Friday Blog 249 - Update 0.11.1 Is Live Right Now! Bright Forests, Dark Tunnels
major updateColony Survival · published
The lightmapping made visible
A massive update to the lighting system is available right now! It’s compatible with pre-existing savegames. If Steam doesn’t update automatically, try verifying the integrity of the game cache.
In the previous versions of the game, the world was either directly lit or indirectly lit. Direct lighting occurs when the sun hits an area, all the rest is shadow. There was just one value for each. Whether the shadow was behind a little bush in an open field, or deep into a cave, didn’t matter. All indirectly lit areas received the same brightness.
Old
We did add a system that checked the position of the player. It measured how exposed the player was to the skybox. If the player was in an open field, the indirect lighting would be boosted. Deep in a cave, the indirect lighting would be dimmed.
But this too treated all shadows in the same way. If you were standing in a tunnel in the middle of a mountain with a view onto bushes in the middle of a field, the shadows in the tunnel would be just as dark as the shadows caused by the bushes!
Of course, this is not how lighting works in real life. Real light bounces around. When something is not directly in the sun, but sunlight is reflected towards it from the sky, the ground and other nearby surfaces, it still appears bright to us. But when you close your curtains, move into the basement or walk into a cave, the reflected light gets weaker and weaker until it is fully dark.
New
It’s very performance intensive to continuously simulate this on your PC. But as a voxel game where the world is made out of big cubes, there are some useful approximations. In the new update, we calculate lightmaps for all those cubes. The brightest value is for every 1x1x1 area that can directly see the sky above it. Every block that can’t see the sky like that, but that is directly adjacent to the first category, is a bit darker. This chain is calculated 16 blocks deep.
Shaded areas in forests and the interiors of buildings with big windows will be a lot brighter compared to the previous update. But on the opposite side - deep tunnels will be actually dark now! There’s a more realistic contrast in general. The wonky system where all the indirect lighting would become brighter or darker based on the position of the player, has been removed.
Old
Instead of trying to trace complicated paths to the sun, there are some simpler rules you can apply. Crevices and hidden corners will always be darker than openly exposed surfaces. Ambient Occlusion exploits this to add some realism. We had been using a standard AO that applied this effect, but it only looked at smaller details - it had a range of about five centimeters. We added a new one that uses the voxel system to analyze the local environment. Instead of five centimeters, it adds appropriate shading based on a range of about two meters.
Last but not least, while polishing the lighting and its consequences, we took a look at the tone mapping. Tone mapping is a form of image processing that tries to turn the raw outputs of the game engine into something your monitor can render well. The old tone mapping was pretty standard, but it did increase contrast and change colors in ways we weren’t completely happy with. We changed it to more neutral tone mapping.
The new lighting system is more complex than the old one, and that will decrease performance a bit. But at the same time, you should need less torches and other player-made lighting in this new version, and that actually helps performance again. Another thing that should help with performance on very low-end hardware, is a a way to toggle the sun off. With the new light mapping, the game actually looks fairly okay in that state.
New
If you’re playing 0.11.1 and you run into any glitches or bugs, please let us know! If you don’t like the changes in general, if you want things to be darker, brighter, with more contrast, more saturated, less saturated - share that too. The previous version, 0.11.0, will still be available in the beta branches tab. We’ll definitely read feedback on our Discord, in the comments of this blog and on our Steam Forums!
Heel veel plezier met de update :D