Info > Feedback and Suggestions

Night Map Discussions:

<< < (2/3) > >>

Watchmaker:
I also know something about computer graphics and lighting, in particular in this game, since I build all our customized stuff. :D

1) Ambient light is not necessarily a solid color (it just refers to light that is "sourceless" and generally not dependent on a surface's position and/or orientation); ours is actually a three-component gradient (sky/horizon/ground).

2) What that person probably meant is that we can't depend on extra dynamic lights (which would include ship headlights) for visibility on a map like this, because those may be turned off based on a combination of the Light Quality setting and distance/importance.

The only lights we support on all quality settings are the ambient gradient mentioned above and a single directional light (the "sun".)  This is a deliberate tradeoff to allow accessibility on a wide range of hardware that we chose for the game in general, and have to design this map around.

Schwalbe:
1) That's what I meant, my honest mistake was using... hm. The direct translation from polish would be mental-shortcut. I hope it's understandable. ^^

Also. This sounds curious, if you have possibility to link me an article on that ambient light technique, that would be cool. ^^ I'd search for it myself, it's just I'm slightly busy being fisted by my faculty.

2) You mean, that it's due to balance issues somewhat? I mean, in case somebody turns that setting to off to improve performance, and thus possibly giving himself disadvantage? This begs another question - how would flares work? Or are flares mostly the entity textured with transparence to simulate the light, and not necesserily the light source itself?


Yeah, just like I thought. :D Although, hmmmm. Do point lights REALLY hit performance that much? Or is that Unity problem with lighting calculations? So far I only have experience with creating point lights in (almost) pure OpenGL only, so yeah. ^^


Thanks for answer Watchmaker, honestly kind of surprised of having an answer from someone who knows his shit and this soon. :)

Watchmaker:
I don't have a handy article, unfortunately.  I've heard our ambient technique called "tricolor" before, if that helps find any resources.  Also as of Unity 5 it's one of the built in options (we don't use the built in implementation because ours predates it and I haven't had time to unify the two properly, but it's the same kind of thing.)

It's not "balance" in the traditional sense so much as keeping the game, in all forms, still playable at reasonable framerates and as a good experience on our minimum required hardware.  If a night map were only playable on higher settings (because there wasn't enough light to navigate by when "optional" lights were deactivated, say) that would hardly be fair to a great many of our players.  Likewise always forcing those lights on would likely drastically reduced framerate on weaker machines, so that's not a great option either.

Under forward rendering, the cost of any per-pixel light is related to the number and screen-space size of the objects it illuminates.  If we were using some stripe of deferred rendering additional lights might be cheaper, but that has its own complexities and trade-offs.

The Mann:
Another screenshot:

Carn:
All I can imagine are stealth galleons. Rather terrifying if you think about it.

Flying along, looking for enemies, suddenly next to a large cliff, hwatcha fire lights up the night.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page