TaCZ: Lights

TaCZ Lights

TaCZ Lights brings real dynamic lighting to Timeless and Classics Zero, powered by Veil. Flashlights light up the world in front of you, lasers put a dot of light where they hit, and every shot briefly lights up the area around the gun.

Everything is driven by gunpacks: authors add a small taczlights block to their existing TaCZ display files, no extra files and no code needed.

Features

Attachment lights

• Flashlights and other attachments can cast real spot lights (a cone) or point lights (a glow) from any bone in their model
• Lights follow the gun: aiming, sway, recoil, reloads and inspect animations
• Attachments can have several light modes, for example a wide flood and a narrow focused beam
• Press the light key (default J) to cycle through the modes: off, mode 1, mode 2, and back to off
• The mode is saved on the attachment itself, so it stays the same when you move it to another gun
• Other players see your lights too

Lasers

• Every laser casts a dot of light where it hits, in the laser’s color, including custom colors from the TaCZ customization screen
• The dot uses a custom cylindrical light, so it stays the same size at any distance and stops at the first block it hits
• Press the laser key (default K) to turn lasers on and off
• Visible laser beams glow, with adjustable strength and width
• Gunpacks can mark a laser as infrared: the laser key then cycles on, IR and off (see Modern Mayhem below)

Muzzle flashes

• Every shot briefly lights up the surroundings, even at high fire rates
• Works for your own shots, other players and TaCZ mobs
• Suppressed guns don’t flash
• Gunpacks can change the color, brightness, size and duration per gun, or turn it off

Client config

Found in config/taczlights-client.toml. It can be edited while the game is running.

• Turn attachment lights, laser dots, muzzle flashes and laser glow on or off individually
• Limit how many lights and muzzle flashes are active at once
• Adjust the laser glow strength and width

For gunpack authors

Add a taczlights block to an attachment’s display file:

"taczlights": {
  "default_mode": 0,
  "modes": [
    {
      "name": "Flood",
      "lights": [
        { "type": "spot", "bone": "light_pos", "color": "#FFF4E0", "brightness": 1.0, "distance": 24, "angle": 45 }
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Focused",
      "lights": [
        { "type": "spot", "bone": "light_pos", "color": "#FFF8F0", "brightness": 3.0, "distance": 60, "angle": 15 }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "laser_light": { "radius": 0.06, "softness": 0.6, "brightness": 2.0 }
}

• Lights sit on the named bone and point along its -Z axis, the same rule TaCZ uses for laser_beam bones
• laser_light sets the laser’s dot. Lasers without one use the default dot, if the client config allows it
• A gun’s display file can set its muzzle flash with "taczlights": { "muzzle_flash": { ... } }
• Changes can be reloaded in game with /tacz reload or F3+T

Requirements

• TaCZ for NeoForge 1.21.1 (unofficial port)
• Veil 4.4.0 or newer
• NeoForge 1.21.1

TaCZ Lights must be installed on both the client and the server.

Compatibility

• Modern Mayhem: infrared lasers and IR lights are only visible through Modern Mayhem’s night vision (not implemented yet, only on Neoforge 1.21.1 version)
• Shader packs (Iris): Veil’s lighting doesn’t work with shader packs, and the laser glow turns off while one is active
• Veil fixes: TaCZ enables stencil on the main framebuffer, which breaks Veil’s lighting. TaCZ Lights includes fixes for this and a few other Veil rendering bugs. It turns them off automatically on Veil versions that already fix them.

Support

Found a bug or need help? TaCZ Lights has its own post in the TaCZ Discord server, where I answer questions and help with problems:

1. Join the TaCZ Discord
2. Open the TaCZ Lights post

When reporting a problem, please include your latest.log and a list of your mods.