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Well, what about litter? What about things the AI have deliberately moved for good reason? Wallets? Purses etc? We actually don’t want everything to reset.
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That’s great then tell things out-of-place to get reset to their original positions after a certain amount of time. Lots of things might get moved around by the player (say the player trashes an apartment or a bar), we don’t want those objects to stay in their trashed positions forever as this is a simulation we would probably want the AI to put things back how they were eventually, or at least imply that and have everything be reset at some point. That’s not necessarily a problem for a modern game engine, but things get complicated when you think about how you want them to behave. Object Handling/Saving/ResettingSo we have this world populated by literally 1000s of props, most of which can be moved, damaged or destroyed in some way. I’m not actually sure how much this is helping performance, but I imagine I’m at least saving the engine some amount of calculation by cutting off a chunk of active lights this way. Therefore ensuring that lights within an interior largely only affect things inside a building and vice versa. Using this, I can make individual buildings have their own light layer. This allows you to make sure lights are only cast on certain layers (any object in the world can be part of a layer). This isn’t my favourite compromise as it means the lights essentially turn off as you reach a certain distance, but it is a good ‘catch all’ method for making sure we don’t have too many lights shining at once.Īnother Unity thing is light layers. Fortunately, in Unity you are able to set distances for lights to be active. It’s not perfect, but this method helps to light up the street with additional ambient light. Every object that spawns in the street (for example a red paper lantern) can alter the ambient colour of the overhead area light slightly. This is designed to mimic a mixture of all the ambient lights in the street. Over every street is a large area light, which casts a colour down on the street. In this scenario, however, I’ve come up with a way to ‘fake’ having a bunch of ambient lighting. There are a few cases where this is tricky, however mostly the street scenes. If calculating all this is expensive, then use less of them right? Fortunately, having fewer lights creates some nice heavy shadows which kind of lends quite well to the noir genre.
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Although it’s common for a game to feature a mixture of both baked and real-time lights anyway, the nature of the levels where nothing is predetermined means Shadows has to use 100% real-time lighting: That’s a big performance hog. Lighting is a big one as it means you don’t have to ask the game engine to bounce light everywhere when playing. Much faster than trying to figure out all those calculations in real-time.
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Baking essentially means precalculating tricky things into a bunch of data the game can read when you play. Most non-procedurally generated games feature baked lighting (and not just lighting actually, it means you can do all sorts of yummy baking). That’s great and everything, except when it comes to the technical challenge of lighting. LightingShadows of Doubt is a procedurally generated game. From diary entries to the victim’s call history, checking their work ID and sneaking into their workplace or tracking down the CCTV footage in a cafe from a receipt you found on the scene, the only limit is your imagination!Īt Gamescom we will also have some awesome Shadows of Doubt themed goodies to give out to anyone who plays the game, we look forward to seeing you there! You will have the chance to put on your detective hats and take on the role of a private investigator as you search a crime scene for clues and decide which leads are the most important to follow. You will also have the opportunity to chat with one of our members of the team! Try your hand at detective work and see if you can solve a case. You’ll be able to find us at the Indie Arena Booth in Hall 10.2 where you can get your hands on the game. We’re pleased to announce that Shadows of Doubt will be available to play at Gamescom, this will be the second time we have had a build for Shadows of Doubt publicly available and the first time at a major international event!