I was having a look at this picture of a lightsaber fight in the dark.

 

The surfaces close to the lightsabers are appropriately brighter, but not bathed in specific colour of the lightsaber. For example it would have been nicer if the light thrown on the sith were red to reflect the light from their lightsabers.

 

I think it's too late to change the engine, but that would be seomething nice next time.

may i have some please

Looking at all the other screenshots, 'looks like that's already implemented.

I think I understand what you're saying... as in why aren't the characters' faces bathed in the same color light as their lightsabers? This is because (as I understand it) making the lightsabers actual light sources drove the mem requirements through the roof. It just wasn't feasable this time around.

kool

at least this idea wasnt carelessly overlooked

I remember Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy had great lightsaber effects but that's a completely different game using a completely different engine. Not to mention that Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy were made for the PC and then ported to the Xbox where as KotOR II is being made for both simultaneously.

The semi-technical/more boring explanation:

 

The problem was that the engine only uses a specific number of dynamic lights to determine how things should be illuminated (Not counting the ambient light). When we made the lightsabers provide a dynamic glow to surfaces around them, we ran into problems where brighter lights were getting ignored because the lightsabers were closer than other lights.

 

So you'd have a weird effect where characters would look /darker/ all around when a lightsaber shined on them than the lights in the room should have them appear. All methods for getting around this would have significantly raised the minimum system requirements on the PC and totally exceeded the capacity of the X-Box, so we unfortunately had to take this change back out.

 

-Akari

Thanks for the explanations.