Light system like in Darkest Fear or Darkwood.

Apofex

Want to make 2d horror game and don't know how to make dynamic light/dark system for character. Support please.

Zeftax

You can place a canvas modulate in your scene to make it dark and then use the (2d) light nodes to illuminate it. There is a tutorial in the documentation here: https://docs.redotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/2d/2d_lights_and_shadows.

Apofex

Zeftax

StarfighterInteractive
The question was in script. How to make character understand it's in light or in dark by script.

StarfighterInteractive

Since Redot is still pretty close to Godot, I think you may still be able to use the "Sprite Occluder 2D" node paired with Light2D nodes to get some dynamic shadows and what not. You'll probably still be working a lot with animation trees, and writing a lot of scripts getting everything lined up correctly,

Of course, you could always do your lighting effects caveman style by doing the lighting and shading in your artwork. Difficult, sure, but very satisfying. That's what a friend of mine is doing.

bitshift-r

Apofex
How you can detect light/shadow will depend on how you set up your game.

For instance, if you're using point lights and occluders one option might be to use a raycast to shoot a ray from your player towards the direction of each nearby light. If it hits a wall or some obstruction you're not being illuminated by that light.

Or if your illumination is baked into your game art an option might be to define Area2Ds with collision shapes that cover areas that are light. If the player intersects one of these areas they are illuminated. Or the opposite, where you define shadowed areas.

Apofex

bitshift-r seems like I understand you. What about getting pixel color? Is it good for performance?
See this video to understand what i want (example).

Zeftax

Use bitshifts idea for detecting proximity, it is more robust. Below I am attaching a snippet from a recent game jam I did that makes the enemies invisible if they aren't lit by a pebble the player throws, maybe that can help you with getting some smooth value once you know that you can actually see the pebble.

# Set alpha based on pebbles
var lightPower: float = 0;

# Go through all the pebbles in the scene
for pebble: Node2D in Global.pebbles:
    # Apofex: Here you could add a check if the light source is reachable
    # Distance to the currently examined pebble
    var dist = pebble.position.distance_squared_to(position);
    # 128 is the default radius for the pebbles light
    # Pebble power is a number between 0 and 1 that determines how much power the pebble has left (shrinks radius)
    # The multiplying by a small number is to make edges smoothly get more alpha instead of popping out of nowhere
    # You may want to cap the value between 0 and 1 manually, here it is not needed.
    var currentPower = ((128 * pebble.power)**2 - dist) * .0005;
    # If the light received from the currently examined light is strongest yet, save it as the strongest.
    if (currentPower > lightPower):
        lightPower = currentPower;
# Change the alpha of my body to match light distance
$Body.modulate = Color(1, 1, 1, lightPower);

I wanted to attach a gif of it in action, but 1.5MB is apparently too large 😃

Apofex

Zeftax do you mean pixel color detection by saying "bitshifts idea"?

Zeftax

Apofex I meant checking for collisions before considering the light source. But since the dark areas are pure black, checking pixel color might work too, although I am not sure how you would do that - I am still reading through the documentation :-)

Apofex

Zeftax colliders is good. But if we have any big box, colliders will become unusable.

Zeftax

Apofex I am not quite sure I understand? You can make collision shapes however large you want. Then, if you want to determine whether you "see" an enemy, you can just cast a ray from the player to the enemy and check if it intersects any light-blocking geometry. Could you please be more specific in what your issue is?

Apofex

Zeftax

bitshift-r
2d top down game. Core gameplay mechanic is Darkest Fear like. Player need to avoid darkness and be on the light to survive.

bitshift-r

Darkest Fear clearly uses a tile based system for lighting. This is very different than Darkwood, which is more like the light documentation @Zeftax linked to earlier.

It would be quite helpful if you could to provide some context about your project.

Zeftax

Apofex For that, you should be able to use the script I provided, combined with raycasting, if the "power" value of the closest reachable light is lower than a given treshold you can start dealing damage to the player.