Scene Lighting, Post Process, And Placed Lights

What This System Is

Scene lighting controls ambient color, time-of-day overrides, conditional states, placed lights, and post-process volumes. It lets authors describe mood and readability in the scene document while runtime and preview systems blend those records into the active presentation.

How Authors Use It

Author a base lighting setup first, then add local placed lights and post-process volumes only where the scene needs focus or a temporary mood shift. Use trigger or condition references for temporary states such as interiors, alarms, cutscenes, or combat phases. Preview the scene with overlays enabled before relying on the effect in gameplay.

Rules And Invariants

Lighting and post-process ids must be stable and unique within the scene. Numeric settings must be finite and within the validation range. Volumes and placed lights must stay within scene bounds. Trigger and condition references must point at existing authored records. Overlapping lights and volumes should have clear blend priority so runtime results are deterministic.

Placed light budgets matter. Authors should prefer a few intentional lights over many overlapping lights that fight each other or hide gameplay readability.

Validation And Debugging

Scene validation checks lighting ids, bounds, finite values, trigger references, and post-process records. Editor panels expose active state, authored values, and preview controls. Use light overlays and heatmap warnings to find overlap or budget pressure.

If the runtime view does not match the editor, compare active trigger state, current time profile, scene bounds, and post-process blend priority. If only standalone differs, check pack-export asset inclusion and runtime presentation cache invalidation.

Examples

For an interior, author a room volume with warmer ambient light and lower exposure, then gate it on the player entering the interior trigger. For an alarm state, add a conditional red light state and a short-lived post-process volume, both keyed by the same trigger state.

For overlapping torches, reduce radius or priority so the light heatmap shows a readable path instead of a saturated blob.