I've never heard of mipmaps and I have no idea what all this is (I'm a designer and writer ), but it sounds interesting, so I'll do some research. :O Still open to any contributions to my little problem! :D

Wtf? Use raycasts. That's what Thief is doing, back in the days when there was no Shadow Mapping and the GPU barely drew textured triangles slightly faster than the CPU. Stop trying to read and apply source code that was written for a whole different hardware architecture and engine.

I used raycasts, distance, and triggers in my prototype but they are limited. Sometimes a gameobject is in the way, but it doesn't produce enough shadow to realistically be an area the player could hide. It breaks the realism, so I'm using RenderTexture at the moment, however, it is really expensive. It was chewing the cpu by 73% and after we added a FixedUpdate, it went down to 43%, but the lag is still very noticeable. Even with raycasts similar to how they did it in another splinter cell ( I can't remember which one), it only affects what the AI can see and not how lit the player is on a gradient.

Theif 2 and Splinter cell did it well, so I'm curious how they did it. I'm not necessarily trying to do exactly what they did. Any option available is good, but it has to be efficient and realistic. Because when I'm playing a shadow-stealth game, and I walk into a place that ought to be darkened, only to discover i'm lit, or vise-versa, that has a negative effect on my enjoyment in that moment. Like I said earlier, I'm not a pro scripter. I'm a designer who can script decently, but even this problem, run across several guys I know, has been a tricky problem.

Anyone have an idea how i might do this in Unity with C#? XD

Darn. I can't make heads or tails about it, yet it is right there before my eyes.

Oh, that's cool to know about the raycasts and thief 2. I'm reading it, however, I'm not a very good scripter and I've only played with C#. Still, this is pretty great! Is this C++ language in the tweets?

Is there any way to get the shadowmap data produced in Unity from the point and spot lights to determine how lit the player is?

I'm asking because I have already used triggers/volumes, raycasts, and rendertexture to determine how lit they are, however they are either inconvenient or expensive.

I'm looking to determine how lit the player is similarly to how they did it in Thief 2 or Splinter Cell:Chaos Theory. If anyone has any suggestions on how to do it, I'm all ears.

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18882-how-does-the-light-awareness-system-las-work/

Found an interesting answer from the Dark Mod and thought of sharing it here.

You need to add lights in the level by hand anyway, you just create a prefab with a light, a collider, and a script to resize the radius at runtime, et voilà!  Wink
It is not realistic, you mean the level building procedure?

Yeah, I did that. By realistic, I mean there are many small areas wherein the light/shadow didn't function well enough, although at this point even recreations of Theif 2 by fans have said to use the same method. I'll just go through and make a level to alter it so it conforms or change the setting from cyberpunk to something medieval so there aren't as many lights everywhere. I'll be adding sound as well, so I'll check if a combination of the two works. I think it will. Thank you all for your answers! :D

I've already used colliders and a distance to the center of it to check how visible the player is. It works, but it is a real pain in the butt when building a level because it isn't realistic enough for me. It's also a pain in the butt to place them everywhere only to change the level design. It took hours last time.

This all makes me very optimistic and I'll look into these. I'm not as good at programming as I would like to be(I can do simple stuff and have never touched a shader or lights), I'm more a design/artist type, and I'm doing a slice of a game by myself for school as a final project, but I think I can do this. I was never sure where to get the data, but these options make sense to me when I read them. I'll take a look at all of them tonight. :D

Hello! I am a little new to Unreal Engine, but I'd like to hear any suggestions about how this might be done in Unity as well. I'm a fan of Thief 2 and I wanted to create something similar with the lights. At present, I am using Volumes/Triggers to determine if the player is within distance of the light, then I check the distance from the player to the light and divide it by a float to get the visibility. The closer you are, the more visible you are. It is very simple.

Unfortunately, each light is not the same size and each area is not the same size, so this solution I found is very inconvenient and time consuming, both when setting up the volumes/triggers and modifying them when the level prototype undergoes alterations.

Because of this, I want to check how much light is hitting the player or how lit they are. So, I do not just want to know if a light is hitting the player, because I can do that, but I want to know by how much the player is lit up in the scene. Areas that are very dark will completely obscure the player(dark), areas with a lot of light will make them visible(light), and those areas in between will offer a value of how visible the player is (all the grays in between dark (0) and light (100).

Would anyone have a solution to this? I'm not sure if this has something to do with a shader or whatnot.

Thanks for your time in reading this message.

Anything particularly to stealth and Unity3D? I am reluctant to use Unreal Engine 4 since I have to have a stealth game done for a project in 2 months. Thanks for the answers so far!

I will be scripting some AI for a stealth game soon. I have seen the stealth tutorials for unity, although I would like to build upon it. I was wondering if there were any resources the community may have for scripting AI for unity or in C#. I'm not incredibly talented as I've spent more time creating art, but I am patient.

After this year is over, I plan to start a prototype for my first game(outside of school. I've made over a dozen) and I have 2 questions:

1. Where can I go to ask people about their preferences of genre?

2. Where might I go to gather statitistics?

 I am eager to read the replies.

I'm putting what I think I can make or look forward to making, but anything added in a reply will be noted.

I'm just polling to see which of these gaming genres people like the most. Answer it please. :D

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PLG9996

Hello! I am the sole current founder of Mountain Forge Games, which is also my name on here! I've been in the independent design courses for a year and have experience doing design, business, art, and scripting. I've learned quite a lot in the past year and currently trying my hand at level design, texture art, and environment design. I have a game called Shambler's Wake that came out a few months ago as a class project of which received more videos on youtube than I thought. At the moment, I intend to finish this next year of classes before making Mountain Forge Games an official studio to create games and hopefully deliver some excellent content for others to enjoy. :D