The lighting in the CitizenCon demo looked absolutely amazing. You mentioned getting the great warm sunset for free, which implies that there are now some major systemic differences between the lighting model there used to be and what there is now. Can you touch on the difference, and will we see that in 2.6 or 3.0?
TL;DRLighting now comes from the sun being a positioned entity in the world rather than keyframed time-of-day values, so sunsets and per-planet times of day emerge automatically from position; no release is addressed.
Yeah, it's a good question. So what I really meant about getting it for free is, yeah, it's in a system. It's part of the positioning of where the sun is versus where your camera is on the planet, and how exactly those rays are actually getting scattered through the atmosphere. So what I mean by being free is that there's no artist going in and saying sky is blue, sky is green, sky is, at 6 a.m. it looks like a sunset or a sunrise or whatever it's supposed to be. So this happens automatically. So it's a massive switch to how the engine was doing it before. What's interesting is we used to fake the exact same values within our time of day system. So the typical CryEngine system was a time of day system. And what it is, it's 0, 12, 24 hours. You had a whole timeline of when the sun would be at a certain position above your head. So depending on that position, you could keyframe a whole ton of values. Again, the sky color, the clouds, how bright the sun is, all kinds of, there really was like 120 different properties. It's pretty crazy.
So what this actually does is, it's not that we've removed time of day. It's that we've decoupled the sun from a skybox. So no longer is it 6 a.m. anymore. It's only 6 a.m. because of where that particular sun is versus where you are on that planet. Because if you think about it, time zones across a planet, all these kind of things. So we decoupled the sun, made it an actual entity within the world, within the actual map itself, so that way we can place it. And then one of the things that a lot of people noticed, and I'm super glad they did, was when we did this two-planet transition in our little tech demo, you saw that the sun was pretty high up in the sky on one planet, but time didn't switch, just our relative positioning to the other planet switched. So it was sunset in that particular location on that one planet that we went to, but it was the middle of the day.
Same star, two different planets.
Exactly. So it just becomes a positional thing on that entity rather than a keyframed thing on a track, if that makes any sense.