Lighting

(And particle systems)

Build problems

After changing some things in the analysis I wanted to try and build my project once more. All of sudden all my realtime lighting wasn't working anymore in the build, while it was still working in the Unity Editor. I eventually made an empty scene in the same project, without any lighting settings. Even then, the realtime lighting wasn't working in the build.

I searched online but couldn't find anyone else with my problem. This is why I eventually made a package of all the important stuff in my project, and exported it to a new empty project. After tinkering around a lot with reconnecting references between scripts (including some packages like the third person controller), I managed to get my entire project to work again without having to throw away about a week or two's work from the analysis.

This took an entire week.

^ Editor (Red light is realtime, White light is baked)

^ Build

Swapping lightmaps

From the research in my Technical Plan I had concluded that baking my lighting would dramatically impact the FPS. The biggest challenge that came with this is the fact that my scene has multiple stages of lighting, so I would have to find a way to swap between lightmaps.

I found a lightmap swapper script online called Lightmap Switcher, which seemed to work. After reading through the documentation I learned that this lightmap switcher worked with multiple scenes: one with just the geometry and the other scenes for just the lighting.

This would mean that I could only change the lighting in a single scene, without seeing how it would impact the geometry. Luckily, Unity allowed me to open multiple scenes at once.

This slowed down my workflow a lot however, so I made a simple helper script that lets me open scenes via drop-down menu.

After this I made a script that that lets me swap between the two lighmaps and update the environment's stairs as the puzzle progressed.

Finally I tested the impact of the baked lightmap on the FPS, and found that the scene looked quite similar while the FPS almost doubled. I was really happy with the result, since I had to fix some lightmap saving bugs since the documentation for the package was outdated.

^Realtime lighting (before)

^Baked lighting (after, FPS went from about 140 to around 230)

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