Amnesia: The Dark Descent Windows, Mac, Linux game

Billboards in game design are 2D images rendered within a 3D environment (NOT to be confused with sprites, which are a 2D image rendered within a 2D environment, in HPL2's case, this would be the inventory and other GUI's, or a plane, which is technically a 3D object) The billboard design concept has been used in many games throughout the years to create or simulate a wide variety of effects, from trees, clouds, and halo's produced by bright light, and even sometimes lens flare effects. HPL2 uses them mostly for enhancing the lighting, via halo billboards, and many of the light source assets already have one built into the entity.

This, however, isn't to say that there are no ways to make new and even improved effects through the use of billboards

Most light source assets in Amnesia already have built-in billboards for halo's, since they are a standard part of creating realistic lighting. What I have done is taken that logic a step further, using large, and faintly colored halo billboards in the environment to simulate an ambient glow for an area with decently-bright lighting.

This also helps me better blend the lighting with the fog in that room as well, and as you should know, cohesion is always a good thing when it comes to any form of design. So far I have only done this for the first room, but I will be working out this effect for the other areas as well and implement this in my future level design.

One thing different I am doing with this mod is creating outdoor environments visible outside of windows, cracks in the wall, you name it.

One thing that always annoyed me with custom stories and TCs alike is that the windows were plain white, and glowed, even if the location they were in was darkened. I always felt like if the area were truly dark, then the windows would be too, and furthermore, if there were windows that you could see, there would be some ambient light in the location anyway.

You can see a bit of my transparent window design in the screenshot above, but I will include a screenshot where a window view is more of the focus below.

The sun glow in the window ironically is also a billboard effect. It is simply a halo over a custom sun texture that I put in the sky area above that outside environment.

It is definitely interesting how you can use billboards to simulate a large number of lighting effects without straining the engine by giving it actual lights to render into the scene. Using billboards can also make your levels look a ton better, especially when combined with fog, and for any fellow modders who might be reading this, I definitely recommend playing with billboards and simply seeing what certain ideas you may or may not have actually look like in-game, you never know, you might accidentally find something really nice that you can use in your designing!

That will be all for today!
- HappyMatt12345