Photon 2: Emergency Systems Platform (Beta)
Photon 2 is a new emergency vehicle system that adds lights, sirens, and more to emergency vehicles in Garry’s Mod. It is a full rewrite of the legacy Photon Lighting Engine released nearly ten years ago.
This addon is currently in beta and remains under heavy development. Please excuse the mess and report any issues.
[photon.lighting]
Problems? CLICK HERE[github.com] for Help & Troubleshooting.
As Photon 2 is merely a platform, the Starter Pack is required for all of Photon 2’s demonstrator vehicles to work correctly. If you continue to see error models, verify that you don’t have any of the addons disabled.
Photon 2’s demonstrators are based on real-world vehicles and feature 4K liveries (skins), realistic equipment, lights, siren models and flash patterns.
Current Demonstrator Vehicles:
- Boulder Police Department – 2020 Ford Police Interceptor Utility with a Federal Signal Valor lightbar and PathFinder Unitrol siren tones.
- Boulder County Sheriff’s Office – 2020 Ford Police Interceptor Utility with a SoundOff Signal nForce Lightbar and SoundOff siren tones.
- Fort Collins Police Department – 1996 Ford Crown Victoria with a Code 3 MX7000 with Motorola Astro Spectra siren tones.
- Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police – 2020 Ford Police Interceptor Utility with a SoundOff Signal nForce Lightbar and SoundOff dual-tone sirens.
- Seattle Police Department – 2013 Ford Police Interceptor Utility with a Federal Signal Legend lightbar, Motorola Astro Spectra siren tones and three livery variants (classic light-blue, refreshed dark-blue, and the 2015 redesign).
- Las Vegas Metropolitan Police – 2016 Ford Police Interceptor Utility with a Federal Signal Vision SLR lightbar and Federal Signal and PathFinder SSP siren tones.
- Photon 2 Wiki & Documentation[photon.lighting]
- Official Photon Community Discord[photon.lighting]
- Photon v2 Github Project[photon.lighting]
- Do I need delete/uninstall Photon LE (Legacy)?
No, Photon 2 is fully independent and can be safely run alongside Photon LE. - Will old components/vehicles/sirens work in Photon 2?
Not at the moment, but it is planned (but probably not for a while). - Why am I seeing ERROR models on cars?
You’re missing required content or you have one or more required addons disabled. Because it is not possible for addons to automatically subscribe to other required addons, it is important to read addon descriptions so you know the prerequisites.
- Written from the ground-up to resolve Photon LE’s problematic structure and code patterns.
- Incredibly modular framework unifies functionality of all different lighting types (primary, auxiliary, traffic, basic lighting, etc.)
- Dedicated Photon entities are now used instead of actual vehicle entities, allowing Photon to be used on any type of entity when configured, and drastically reducing the chance of conflict with other addons.
- Robust component inheritance support allows you to easily construct new components based on existing ones without redundant copying and pasting.
- Edit nearly every aspect of any component when adding it to a vehicle in the vehicle file itself, including flash patterns and inputs. No more needing to create dedicated component files every time you want custom behavior.
- User-friendly menus and windows make the addon much more approachable for non-enthusiast users.
- Highly responsive developer workflow allows for vehicle and component creation/editing with minimal need to ever respawn or restart. Simply save the file and immediately see changes take effect.
- Error-intolerant operations pipeline exposes errors when they occur instead of silently failing, allowing for rapid debugging and a much more stable code base.
- Support for different types of engine lighting (2D sprites, 3D meshes, dynamic lights, projected textures and sub-materials)
- Extremely customizable control configuration, allowing for any type of hardware button to be bound (as long as the game itself recognizes it), the ability to have multi-button combination commands, and even multiple input profiles that can be created, swapped, and assigned to individual vehicles as desired.
- New, high-fidelity siren sounds (made by me for Photon 2) including modern tones from SoundOff Signal, Federal Signal, Whelen and Code 3. Many new sirens are planned and in progress.
Preliminary testing shows Photon 2 performs on-par or slightly better than Photon LE (Legacy), but there are a number of optimizations that haven’t been implemented yet. Once the addon is stable and well established, optimization will be a focus.
Lights in Photon 2 are somewhat dimmer than in Photon LE and can look strange in some circumstances. Although it’s my favorite thing to work on, it’s time-consuming and there are more pressing things to address first.
Although fully-functional and capable of achieving its purpose, the technical implementation of key-press detection needs refinement in order to feel more fluid and intuitive.
While a fully-functional graphical editor for everything is likely beyond the scope of a hobby project, a number of helpful tools are planned to streamline the developer process.
Photon 2 would not be possible without generous community contributions and available assets. Special thanks to Roegen, Tyler Designs, Twurtleee, and OfficerFive0 for making their content available.
