Just wondering if I could have basic information on lighting.

For example, what's the difference between realtime and baked lighting..? GameGuru starts with realtime lighting because it says there aren't any baked lightmaps there. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using each one and how do you add and use baked lightmaps..?

Also, I found that changing the skybox makes no difference to the lighting. If I want to change to a sunset skybox the ground and the protagonist's hands/weapons are fully lit and it looks decidedly odd lol. And it's even worse with night skies. Should the skybox automatically change the lighting in the game or do you have to do this yourself by adjusting the sliders after pressing Tab twice..?

Any help would be much appreciated, ta!

snowdog,

Real Time lighting is used in the Editor as the default and is what had existed previously before the baking process was introduced... Baking was intended to improve the quality of lighting and shadows for final games as it does not use real time as the baking is intended to carry out the needed calculations before your game is released and apply them to your game level before hand. Thus when the game is played the baked lightmaps do not need to be called in real time which in theory also boosts performance too and speeds up game play.

To add baked lightmaps - when you are in test run mode (Playing test level) You use the keys F1 - F4 to carry out 4 different Baking qualities. F1 is lowest quality - F4 is highest. The process says this when you try it. It may take some time to bake a level especially if you have a big complex one with lots of content and the highest quality (F4) will take the longest to bake. Best perhaps try F1 first.

There is perhaps some difference of opinion as to any benefits and disadvantages of baking which you I guess will have to adjudge for yourself as it works best for you.

Some seem to find that baking makes little difference to performance or is even worse. In my case real time performance in any case is lower than it has been in earlier versions so baking is advantages, however I have issues in Baked levels so neither mode is ideal and or usable for me. Real Time to slow - baked having unacceptable issues so between a rock and a hard place. Some users I believe may have no issues at all. The nature of this product I guess.

As to Sky Boxes - Some of these used to affect the scene lighting quite a bit - others hardly noticeable. I am not sure if this has changed at all in GG version. As to the High lighting on the weapons and so on I believe this is an Issue which has been brought to TGC attention - though no idea what if anything they will do about it?

Generally speaking with regard to the environment itself, I would imagine if you want a level to be just right for your own preferences visually and look as near as possible to how you want it to look and envisage it in your minds eye for your own game levels, then its quite likely you will need to resort to many techniques including the use of the internal settings and sliders controls and tweak them almost endlessly to get close to your desired result. It can be not easy depending upon each individual game concept and how fussy some would say a game maker is about their results.

Personally I find it almost impossible to be satisfied with achievable results, but them I am a stickler for getting it right as I see it before I am happy with my results.

Hope that is of some help.

Okay, thanks for that, very helpful. Ta!

Thanks Uman .... very detailed information

Great UMan

Thus far I've found that baked maps slow my performance over real time, bu the shadows and overall look is better with the baked map.

In this same area I have 2 questions..

1) The current sky boxes all seem to have the main light (sun) in one specific place (thus the same time of day). Can this be controlled?

2) Even, when one is "inside" a closed model with no direct line to the sun, the interior is still lit by the sun. How does this work and can this be controlled?

Thanks

The sun can be controlled through the Skyspec.txt in the skybank...ie ..skybank \ clear \ skyspec.txt \

The sunlight on the buildings can be contolled in the "TAB" menu playing with the surface ambience and colours..

Hope that helps