I am working on a terraria-clone and I am aiming for it to be able to be run on most Android devices. I am able to generate a world, jump around, etc but I am not looking to add in some efficient lighting. In the past I have tried doing a tile-based lighting system but the project quickly came to an end after that because it dropped performance hugely. In that demo I was drawing a transparent black square over each tile and setting the alpha value dependent on surrounding lights. I envision that this will not be efficient on mobile so I don’t even know if I want to go down that road. I don’t need the shadows or anything like that (as of right now), I just need the lighting portion implemented. I have also looked at the other suggestions on the page here but am not sure which is the best option.
If tile-based lighting is the way to go I’d have to think of the best way to go about it. I don’t think that it would be a problem to just have it work with a torch giving off light and only updating light values when a light source is added/removed, but when entities are incorporated I also have to think about how will I efficiently update an entities light value based off of surround light values. I have optimized the hell out of the game so far, with a world of 1,620,000 tiles being contained within it and getting a stable, smooth 30 fps even on mobile. I haven’t attempted creating larger worlds than that but I don’t see why, at this rate, it wouldn’t be able to become any larger. I am trying to keep it as optimized as possible throughout development of the entire game so coming up with an efficient, optimized lighting system is essential.
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks.