawning small dynamic light entities around those hit positions. This is why it is possible to see it as a forward beam projection.

I also need to create a model for the flashlight.

Current idea

I do not currently know how to do it properly, so the current implementation uses a more practical workaround:

read the player head direction
trace a center ray plus a ring of extra rays
detect nearby hit points against loaded world chunks
pick representative hit positions
spawn/update dynamic light entities at those positions

This gives a result that behaves more like a fake projected flashlight impact than a real render-level flashlight.

How it works

The plugin is split into a few simple parts:

Main registers the command and the tick system
FlashlightCommand enables, disables, or toggles the flashlight
FlashlightTickSystem updates active flashlight players every few ticks
FlashlightService contains the main logic
FlashlightConeMath contains the math helpers used for beam sampling

Runtime flow

When a player runs the command:

the player flashlight state is toggled
the plugin syncs that player on the world thread
every few ticks, the beam is recalculated again while the flashlight is active

Beam approximation

The beam is approximated using:

one center ray
a ring of rays around it

The service traces those rays forward until they hit a non-air block in a loaded chunk.

From those results:

the center hit is preserved if it exists
the ring hits are combined into a weighted secondary hit
one or more dynamic light entities are spawned or updated at those positions

Why dynamic light entities

I went with spawned entities + DynamicLight because I do not currently have a proper way to render the flashlight exactly as I want.

The main problem is that what I really want is something closer to:

a proper surface projection
or a visible cone/beam effect
or a shader-based overlay / post-process effect

Config

The plugin supports a config.json file for the main flashlight settings.

The config file is stored in the plugin data directory and is created automatically on first load if it does not exist yet.

It is used to adjust the main values without recompiling the plugin, such as:

debug rendering flags
impact light enable/disable
player-attached light values
beam range and beam angle
ray step
impact back offset
ring ray count
debug draw settings

If the file is missing, the plugin writes a default one automatically.
If the file already exists, the plugin loads the values from it.

Example:

{
  "debugDrawBeam": false,
  "debugShowHitPoint": false,
  "enableImpactLight": true,
  "playerLightRadius": 0,
  "playerLightRed": 0,
  "playerLightGreen": 0,
  "playerLightBlue": 0,
  "minEffectiveHitDistance": 2.0,
  "centerLightRadius": 5,
  "sideLightRadius": 2,
  "maxImpactLights": 10,
  "beamRange": 50.0,
  "beamHalfAngleDeg": 10.0,
  "rayStep": 0.08,
  "impactBackOffset": 0.15,
  "beamRingRays": 10,
  "debugDrawDurationSeconds": 0.12,
  "debugLineWidth": 0.02,
  "debugFade": false
}

Commands to activate the flashlight

/flashlight
/flashlight on
/flashlight off

Dynamic Flashlight