Black Lighting under overhangs

This is not a game-breaking bug, but it is incredibly ugly. And I reported it months ago on the old bug-tracking Wiki page:

[X] Blocks under an overhang are completely unlit, since 1.3.1. If you move under the overhang, the lighting will be corrected, but only until you logout. Happens with OpenGL and without. Screenshot [3] Robotic Pants

I'd really like it to get fixed. It annoys me to see huge black rectangles all over the mountains.

I've seen variants of this bug since beta version 1.5.

Always notice the lighting error occurring either somewhere under an overhang, entrance to a cave, under tree leaves, or underwater: never in direct sunlight, but most often adjacent to direct sunlight. Lighting error does not always extend vertically all the way from a floor to a ceiling, sometimes the error only extends from floor-or-ceiling to the next multiple of 16 along the y (vertical) axis. You can measure where the glitch ends by determining at what eye-level the player's hand and tool change brightness.

Lighting error is ALWAYS resolved by a block update within or directly adjacent to the affected region. OFTEN resolved by player moving in or near the affected region. There also seems to be a delay between entering the region and lighting getting resolved directly proportional to the number of blocks involved in the error. Player entering region does NOT appear to resolve error if the affected region is exactly 1x1x1 in size: have tested both moving players feet and players head into regions matching criteria above of mid-air vertical cutoff. SOMETIMES resolved when player walks within a few blocks away from the error, or puts crosshairs into the error while standing within a few blocks away.

A particularly nasty side effect of this bug is the lag associated with causing the lighting engine to update many dark spots at one. Played a SMP world with mineshafts spawned mid-air with black lighting underneath. If you got into an area with enough black lighting around, the lag made the game virtually unplayable.

Ran across this and just thought you guys might like to know they are working on this...

Source: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Upcoming_features

1.5
Rendering engine rewrite. Current engine has some bugs.
Support for high resolution texture packs[4]
The geometry of individual textures can differ
Much faster overall rendering, thus higher FPS.[5][6]
Includes the lighting fixes first introduced in snapshots 12w39a /b (during 1.4 development)
The features were:
Support for fancy lighting control[7]
Support for more realistic lighting, such as active furnaces only giving off light from their front surface[8][9]

Really, Talven? That's good news.

I'm at work so cannot presently, but can anyone confirm the "black lighting" bug is either fixed or significantly altered in snapshot 12w39a?

The code was not completed and was pulled back, so not sure you can confirm anything. They found issues with the changes they made and their target is 1.5 so I think you will just have to wait.

The problem persists in the 1.4.4 version.

I am soo looking forward to a fix for this. To me this one is major, as Fisico said.

I agree that this bug feels rather "Major" than "Minor". I haven't played Minecraft in months because of it. I don't have much fun playing it if the worlds look ugly, and there are direct effects on gameplay as well. As already mentioned, the game can lag for seconds if a large glitchy area is updated, and also you cannot see what's in a cave until you enter it.

I'm surprised that there isn't more pressure from the community concerning this, since it seems to affect everybody, and in my view it makes the game pretty unenjoyable. (Persists in 1.4.6)

Issue remains in 13w01b, screenshot http://i.imgur.com/vIcPI.jpg

In related news .. what is wrong with that waterfall in my screenshot? Why isn't it .. falling? That's not a terrain generation behavior I've ever encountered before. :O

That position, in case it's interesting, is ~x=-212 z=+248 and seed is -6770244940745311567 13w01b

Jesse Thompson, your problem with the waterfall is similar to my problem with lavafall. See MC-5568.

Still happens in 13w02a. Also, lighting on the hand seems glitchy. The hand keeps going dark and back normal all the time for no apparent reason, unless it's shaded by the clouds...

http://i110.photobucket.com/albums/n118/Throwend/webpics/mc_hand_d_zps0bc8416d.png

remains on 13w07a

http://i.imgur.com/ltPVq6X.png

Maybe 13w08a will bring the whole new lighting engine, so maybe this will be fixed again...

Still happens in Snapshot 13w09a

13w09c too

13w10b too XD

present in pre1.5

Confirmed present in Minecraft 1.5 "prerelease", just as bad as before if not worse, screenshot attached.

Time to start right-clicking!

Also confirmed present in 1.5 release, screenshot attached.

This still occurs in 1.5, but less intensly. It's not completely dark anymore.

Persists in 13w11a. The patches are as dark as they've always been for me.
Did the new lighting engine not make it for 1.5 or does it just not fix the bug? At this point I wonder whether I'll have to stay on 1.2 forever.

Nope, still happens in 1.5. Every bit as black as ever, though as it has been for about a year now the lighting under affected trees or water (partly transparent shade sources) can be "too dark" but not quite pitch black, until you block update or walk through the shade to correct it. EG: the shade would be black were it not for some of the light penetrating the partly transparent blocks.

http://i.imgur.com/o8DJrf1.png

Confirmed in 13w11a

Confirmed for the just released 1.5.1 pre-release

I would really like to see it fixed. I just generated a 1.5 nether and it looks really awful because of this.

A Few More Pics of the Infamous "Black Shadow" Bug.

Note: That this is a retention issue. Like Glow-stone holding sunlight.

1) Recreate it by making a dark room BLl0 SL0 RL0
2) Place Glows-tone, Note light, BLl8 SL0 RL8 (0 Sunlight)
3) Place Remove a block allowing sunlight, Note light, BLl8 SL8 RL8 (8 Sunlight)
4) Place block back allowing no sunlight, Note sunlight does not change, BLl8 SL8 RL8 (8 Sunlight)

Torches do not hold retain light.

Before a block is updated its Sunlight or Lack of Sunlight is retained.
When the near block is updated so is the Sunlight.

This is why when a Block is removed the black lighting is also removed.

Why glowstone? Well simply put blocks are treated different than something like a glass panel, pot, or sign.
Hope this help in understanding the issue.

Still happens with 13w16a, first 1.6 snapshot: http://i.imgur.com/hfZfkFh.jpg

Possible Solution: Check for broken lighting on every loaded chunk and fix it
Possible Solution 2 (less lag on servers): Check for broken lighting on chunks that players look at

Possible Solution 0: fix the original bug in the lighting engine. It's nothing but lateral ambient sunlight not being calculated properly.

If the computer is capable of checking the correctness of the light as an audit, it's capable of checking it during first calculation too.

The simplest examples of the bug are on the surface, where everything under an overhang is black, like this: https://mojang.atlassian.net/secure/attachment/24330/2013-03-13_15.32.53.png . No exotic materials, just a concavity in the blocks that sunlight does not directly strike. 50%+ of these shapes render as pitch black. Oftentimes the ground is perfectly flat, and ground square is 15-16 brightness sunlight while the directly adjacent square is 0.

Also, the game already has a hack that tries to compensate for this. It re-lights cubic chunks constantly. It spawns a relight to almost every block you step in (so if you step into one of these shadows, there is a high percentage chance the game will repair the lighting within a moment or two).

I'm pretty sure the problem will simply grow more exotic the more you try to plug up holes in the dam. The root bug needs to be eliminated.

I don't know how this figures into the overall explanation of why the bug occurs, and maybe it is pretty obvious, but I haven't seen it mentioned in any comment so I thought I'd point it out: logging out and back into the world also seems to fix nearby places where the bug occurs. Explore the world, find a black blotch, log out, log back in, and the blotch is gone.

The bug persists in 13w17a.

Yes, confirmed for 13w17a.

Still ridiculously common in 1.5.2. Looks appalling, why bother working on new versions of texturemapping when the landscape looks so dreadful?

Relogging does not fix the issue for me Daniel. When I do it stays exactly the same. Only hitting it seems to have an effect.

I get this as well, really annoying as you can't see what is in those areas.

This has been happening since Beta 1.0

@Jonathan Vernon: I don't have any older versions to test with, but can you confirm that the problem is not present in any of the Alpha releases, but is present in Beta 1.0?

If so, I'm certain this regression information may prove quite helpful to the developers. Thank you. :3

@Jesse: I was off by one version, I tested and during alpha lighting errors like this would occur under trees, but not overhangs, But Beta 1.1 fixed the trees but brought in this current bug

@Jonathan Vernon: Nope, trees weren't fixed. It still happens to me with trees, but the same glitch with overhangs happens a lot more often. I have a screenshot of it happening with a tree in the most recent update; I'm going to attach it now.

Screenshot from 1.6.1

Is this still a concern in the current Minecraft version? If so, please update the affected versions in order to best aid Mojang ensuring bugs are still valid in the latest releases/pre-releases.

Yes, as of 1.6.2 release this bug is still easy to reproduce: http://i.imgur.com/LSZrlWY.png

Step 1: start a new world in creative mode (mode only matters to more conveniently locate an affected area)

Step 2: in Video Settings, turn off Smooth Lighting (bug happens whether smooth lighting is on or not, turning it off only helps add contrast to the visual presentation of symptom)

Step 3: fly up in the air, look around, and in some rare cases actually travel somewhere in search of an overhang. Due to processes in the game that obviously search for lighting errors like this to fix after the fact, avoid trying to look directly into a shadow or flying into said shadow as doing so has roughly a 15% chance of correcting the shadow before you can screenshot it. Forcing a block update inside of, or directly adjacent to a contiguous shadow (such as breaking any block in the shadow) has close to a 100% chance of correcting it.

Out of curiosity, this bug is globally visible, right? I mean, there do not exist minecraft clients who can't reproduce it, do there?

I've reproduced since ~1.2 beta, on 4 different computers I own running win 7, win XP and Ubuntu 10.04 linux and friends of mine in multiplayer reliably encounter it on at least a dozen more computers. I've never played with anyone who doesn't see this more frequently than they see red or yellow flowers.

Yes, confirmed in 1.6.2 on Linux, too.

Confirmed indeed, I think in 1.6 it is even worse than in 1.5 and earlier.

Yeah it's still a bug... sigh.

The only way to fix it is to touch or walk into the black area so it can be rendered properly.

Out of curiosity, is there no third-party mod that affects/fixes this bug in any way? There are mods that seem to modify or improve most of the rendering parts of the game. Is it possible that any of them make this bug disappear, or is it written too deeply into the lighting system?

Something interesting I found while exploring a world with loads of these glitches:
When you place a torch in one of the black areas, the other black areas nearby get sort of fixed (it gets affected by the torch light only, it seems). But when you break the torch, only the area that you placed it in gets fixed, the other areas go back to being black.
I'll attach a few screenshots.

Also, monsters can spawn and mushrooms can generate in these glitches.

I believe Jeb fixed this (for 1.7, I assume); look at his twitter.

That sounds great re Jeb's tweets. Personally, I believe it when I see it, considering how many versions the fix has already been announced for 😉 but it's good to know that somebody seems to be looking at it currently.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who has witnessed the glitch causing monsters to spawn where they shouldn't. I have read some other reports claiming the bug is purely cosmetic and doesn't have any influence on gameplay. But I am quite sure monsters spawn in black lighting glitch spots that otherwise would have too high a light level.

Since the launcher now allows easy exploration of alpha and beta worlds, I did some exploring to see how early I could confirm the black lighting underhang bug.

As of beta, it's way way less frequent but does still happen. In 1.8.1 it's easy to reproduce thanks to creative mode (but still nowhere near as common as newer versions), but prior to this lacking creative mode it either takes somehow adding a fly mod (that I'm not up to) or investing tons of time searching to find anything.

It took forever but after boating about and creating beds to dispell night and lots of hunting I did spot the gremlin in the wild in beta 1.7: http://i.imgur.com/VvnpE8e.png

I put similar effort into beta 1.5_01 but over half an hour of searching and I could not reproduce. (then again, when I used to reproduce back in the day it was after solid days of playing. ;D)

As to Jeb's fix; has anyone noticed a new snapshot since 1.6.2 shipped? Is there anything new I can play to determine if the fix is even superficially effective? :o

Re-posted in - https://mojang.atlassian.net/browse/MC-3329

If I'm not mistaken, this does not relate to this issue. What I think is happening is that the lit chunks have been loaded properly, but the unlit ones seem to need a block update or the player to fly to them. It is the same way with naturally occurring lava pools.

in 13w26a, I would call this primarily resolved. I am still able to encounter the black lighting, but like Jeb said it is a couple orders of magnitude less common.

I'll report back on what I have seen however, on the off-chance anyone still wants to root this out at the source. 😉

I've seen one instance of a pair of trees with over-dark shading below them. Not full-black, but then again light filters through the leaves. Shading problem resolved itself as I hovered nearby watching.

And I've seen about a half-dozen instances of black lighting where there was a precisely 1-block overhang (often tree leaves, though at least 2 times it was an outcropping of rock) and lighting was normal for many blocks directly below the overhang, but the cliff face was smooth and some number of blocks below the overhang the lighting cut out and went black. Then the blackness continued either until the cliff face gave out (test world was amplified) or sometimes the blackness gave out of it's own accord. Bottom of effect was either horizontal or diagonal; I'll have to check again but I'm guessing diagonal bottoms were near tree leaves (re-radiated sunlight) or other light sources (this world had loads of lavafalls)

My spidey senses tell me the top of such phenomena probably lines up with the largest multiple of 16 on the y axis less than the overhang, and I'll bet many of the unexpected bottom cut-offs are multiples of 16y as well.

This leads me to believe that jeb's code checks for pitch black directly underneath certain overhangs, and probably triggers a recalc when that's found. But that due to the problem not being addressed at it's root, said recalc fails to reach farther than the next multiple of 16y. Furthermore that trees which evince this bug, and have not-quite-pitch-black beneath them by dint of light through the leaves, don't directly benefit either.

Some of the cliff-face examples I've found so far fixed themselves while I hovered nearby. Many fixed themselves as I floated through them. 1 or 2 survived even that, and I could float through them and confirm my character's hand turns black for 1 block away from the cliff face. I could place a torch near the black and add a meager amount of light, remove torch and blackness returns, or place torch within the black (triggering block update) and destroy a large part of it .. though that effort does not always reach beyond 16y boundaries.

I will try again after work tonight and submit screenshots or video of what I find, however the search is hampered by a different problem. Flying around a lot, the game has a terrible time rendering 16^3 chunks of terrain onto the screen. If I rush or fall at a given hole in the world, then the game will rapidly deliver said chunks. But it's hard to explore when the land is too lazy to keep up. Increasing RAM to java has not helped, and my quad core CPU is only at 33% total, 80% average for highest core. Do you guys suspect Disk latency? Tonight I'm going to try running off a RAMdisk and see if that helps.

Tried RAM disk, confirmed it was actually running from RAM disk, and chunk display lag was not impacted. Obviously a separate bug, but still .. kind of unsettling.

I guess even if display performance could not be improved, I would prefer that all chunks touching the crosshair (pick ray from players eye), nearest first get top display priority. Similar to the "player is about to touch it" getting display priority. That way, if I'm trying to set up a scene for a screenshot or a video, I don't have to move to a whole in the scene just to load it, and find that the area I just left decided to unload while my back was turned.

== Blacklights: it looks like I only really captured one screenshot. I'd spent a bunch of time and got about a dozen good shots, but forgot I was on the RAM drive for testing above issue so the screenshots did not get rescued from the drive disapperating. ;(

• http://i.imgur.com/TrHm4yc.png

I'm curious to know what the resolution is. I apologize if it should be obvious, but I don't see that this was fixed & I'm experiencing the same thing. In my case, I had no issues playing on 1.6.4 up until this past Monday, 10/14. At that time, my hard drive crashed & was replaced. Now for some reason, I'm seeing these dark areas same as what's being shown in the screen shots above. I don't know if something went wrong with the re-installation process or if I 'm missing an update of some sort.
I'm also noticing darker than normal shaded areas under trees which usually clear up when I walk into them. When I say 'darker than normal', I mean that the area is noticeably darker than the should be but not completely black. I can provide screen shots if requested. So again, is there an actual resolution, or is this an anomaly I have to live with. Thanks.

It's fixed in 13w36a, which is a 1.7 snapshot and 1.6.4 doesn't contain these fixes.

Thanks, So do I just wait for the 1.7 release?

Alright. I'm back with more goods on the remainder of this bug. :3

I resolved my slow-world-generation problems by upgrading to Java 64 bit. Man, oh man is that better. 😃

Here are 10 screenshots of 7 different Black Lighting incidents I've recorded yesterday on 13w43a. Note, since the "fix" in 13w36a this bug has become about 100x more rare, so in my mind this isn't as much "fixed" as lowered from "makes game aesthetically untennable" priority down to "gosh darn it, I am a perfectionist" priority. :3

http://imgur.com/a/tn76v

You can tell by the coords in my F3 stats that many of these shots happen to have been taken near the farlands. That is entirely coincidental, I just wandered out there for fun. My exploration shows that blacklight bugs happen neither more nor less frequently in that vicinity. This trip and the timestamps on the last 6 events show an encounter frequency of about one black lighting bug caught per 3 minutes of full speed flying through amplified world type.

This issue still isn't fixed. Can someone please re-open this bug report?