I'm Chris. I would like to make games but all that comes out are prototypes and mountains of assets. Am I doing this right?

Report RSS DevRamblings 5 - It's about lights

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Goood morning, folks!

The last week I was busy finding new ways of lighting up scenes in Firewalker.
That's not putting them on fire, that's setting up point and spotlights and better ambient light.
Simple fake 2D light
I did find a way that seems to be alright. It imposes one extra draw call all in all and so far it seems that it doesn't have any significant impact on the time required to render the scene.

So, it works by dropping a few things into an extra rendering layer (lights, mainly). They can be of any shape and colour. They can even be 2D volumetric light meshes (for dynamic cutout shadows).
That light layer is not rendered by the main camera but by a second camera that is rendering only this one layer.
To fake the ambient light I simply use the clear colour of that camera. At night it clears to some dark blue colour and at day it clears to something that looks like day.
The result is put into a render texture.
I call that a lightmap. Strictly speaking it's not a lightmap but the idea is the same.
The lightmap gets multiplied onto the the image that is rendered by the main camera.
Et voila.
Lights and daylight cycle. All dynamic.
Simple fake 2D light
That was the big thing this week.
I also wanted to implement a combat system but it turned out I already did that.
So that was one free point on my list.
Next thing on my schedule is a status indicator to show the status of the player and enemies.
That means, is something poinsoned or burning or frozen or numb and so on.

There shall be more colours then!
And that was it for this time, thanks for reading!

Cheers,
df

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