Luminaire
Filed under: Game Maker
Luminaire… The start of the GM lighting era. This was developed shortly after GM6.1 was released with the new surfaces feature which I’ve been hammering mark about. It is old, outdated, and horribly inefficient because I was rushing to release it and show everyone that this can be done. Compared to it’s modern cousins like L3S, it’s not very much, but people have been continuously asking for it regardless. I don’t know why, but here it is.
While I wouldn’t recommend using it in a serious game where L3S would really shine (but hell, I haven’t seen a single serious GM game use any lighting engine), but for smaller ones it should be just fine. The other thing you can learn from it is what I call the Art of Eyecandy. I think the reason people still pick this over modern much better engines is because the demo is gorgeous, and the others don’t do too well in this area. So look at the demo and learn how eyecandy works. Notice the fading lights, notice the glows added on top of the lights, notice the distorting swinging lights, etc. All these small details add up to make one big ‘wow’ effect. I’d really like to see Game Maker users produce things that make people go wow.
But yeah.. Look at it and learn from it, but you should really be using L3S or similar if you use a lighting engine. Make no mistake about it, this is a first generation lighting engine. In fact it’s the first lighting engine. It’s really oooooold! We’re now in 3rd gen dynamic soft shadows age!
Game info contains everything you’ll need to know to use this.
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Tags: effects, eyecandy, tutorials
October 7th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
I remember this one was really impressive… on my old matrox G400
The link need to be corrected to http://gear.64digits.com/downloads/luminaire.zip
October 7th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Thanks for the catch, I corrected it.
January 29th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
It amazes me too how this is still used. I’ve come to use engines such as the “SHS Simple Lighting Engine” as of recently myself, mainly because I don’t usually need shadowing. The presentation is though, as you said, amazing.