I didn't get much done today, but I did manage to get lighting working the way I want it to, and in the process I got a pretty cool screen, so read on!
Lighting
As many of you saw in the video I released a couple days ago, the A22 Engine allows for the time of day to be set, and the lighting of the level is affected accordingly. Well, initially I thought I would be able to get away with a semi-transparent quad rendered over the entire scene. This works just fine until you want things to be unaffected by the darkness, such as fire. Well, then I thought, "I'll just render the fire over the quad, and everything will be ok!"... no, everything was not okay. You see, the fires you see in game are particle emitters, emitting sprites the start off as fire, then turn into smoke, and then fade away. I ran into a big problem, because when the smoke fades away, it gets to a point where you can't see the sprite, but its alpha is still greater than 0, so it passes the alpha test, and it gets rendered as though the quad never existed, meaning they would be visible as bright blue smoke puffs, which didn't look very good. So yesterday, I actually sat down and used OpenGL's built in lighting to handle it, which was a royal pain in the ass for some reason. But anyways, the lighting works fine now, and now things(ie. fire) can "glow" in the dark and not be dimmed.
Lighted Buildings
As ukdm suggested in an earlier post, a big boost to the "coolness" of having night levels, is the ability to have "glowing" windows and lights. Well, little did you guys know, but we've actually been working on this! We have these overlay textures for each building with yellow lights and whatever we want to show up at night, and once the ambient light level drops below a specified amount, these overlays are dropped over the buildings creating the effect you see in todays screenshot. Hurray ingenuity!
Well, I guess I'll give you guys a screenshot of the new light model, with cool fires and lit buildings, its pretty cool IMHO.
Also, notice the new Radar. I was unaware that the earlier version of the radar that Mark gave me was not the final version, but we have a new one now, and it looks pretty cool.
Thats all for now, let us know what you think! Peace Out!