Lighting the open world of New York Zero for Prototype 2
Keith O’Conor, Josh Blommestein · 2012
Prototype 2 is an open-world action game that gives the player superhuman abilities to move anywhere in the world - including the ability to run at speed up the side of a building, leap off the rooftop, and glide across the city. This freedom presented a variety of technical challenges, such as the question of how to get indirect lighting for both static and dynamic parts of a world where verticality and space plays such an important role. We discuss our solution - a novel pseudo-volumetric light baking process which packs vertical slices of the world into different mipmaps of a lightmap - and how it integrates with the art authoring pipeline and the rest of the rendering engine.