11.1: New Lighting & more Level Editor features!

New Lighting

Disco Dodgeball has always made heavy use of emissive textures. They're not true lights, in that they don't cause color changes on nearby objects. Unity's main lighting types are 'point' and 'directional' lights, and these don't match the types of long-thin glowing LED strips in the game's levels so I couldn't really use them.

In the past I've used post-processing effects like glow and screen reflections to give the appearance that these emissive textures acted like true lights. But the fact the light didn't 'bounce' still left the arenas looking flat and kind of fake.

But in this update, the game now calculates a volume of all the emissive textures in the game, and uses that data to apply a light to nearby objects. It looks up the realtime color of nearby emissive texture so it updates with the arena lights and the beat of the music. So now the lighting looks a lot more realistic!

Check out some of these before & after comparisons! (but you really have to see it in action to get the full effect)

You can disable this setting in Options / Video / Emissive Light Volumes if your prefer the old look.

Level Editor Improvements

• Added ‘rotation snap’ option to level editor, letting you rotate objects 45 degrees instead of 90 degrees (around the vertical axis only)
• Added new level editor prefab: Cone
• Added ‘Special Geometry’ to level editor, that are complex prefabs that resize intelligently. They don’t have as many customization options though.
• Added ability to select from a few different materials
• Added the ability to choose a few different equalizer styles
• Added Disco Floor option - a floor light effect that glows in various patterns and also when an object collides with it. Can specify rows & columns

Misc Improvements

• Added better level-picker: you see images of the levels, can shift+click to select multiple and make a level playlist. You can set favorites, and choose ‘Favorite’ selection option to auto-select your favorites. Local and Workshop levels can be added to a level playlist. Built-in / Local / Subscribed are shown in different sections with expand / collapse header control.
• Added fluid visualization to main menu buttons, and improved many button textures
• Fixed bots having difficulty pathfinding from spawn points that lead to large drops
• Powerups rotate to always face the player
• Fixed jetpack sound effect ‘popping’ when it starts playing
• Added multiplayer check to confirm that each player is on a sufficient Level Editor version so they don’t get sent maps that their version of the game doesn’t understand
• Fixed broken scrollbar on leaderboards panel
• Fixed reflections and volumetric lights not showing up on linux
• Linux defulats to Vulkan instead of OpenGL, as that is compatible with more of the game’s shaders
• Fixed equippable items showing with red background as if they weren’t owned
• Fixed problem downloading all workshop files when you were subscribed to more than 50 items
• Reduced jitter of held ball when changing look angle