Saturday, January 11, 2014

The new lighting is here:

How does it work?

Summary: It is 1 pre-baked lighting map that is quickly re-rendered when any given bucket become dirty.
This is done by slicing up images of lights into 16x16 chunks and placing each chunk into a cell on a grid
that is overlayed over the tilemap. When re-rendering of a light-source needs to be done, we only re-render
the cells that that light touches.

As an added efficiency bonus, each 16x16 image chunk has meta-data associated with it.
Including the highest and lowest RGB values. In this way I can additively blend together
stacks of lights in a given cell. Then when one light is deleted, I have TWO re-render options:


Option1: If no overflow is detected, SUBTRACT the bitmap you are deleting from the pre-baked lighting map.
Option2: If overflow exists, Re-Add all of the bitmap's with a given [cell/stack] on the grid.
         Then decide if the re-rendered stack is overflowing.

What do I mean by overflow?
If we have two pixels:
[200] AND [045]
And add them to get:
[245]
If we want to get back to [200], we can subtract [045]

HOWEVER, if we have two pixels:
[200] & [177]
And add them to get: [377]
Well.... RGB max value is 255... so it gets capped at 255. AKA. Overflow.
When overflow occurs, we cannot work backwards.
We cannot subtract [177] from [255] to get back to [200].

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