There are a few parts of Crea’s engine that I try to avoid due to the inherent complexity of the system – lighting is prominently at the top of this list. I was tempted to leave things be but when I started working on lava I realized lava wouldn’t look right without giving off a warm red glow. Thus began my tribulation with colored lights.

My first attempt was kind of a mess with the lighting affecting the background

I managed to hack my way around it though.

Mostly working lighting with many colors

Had some fun playing with the brightness, saturation and contrast of lights

After playing around with the lighting I found two small issues with it and both were due to my hack. One is that when something was transparent it would look weird at night. The other issue was that sometimes the background would show through the ground. It is hard to see since it is a few pixels scattered about.

Death particles with weird black edge

Background bleeding through

After hours of attempts to resolve these issues I conceded defeat. While beginning to write this blog post I had an epiphany and managed to resolve the core issue and abandon the hack. Yay!

While I had these two issues I reworked the lighting system some to enable light sources coming from anywhere instead of only entities. Now particles can be a light source or even lava!

Happy New Years!