When I switch my Build Settings to iOS, my Beast lightmaps look like crap. After playing around with the settings a little bit, I discovered the reason for the ugly lightmaps is the “compression”. In the Lightmap settings, one can set the “Format” to Compressed, 16-Bit or Truecolor. “Truecolor” produces the result I’d like to have, as can be seen in the two screenshots I attached.
However, I’m confused that the iOS Build settings automatically switch my lightmaps to “compressed”. Does this mean the iPhone’s only capable of those compressed, ugly lightmaps?
No it can use both. But if you use truecolor you also eat up twice as much VRAM which easily boosts your game to a “only 3GS+” level as you can’t afford 32bit textures on pre-3GS devices due to their 10-20MB RAM you have at hand for your assets (you have 25-35MB at hand where about 15mb go away for the program code) and you might also want to be able to add sound.
When blended with a texture as it should be, the lightmap will look perfectly acceptable… its only because you’re viewing it like that it looks so bad.
Thanks alot for your fast and helpful answers!
I’ll check how it looks with real textures - maybe, I’ll employ truecolor only on 3GS4 and otherwise use compressed lightmaps.
However, now it makes sense why Unity @iOS switches to compressed lightmaps per default.
