What would you think is one of the biggest challenges for the budding Worlds Adrift? Surprisingly enough, the devs say that it’s lighting due to the unusual nature of the game world.
The team had a litany of reasons why traditional lighting won’t work for Worlds Adrift, including this one: “The world will feature 1,000-plus islands on launch, which will increase over time as player numbers increase. Each island can be up to one kilometer in each axis. Therefore traditional lightmapping would create data assets that would add many gigabytes to the client.”
The solution is incredibly technical (you can read it in the YouTube description), but the long and the short of it is that the team has figured out a way to finally turn on global illumination and give shadowy depths to the islands. See the difference between the old lighting and the new in the following video and let us know what you think of the changes in the comments!
