Night Map Discussions:

[The Mann]

Turn up the Contrast Settings and feast your eyes on this teaser posted on the guns of icarus facebook page:



I was discussing this with Muse, apparently they are bringing night maps to Skirmish and Alliance.

When asked whether ships would use Headlights, Muse mentioned lighting will be done using Ambient Light.

How do you all feel about Night Maps?

• I for one am very excited for them, I will be awesome to sneak around and ambush enemies.

[Huskarr]

\o/ I gonna trip over so many things in night map. But yay more maps

[The Mann]

I wonder if they'll do maps with a Moon or stars in the skybox, that would be awesome!

[BinaryDragon]

Looks awesome. This is gonna be great!

[Schwalbe]

I know something about computer graphics, lighting and shading models.

Someone who told you they are going to use AMBIENT lights does not.

Ambient light is a component of lighting calculated and is used just so the object is not rendered completely dark - the thing is, that's just a solid color, and usually very weak at that so it doesn't affect calculations too much. It's constant, and doesn't depend on lights, surface, material, etc.


Thus begs the question, what that person meant?

Edit: Unless Ambient Light is referring to way Unity does lighting. And knowing how ass backwards Unity can be, well. It may mean literally whatever (I know jack shit about Unity though)

[Watchmaker]

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

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. 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.

[GurasOguras]

It's nothing new. We have Fight over Firnfeld.

[Dementio]

Step 1: Color your balloon black
Step 2: Flank the enemy, being all sneaky like
Step 3: Die to the AI that doesn't care about wether they can actually see you or not while you can't see them
Step 4: Cry.

Night maps looks nice, but I think they could do with a tint of blue, immitating some moonlight, could also help with adding some visibility.