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[sergiocornaga]

Your terrain has diagonals, have you considered that your shadows might need them too?

[eigenbom]

@sergio - yeh i have!


Update: playing with some different 16x16 block situations to look at the lighting..

[Thecoolestnerdguy]

Very nice game, you're developing something solid here. I can't wait to put my hands on it ( launch an alpha version!).
I vote in:

- Smart NPCs (able to build, fight, etc..)
- Castles/Dungeons
And HOUSELEGSSSSSS 

The ilumination is nice for me, just need some bugfixes, don't worry to much about that.
And the art it's great, so minimalist, chunky, blocky, retro.(I say that because I don't have an artist vision to say something it's wrong with your art).
I hope it will feature awesome chiptune music.
Also, from now I will follow your amazing devlog!

[eyeliner]

Will we hear the nature?

[eigenbom]

@thecoolestnerdguy, i'm working on an alpha atm, i'm glad you like the look of the game so far

@eyeliner You mean the birds and the bees? Actually I really look forward to bringing the world alive with sound, but haven't really thought about sound yet.

[jmcmorris]

Lighting is tricky. I remember reading your analysis on Terraria's lighting. They too had some problems with certain situations. I think what sergiocornaga suggested with the diagonal shadows might help out some.

Yet another similarity in our projects. I too have not considered much about sound. I am just now starting to. I'm sure you'll do a good job with it once you do put the time in.

[eigenbom]

Yeh, I started implementing diagonal shadows but adding slopes doesn't fix all the situations, and so you have a mix of blocky and slopey artifacts. Still I'll take a closer look at some time, but for now the basics of lighting are in and today I'll just be experimenting with some other light-related stuff.

[eyeliner]

@eyeliner You mean the birds and the bees? Actually I really look forward to bringing the world alive with sound, but haven't really thought about sound yet.

Exactly right. Carry on brave soldier!

[eigenbom]

Update: Hey tiggywiggies, the lighting now is computed on demand (when a subchunk becomes visible) and updates in real-time. I made video! Ignore all the bugs

Blocks can register whether they are transparent (like the platform or leaf block), opaque, or whether they emit light, like these gnarly skulls..



In the debug build you can also show the light flow with some nifty arrows ...



And here's the lighting in a typical scene..



So yeh, after all that work, I think it's not too bad. It's not totally awesome, but for now, it works well enough that I can move onto the next thing on my list. :D

[happymonster]

Looking nice.. I think you could do with more foreground shades, in the same way you have for the background tiles.

[rek]

Looks great! The only thing I found odd is that MM doesn't emit any light himself, so he can be in total darkness (even when holding a skull in his hand).

[mokesmoe]

Why would moonman be bioluminescent?

Also Terraria works the same way, so it's not that odd.

[rek]

Why would moonman be bioluminescent?

Because he's the moonman.

Also because I think knowing where your player character is is pretty fundamental.

[jmcmorris]

Not being able to see your character and being dependent on a light source was one of the things I liked most about Terraria. It really gave a sense of exploration and mystery. Also when you're weaker it can be a little scary.

[Cyral]

Update: Here's my first test with lighting. The first image shows the terrain (red for solid block, grey for background block/wall, and white for open), the second shows the lighting computed on it. This algorithm models a boundary spreading out from the lit areas, decreasing with each step. Roughly..

Code:

uint8 light[w*h] stores the light values
initialise all open tiles as FULLY_LIT, and non-open ones as NULL
store all tiles adjacent to the fully lit ones in a set<index> boundary
while(boundary is not empty){
  newboundary = {}
  foreach(adjacent tile, t, to boundary){
    if (light[t]==NULL){
      set attenuation=10 if t is a wall, or 40 if its a block
      light[t] = min(light of all adjacent tiles) - attenuation
      newboundary += t
    }  
  }
  boundary = newboundary
}
// done!

The results are promising, but there's some major issues:
- in the cave at the top right we see a horizontal band of light, seeping through the thin wall ... this looks wrong (but is definitely in accordance with the algorithm)
- in the caves at the bottom, the light falls down from the holes, but doesn't bleed outwards into the surrounding caves (maybe a second pass of the algorithm would fix this?)
- the light at the cave entrance near the center is all wrong

Anyways, back to the drawing board..

Edit: Changing the min to a max gives the light a little more freedom ...

Hello, I really like how this game looks, I'm making a game that is quite similar too this. Ive experimented with lighting alot (Pixelshaders, bluring values, etc) but nothing seems to work well for my game. Your game looks exactly how I was trying to make it. Would you be willing to elaborate a little more on how you did it?