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Dynamic lighting

by Charlie Malbaurn · in Torque Game Builder · 03/29/2005 (10:17 pm) · 2 replies

Hey all,
I noticed with the fish bowl demo, that there is talk of dynamic lighting.

My question, in reqards to not being an art person, is how do 2d images handle light?

When designing my game, i want there to be some scenes that are dark and contain light sources so I was wondering what sort of things need to be considered when making the game graphics. is it some kind of graphical chanel thing?

Any help, theory wise, would be most helpful
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Torque Owner Josh Williams
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#1
03/29/2005 (11:49 pm)
Hi Charlie, yeah "dynamic lighting" in the fish bowl demo is really just a convenient description of the lighting effect we created. Your intuition is correct, simulating "lighting" in a 2D scene can be achieved, roughly of course, by using partial transparency of light or dark images and shapes and overlaying them on other objects. In the fish demo, we have some images that look like rays. They are bright colored. We apply them to a layer in the 2D scene, and dynamically alter their visibility so that the "light" they produce seems to get brighter or darker over time.

You do have to set-up your art a little to work well with this kind of effect, and it pays off to worry about color balancing and washing out when you're coloring your art. But if you do, it can produce some pretty darn convincing stuff. :)

Torque Owner Teck Lee Tan
#2
03/29/2005 (11:52 pm)
Ah, so it was alphas. :)