For a while Gratuitous Space Battles 2 had a separate ‘lighting’ layer for ships that was used to pull off a few effects. This meant a ship hull might come with a color layer, a normal map, a specular layer, an illumination layer and a hulk layer. And those ship graphics are 4x the size of before, so they are 32bit color 1024square dds files. Those get pretty big, and with at least 40-50 new ships, suddenly the game is getting awkward to throw builds about with on my crappy rural broadband…
Luckily, after a bit of chin-stroking and going to-and-fro with the ship artist, we now don’t need that specular layer at all. It was fairly redundant, it was effectively being used as a separate ‘foreground lighting’ layer. It turns out I don’t really need that, I can just re-use the color layer. It’s a bit of a complex engine because it does a normal-mapped 3d thing, but also has lights that can be controlled separately to the foreground (ambient) lighting and also the normal-mapped directional lighting. This allows me to have all kinds of cool effects such as ‘dark’ battles where you can only see lasers and lights from ships, and also to have bright nebulas with everything glowing.
Of course, the minute I changed the code, everything else stopped working. First shadows stopped rendering entirely, then they worked, but I lost control of illumination brightness for ship lights. A whole lot of head scratching and debugging later and I am back where I started, but now the specular layer is irrelevant. That simplifies and speeds up the toolchain too, which is a very welcome bonus.
I’m only a few fighter-hulls away from being able to put together some battles with all-new in-game graphics and taking some screenshots for real, although the planets are still placeholder, and the explosions and particle effects all need re-doing. Still, progress is progress.
Unrelated, I’m off to see the nice people at Valve tomorrow for a UK meeting with developers.. Should be interesting