Create Tutorials For Inclusion In The GameCore Tutorials Menu

[delevero]

What about a tutorial like this.

1). A 3rd person tutorial for a strategy game such as c&c generals / empire earth
      were you select your units by draggin a box arround them and click right mouse were you want them to go, maybe
      a menu would be interesting also so you can order them to guard, hide, attack ect.

2). A tutorial on how to setup a good sky box and a sun that move arround the world to simulate night and day + shadows..

[Squat]

The day/night cycle is easy, but to be honest it's not going to work that great the way things are. Directional lights are needed but there are problems with shadows on any lights other than spotlights. So you have to use a spotlight, and put it way far away. Turn shadows on to complete the effect. Now add that light at that position to any object at the world's origin and give it the simple rotation script.

If you need to go further, you will need to break apart the day night cycle into the color schemes based on the 24 hr clock == one full rotation of the sun with the 2 halves plus the transition periods. You can do it based directly on the time of day and transition every light, material and ambient world setting as you require. It can get VERY Complicated, but it can be done if you're very careful and take care of every factor one at a time.

The first being the rotation of the sun, which again is pretty much just rotation. Lots of scripts in the forums now have that sample code but let us know if you run into trouble with it.

You can also link a particle effect to the lightsource to make a fiery sun. I'd suggest starting with the spaceshooter fireball fx files and taking away the velocties and fiddling with the particle sizes.

[Squat]

I had another thought. I have been scheming on a way to get a really beautiful looking day/night cycle that looks photo-realistic, complete with blury shadows, but can run on any computer.

The concept was to render lightmaps at the various stages on duplicate meshes and create them incrementally enough to give the movement illusion while using general fading to aid the transitioning. I know, it's kind of stupid. But as long as the code only has one or 2 geometries visible and 4 loaded at a time for it, there shouldn't be much lag and it should be somewhat be convincing.

This would, however, need to be limited to one main object such as the terrain. Object interiors won't really work.

The drag is that it's going to take a million years to render that for just the terrain, let alone every house, castle, rock and tree. Secondly, it's going to run fine real-time, even if you did 360 meshes for every 1 degree, but your game directory is going to be 500TB of geometry and lightmap textures. The less you make, the choppier it is.

It wouldn't take too long if you had 360 people all do their one degree, or 36 people do 10 degrees each, or 3.6 people that do just 100 degrees.

Either way the effect is going to be a VERY tough one to balance for performance.

Barring any sudden, drastic changes to the shadowmapping, you're going to most likely be stuck with blury or no shadows at all on a truly full and dynamic day/night cycle. The rest of the lighting, however, will be dreamy.

My plan is to attempt and make 2 general lighting schemes for day and night that are lightmapped differently. I also have lights that can be turned on and off and this is where I want to try to transition separately lightmapped meshes onto already lightmapped meshes. Each light can turn it's own shadows on and off.

If I add the lightmapped meshes on top of a base mesh that has only the color and give them a perfectly white surface with 100% luminosity and set the whole object to multiply, I'm hoping only the darkness of the lightmaps shows through. If there are coplanar clipping issues, I can use normal offset and layer as many as I want with full control over visibility.

I have to run some basic tests on the concept, if I get it working I will show how.

[grubert]

I didn't test it with large worlds or lots of geometry, but if you set the shadowmaps resolution very very low, but increase the filtering, will give you blurred shadowmaps, but much lighter for the engine to render. My project will have a day/night cycle also and I'm already worried about this issue with lightmaps vs sun changing position along the day. I'll need to test different combinations (lightmaps for interiors, ok, but what for outdoors? cities without shadows lack a lot of feeling of volume, grounding, realism and ambience. In the last case, I'll use fixed lightmaps even with the sun changing position. But before this, I'll try to use shadowmaps for buildings with very low res and a high filtering.

[Squat]

As I test more and more with lighting, I think I'm getting a better feel for what works well. For me, it's probably different given that my game isn't using terrain, but all interiors and props. What I've done is just do an ambient occlusion pass (run lightmaps with no active lights). That gives you the volume, depth and crack deepening that you need. Then you can overlay shadows on top and you have a complete effect. The sweet news about this is that the lightmaps are source independant when defaulting to AO, so the real-time lighting and shadow angles are mute points.