OK, so I’m trying to figure out just what I can get away with on a semi-high-end mobile device (something with Tegra3, for example).
Let’s say I have a lightmapped level, with light probes. I’m using a shader for my characters inspired by the character shader from Shadowgun (single pixel directional light, all other lights done with per vertex SH). All of the lights in my level are pretty much lightmap only (not realtime, lighting is mostly done with light probes)
If I need lighting effects like explosions or muzzle flashes, I can of course inject those straight into the light probe coefficients just as Shadowgun does. But, let’s say I wanted them to cast light onto the environment. Is it possible in this case to stick a realtime pixel light (set with with layers so it only affects the level geometry and nothing else) in the scene? If I have 32 guys (that’s the most number of characters in a level I’m planning) running around shooting each other, would this be fast enough to run on a Tegra3 device? What if I disable any pixel lights that are out of view? Chunk up the level into smaller pieces? Any info would be appreciated, as I do not have access to a real device to test.
It’s a bit hard to tell until you start experimenting. How complex are your characters and environments going to be? You can get away with a fair bit on the newer phones. I was pretty naughty with some of the lighting in my game but I only have about 5 - 6 characters on screen at once.
If you’re aiming for something like Galaxy S II then you should be fine using a couple of pixel lights, especially if it’s short range stuff like muzzle flashes which won’t hit the entire scene and every character in it.
So far iPhone 4 has given me the most grief (high screen resolution with wussy processing power). The worst part is I don’t think you can ommit iPhone 4 from downloading your game on the App Store. If iPhone 4S and 5 users can download it, so can iPhone 4 users. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Well, very specifically here I’m targetting OUYA (I think the closest device is Nexus 7 since it uses the same chipset). So I don’t have to worry about supporting multiple devices
My characters will be low-poly, again pretty close to what it’s like in Shadowgun (most of the details will be in the normal map).
My levels will be pretty Quake-like, so small enclosed levels should hide a lot of characters offscreen (I don’t really have a way of controlling how many are onscreen as this will be a multiplayer game, but 5-6 characters seems reasonable)
I think what I’ll do is for now just set up the lights as I’m describing, and if it’s too slow for my target platform I can easily set the lights to Not Important (force vertex lighting). Since the light effect happens very fast (only visible for a fraction of a second), per vertex may end up working just fine.
