End of July Update - Shadow and Lights are (Almost) Done

Hello everyone,

I know some people have complained about the massive amount of development time that the whole dynamic lighting system has eaten up, and that you would like to see more parts of the game fleshed out instead of seeing seemingly endless updates related to the new graphical system, and unfortunately, this month's work has almost entirely related to lights and shadows.

The good news is that all that stuff is bordering on being wrapped up. Aside from some specific things like including flashing lights for things like muzzle flashes and explosions, as well as ironing out some small bugs with the system, it's essentially a complete system now.

 

Naturally, shadows cast from objects will realistically fall upon smaller units, such as this Powerplant casting a shadow onto the tanks below.

 
 
Shadows will also take into account the height of terrain as well.




Specularity also plays a large factor in the lighting; the twin-turbine helicopter above has a shinier, chrome-like surface, and the canopies of aircraft and glass surfaces will appear to reflect more light than matte objects. Note that currently, shadows are only cast relative to the sun position; shadows that are simultaneously cast from nearby light sources are in the works but not finalized yet.

 
Shadows also allow for more interesting atmosphere to be created. As can be seen above, the ambient light on the map can be reduced or increased to create a different mood, like using near-zero ambient lighting to create chiaroscuro shadows for a more menacing feeling. The light color of the sun and the ambient light can also be used to create a contrasting effect, such as using an orange or red for sunlight while the ambient light uses a more blue or purple color to give a more stylized look. This is essential for creating the feeling of a certain time of day as well, such as a very low sun position with a red color to give the appearance of sunrise/sundown, or a high sun position with a low intensity and a blue tint to the map (along with a higher ambient light intensity) to give the feeling of a night illuminated by the moon.



We also got some work done on adding new terrain, since it was getting pretty boring staring a bland moonscape. Like with most other old graphics, the old terrain we had made in older builds also needed to be thrown out and completely redone. Luckily, making new terrain is pretty simple due to a mostly automated system I've created for the terrain scene file in Maya Autodesk, and I managed to crank out 2000+ terrain tiles for the game in a matter of 4 days. The game having more accurate Z-sorting also means we can do some fancier stuff with it, like how the concrete in the above tile is slightly raised, for instance.

That's all for this month. Next month I'm going to try speedrunning replacing every asset that still needs to be replaced, since now the system for creating new assets (or repurposing old ones) is super clear and has a very streamlined process.

Thank you all for the continued support. I also decided to make this post completely public, since there are some free followers that likely have not been able to see any public updates whatsoever in a while, so I figured it'd make sense to give everyone a chance to see what's been going on. The shadows also being largely finished now means the game can look like an actual game again, and I want to go back to creating semi-regular public video updates that can be posted to Youtube and X/Twitter.