Now that Lee has got around to looking at lighting in Reloaded, I think this is going to be very important if we are going to compete on the likes of Steam. Its great the ambient occlusion light mapper is almost there and this should be a win win in terms of better visuals and performance gains.



I was just watching a video on YouTube of how lighting is being done in Unity 5 and I think there are some things we can learn from here for Reloaded such as the use of a single object shader which can be used to make lots of very unique materials but only using the same shader across everything.



Watch from 40:00 to 1:00:00 below to see how Unity are calculating light from the skybox and direct lights with static and dynamic objects then from 56:00 to 1:00:00 to see how they created a much larger scene using the same shader and time of day.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZGA5NLwy4A&t=40m0s



Unity 5 Lighting Video - 40:00 to 1:00:00

Just been watching the video off the blog. Some nice stuff there. If Lee could get baking to work in a similar way, it would certainly improve testing, as it would render as you change the scene. As long as the editor didn't completely halt each time, it would be a nice way to get the work done when your sitting back pondering
The Unified shader stuff sounds good too. Perhaps Lee is already considering this with his shader hints in his blog. All interesting stuff, and could have useful pointers for a few more things in the complete video. I liked the UI stuff nearer the start for one. Food for though for when Ui options are implemented maybe.

Some really nice ideas there! At some point it would be good to do a side by side comparison between the two products, but not today The good news is that I have already written an 'on the fly' lightmapper a while back so should be possible to resurrect that, and the live-preview and sun position changer is also a nice touch. My focus remains on performance this week however so watch out for a week when I am on visual work and we can bounce some more ideas around in my daily blog.