Lighting - Team Specific Differences

With our new understanding of how we can control parts of the game to work only for certain teams in team-death-match mode, I began to look into a mechanic whereby the guard players would have to use a flash-light to see in dark rooms, while the cat burglar would have better eyesight, and can see in the dark far better.

The initial way of doing this was to create a light room, and a dark room, and place two Post Process volumes in the dark room; one for the guard to see through, and one for the burglar to see through. Despite this working there were some major problems, primarily with what the guards could see in terms of light from the other room.

To advance from this, I tried to make the room very dark from natural causes, not post processing. However, a downside to this is that Sky-Lights cannot be used in map lighting because they can light shadows, meaning even the darkest rooms would be lit somewhat.

So to make completely dark rooms, we have to block the windows (with curtains in game), and also tell the walls, floor and ceiling in that room only, to not emit any diffusion or emissive light, stopping the room lighting itself using indirect lighting methods from the light in the room next to it, or outside.

This is the lit room, using 1 spotlight facing the floor from the ceiling. You can see that the rest of the room is lit well from emissive, indirect light.

This room has had all surfaces told not to emit emissive light, however they do still accept it otherwise by the door the sudden falloff of light looked odd. This is what the guards would see in the dark room, which has no post processing at all.

Using a post process volume in the same dark room, this is what the burglars would see. It is lit-up with a blue tint. As much as this sort of works, there are problems, some of which I encountered before.

• The deep shadows of the room have been forced to light up, and that is causing us to see bad texture compression artefacts as a result.

• The doorway with its natural light from the other room has changed colour. When I forced the room to be dark using only post processing, this effect was even worse, but a better, more controllable look in the darkness overall.

Another reason why using post processing to simulate darkness was bad was because we wanted the guards to use a torch to see in the dark. However, with the post processing volume there too, the light would come out tinted blue also, not yellow.

Further research into possible ways is currently under-way.