I've had a few people ask me about the lighting and weather in Rush Rally Origins over the last week or so, and felt I should knock up a quick video to show it in the flesh as videos speak better than text!
The engine has a full lighting model built in, but has been highly optimised to ensure that it keeps 60fps on the Nintendo Switch and other mobile devices (not forgetting 120fps on Apple ProMotion devices too!).
Deferred rendering is not really an option on the "less powerful" targets so we are limited to techniques of old if we want to get a system working with full flexibility. The shadow system uses cascaded shadow maps from 1 single light source, The rest of the engine uses a single directional light balanced up with an ambient light, and then a few shader tricks to add ambient occlusion and shading to the terrain and cars (In RRO you can't see this on the cars, but you can in RR3!). In the night stages we also have another light source (the headlights) which is basically a spot light with some nice fall off.
All of this means we can easily change the lighting on any stage and make a single stage feel different based on the lighting.
Here's a quick snippet to show you what I mean!
Thanks!
Ste
