Dev Diary Follow-up; Lighting and Atmospherics

Hi all,

Allow me to be the first person to share our perspective on some of the upcoming changes to LEGO® Worlds over the next couple of months. We’ve come a mighty long way, and we’ve got a mighty long way to go, but we’re starting to see some excellent progress following Emilio’s Dev Diary on the visuals of the game: http://steamcommunity.com/app/332310/discussions/0/485622866440633602

Let’s take a look shall we?

Per Biome Atmospherics:

We always want to make things prettier. To do that, you sometimes need to make things a little uglier. Or in the case of some of our forests, spookier! So what’s one good way to do that? Adding localised fog to them of course! One of the latest internal updates has shown off a rather gorgeous improvement to several of our varied biomes. Such as this:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=677841524

We also wanted to add some vibrancy to the biomeswhich includes the way we handle global lighting. This results in some truly lovely visuals like this:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=677841960

And some very impressive nighttime scenes like this:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=677842389

Large Scale Ambient Occlusion:

Another update plucked straight from Emilio’s diary, is this rather major improvement to the Ambient Occlusion or more simply, for someone like me that didn’t know what that meant before, “make dark things darker”.

Toby has kindly provided me with a couple of before and afters, that show how caves or small holes in the terrain now generate natural shadows. One such example would be this one….

Before:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=677842834

After:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=677843003

How about another?

Before:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=677843308

After:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=677843798

One more?

Before:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=677844114

After:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=677844328

Oooo go on then, here’s one more.

Before:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=677844756

After:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=677845277

Best thing about both these updates? When they roll out, they’ll be combined with a lot of the improvements that were patched into Update 5 so people should be seeing much smoother gameplay. Nice!

We’ll have a lot more to share with you over the coming weeks, and we may even have some major news in the not too distant future too, which is well worth keeping an eye out for! One final note from us, we have another patch for this update planned to solve any outstanding performance issues that we’re aware of, so stay tuned there.

Many Thanks,
The LEGO® Worlds Team