Monday Update 08/09/21

This week I started working on reimplementing Fredrika's mechanics into the new lighting system. This is still something I'm working on so there's no build unfortunately but I thought making a text post giving an update as to what was going on was better than nothing.

Previously Fredrika's mechanics for turning off lights was extremely simple: she hits a switch and a "light" is disabled. With the new lighting system this won't work since the majority of the lighting is now "baked" which means all the GPU legwork is done a single time when compiling the game so it can't be "recalculated" during gameplay when circumstances (like a light being turned off) change. Because of the use of baked lighting I have to find a hacky workaround to get the lights to turn off properly. I've tried a few different work arounds including some purpose built stuff from the asset store but haven't had any luck.

The previous solution I tried was having two copies of the map, one normal and another map that had the lights turned off. When the player switched to a room with the lights off, or a light switch was hit, it would quickly swap out the lit map's data with the unlit map's. The biggest issue with this solution was that it caused inconsistency if players paid attention to the door ways, even if a light in the background was supposed to be on/off, its status would match the currently viewed room. I tried moving the cameras around so that they couldn't see door ways, but the result made it pretty obvious I was trying to hide something.

The current solution I'm perusing is similar, however it's being done on a room-by-room basis instead of the entire map. This is going to cause an issue in rooms that have lights that cast rays out into other rooms. Hopefully that issue isn't noticeable, if you're looking for it you'll probably be able to tell. If it is a big enough issue I'll have to try baking each room independent of each other which should definitely make it  nearly seamless since it's harder to detect when light should be there rather than when it shouldn't. This approach might also increase the GPU load of the game due to swapping out light probes for another solution, but I can't say by how much until I try it.

In summary, using environment lighting as a mechanic was a terrible idea and no one should ever do it.