The upcoming patch (version 1.1) will add a new lighting system into the game which introduces (soft) shadows and approximated world-space ambient occlusion.
Baked lightmaps
The goal was to have high-performance shadows which are still rendered at the same quality at long renderdistances. Baked shadows was the best option as it also allowed to add soft-shadows which are otherwise more expensive to render in realtime.
Ambient occlusion is a technique which attempts to simulate how exposed a given surface is to the surrounding light. (Corners or the lighting in caves are a prime example for that.)
Celaria is using a very rough approximation of ambient occlusion which has some drawbacks (it works best on more open maps, less so on those which are more enclosed/obstructed by surrounding geometry) but the advantage is that it allows the game to calculate AO (Ambient Occlusion) very quickly behind the scenes.
Shadows and ambient occlusion will be stored in seperate lightmaps which will then be applied on the level geometry.
Baking during gameplay
All campaign maps of the game will be shipped with perbaked lightmaps for both shadows and ambient occlusion.
Gamemap files (.cmap) however don't store lightmap information. So custom maps which are downloaded from the workshop won't have them by default.
The game will automatically generate/bake this lighting information once you start playing a map.
To minimize waiting times the baking process will run behind the scenes while you actively play the game. This means that for a short amount of time (which depends on how large the map is) you will be playing the game without shadows/AO. Once the baking process is finished they will smoothly fade in and be visible for the rest of the playsession.
To avoid having to rebake them after exiting the map, all lightmaps will be cached in the savegame directory of the game on your HDD/SSD so that they can be later loaded in if you want to replay a level.
Here is an example how this process would look like on the map "Speedline" (from left to right):
Additional changes
There are some other noteworthy changes in the upcoming patch such as:
- coloring of blocks was adjusted
- Purple checkpoint blocks are now colored red (same as the goal block)
- Changed the appearance of the 3,2,1 counter at the start of a run.
- added new options in the graphics/video settings for the lightmap generation.
- Minor tweaks/fixes in the UI
Preview now
A preview build of the upcoming 1.1 update is available as a new "Beta" branch on steam.
Open the properties page of "Celaria" and select the "Beta" branch under the "Betas" tab to download the preview build:
Note that the build is still work in progress so bugs/crashes can still occur.
You can give feedback or report any kind of issues which you encountered in this build on the steam forums or directly on the official Discord server of Celaria.
Screenshots (work in progress)
