New Light Interface

This week, work focused on developing a completely new interface for placing and customizing lights in the scene.

The history of Vortex with lights is interesting. In Vortex 1.1, the light system would leverage the fixed pipeline functionality. This meant that any single object in the scene could be lit by up to 8 different lights simultaneously.

In Vortex 2.0, the entire light system was replaced by programmable shaders. This meant that a user could define as many light as she wanted, as long as she created a custom “Visual Effect” that implemented the lighting rig. This was very flexible, but shifted the burden of lighting to the application.

For V3, we are changing the approach again to be able to support multiple dynamic light sources while, at the same time, moving most of the work back into the engine. The plan is to effectively shield the application from implementing the lighting logic and let it focus on just light placement and configuration.

In V3, lights are components that can be attached to entities. Being part of entities means that lights will be able to move around just like any other object in the scene. Being custom components allows bringing in the flexibility of exposing a rich declarative interface for configuring the appearance of the light and how it affects the world.

Under the hood, the new renderer will take care of processing all the lights in a consistent fashion, ensuring that lighting throughout the scene is uniform.

I think we are about to reach the most interesting parts of the new renderer. This is where V3 will really set itself apart from previous iterations of the engine. Stay tuned for more!