Technical difficulties?

We've officially crossed the halfway point of the week. Progress continued at a good pace today, but a lot of time was spent on some techincal things.

We noticed that lighting is a major performance bottleneck. Turning off all lights almost tripled our FPS! We could optimize it by having fewer shadow-casting lights or making sure lights are disabled when the player is far from them, but it still leaves us with a lot of dynamic lights, so baked lighting seems like the best option.

As a bonus, the lightmaps create a more realistic look (but our bakes are still turning out way too dark - except for this one guy on the floor who is WAY too bright!)

We've also got a new shader for some of the environment textures to add some grunge. I made a geometry node setup in Blender which looks for vertices in concave or occluded areas, and modifies their vertex colors. Those vertex colors are then used to blend a darker version of the environment texture onto itself in Godot.

I feel like geometry nodes have a lot of potential for neat little tricks like this. Here are the nodes for anyone who might be curious:

The grind shall continue tomorrow.

Thanks for reading!