I've been trying to figure out the best way to handle lighting in the interiors of the buildings...and this little $39 dollar program was the solution to my problem.
It's very easy to use, and does it's job well...it supports lightmaps, radiosity, and all kinds of other cool stuff.
After a few hours of playing around I was able to generate lightmaps for all the interiors of the buildings I have in the game right now...here's some screens of how it's looking.
So I guess I'm gonna go with static lightmaps on the interiors of the buildings, and use my little shadow hack for the dynamic shadows on the outside of the buildings. For the shadowing of the people/cars/objects I'm just using a quad with a alpha blended shadow texture directly under the character...pretty standard.
I should have some really cool stuff later this week...
- Dan
I know this sounds crazy given what you have to go through to build this thing, but have you thought about expanding this into a property that can be licensed? Maybe with specific characters?
I was talking with a biz guy who has started 3 game companies and now publishes indies. He told me that one of the greatest dangers we indies face is not thinking about trying to build a brand that extends the life of the product. So we work like the devil, put it out in a clogged channel, and that's that. With most deals, the publisher takes all IP, so we also have to start from scratch.
You may be lucky enough to not have to worry about funding problems (!), but brandable characters (like Gordon of Half-Life or Sam Fisher) could make building the next game all that much easier.