Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fauntleroy | Hacker News Reader

So all the examples only use one light... how many lights can you have in a scene? What kinds of lights are supported (omni, spot, etc)? Can you use different colors of lights? If I wanted to use hundreds of lit particles in a scene, how performant would it be?

View on HN

It seems like the main use case is exporting the normal/depth/ambient occlusion maps, which you'd probably end up dropping into your engine of choice rather than using Sprite Lamp itself in your game (Sprite Lamp would generate the assets, but the game engine would display them).

If you have the maps, there's no hard limit to the number of lights you can have in your scene, or colors, etc; it just depends how many lights your engine can support with decent performance.

Think of Sprite Lamp more like Blender than like Unity — Sprite Lamp is a way to create assets.

I'm no graphics guy (not even by a long shot), but my understanding of this is that it's generating the same maps that you'd otherwise have to generate through some other process. The images used to generate them have a single point source, but I have to assume that, once generated, the maps would work just as well for multiple or different types of light sources. As for performance, that's entirely up to whatever engine you're using to render the damn thing; once you have the maps, you're done with SpriteKit.

And of course I meant to say Sprite Lamp in that last sentence.

As far as lighting goes, I think it would be as performant as it gets. It's the same idea as deferred shading; you only have to shade the pixels that the light affects.

As for types of lights and colors, yes, I think that would all be possible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com