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Graphics mode and lighting setup.

Another roguelike developer who blogs as VJOinteractive commented on my last blog about the lighting system. Actually lighting is a problem with the blender game engine, because it can have a maximum of 8 light sources. That means either having a single light source and modulating it to take in to account the number of lights in the main viewport (Simple lighting), or using up to 8 lights and moving them around as the camera view moves (dynamic lighting).

Dynamic lighting is my preferred option, but it's not easy to represent a single torch with a single light in an isometric view. If I place the light at the location of the torch the top of the walls and anything above the player is not lit. If I place it too high up, the lighting on the character looks wrong.

There's also the fact that I'm using an old fashioned graphics mode, per vertex lighting. It's really fast and it'll run on almost any computer, even one with a crappy integrated graphics card. But the lighting options are poor. If I use a point light it has infinite distance and no fall off. The only way to fake a pool of light cast by a torch is with an overhead spotlight, but again the lighting direction looks a little weird.

So I have to decide whether to continue using per vertex lighting, or switch over to per pixel lighting with the advanced GLSL graphics mode.

GLSL lighting.
GLSL uses open GL graphics, and as such it is not well supported by older graphics cards. You need a fairly good card to get it to run. That means many tablets or laptops won't be able to run the game. It's also slower. With the older style graphics mode you get the same speed with 8 lights as you do with one. It's all calculated in a single pass. With GLSL you get slowdown with the more lights you use. However, I've checked out the latest builds of Blender and they've done some great optimizations, especially regarding armatures and mesh deformation (which can now be threaded) so performance is not quite the problem it once was.

I did some work to get my demo to work with the GLSL mode, setting textures differently and tweaking the lights. It's not something you can change with a click of a button sadly. It's not possible to provide an option for either mode depending on your computer's capabilities. I have to choose a graphics mode and move forward with development in that mode. The result was very nice, though it also highlighted some mistakes in my lighting script, such as the fact I was only using 4 lights, not 7 as I had intended, or the fact that the lights were being knocked out of alignment when they were recalculated and re-parented.

Anyway, here are some screens to show what the game could look like if I switch over to GLSL mode:

Much darker and atmospheric, but maybe too dark if you don't have a torch.
The back of characters carrying a torch is plunged in to shadow, though I could correct this by using an extra "filler light" parented to the camera.
It's also possible to have dynamic shadows with GLSL, but it really requires two shadow casting lamps per light source, reducing the overall pool of dynamic lights by half.
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