Disclaimer: this feature is still in R&D, highly experimental and might not make it into the alpha anytime soon. But for your viewing pleasure, here's what Voxatron looks like with a volumetric light attached to the player. I really want a scene in the main story cart (1.0) that has the main character walking through a forest at night with a lantern, with snow catching the light as it falls into view. I tried making a quick mock-up using a brute-force method and it turned out to be fast enough to be interactive, but not yet useable.

Technical explanation:
This new lighting model is made possible by the way I'm calculating shadows. Instead of generating a traditional 2D shadow map, I instead generate a 3D 1-bit volume, where each set bit represents a fully lit voxel. The volume is then sampled while drawing voxels to give soft shadows. To do rough attenuation using 1-bit values, I dither the maximum light distance based on xyz (and t for flickery torch-style light), and then let the sampling take care of producing a smoother version. I still kind of like the 1-bit version though for large simple geometric shapes.

The beauty of this method is that the light volume can be generated in any fashion and still rendered at the same speed. It's possible, for example, to blit many blobs of light into the map (e.g. for bullets or explosion particles) with hardly any additional cost. To do light emitted from a point and casting shadows, I'm currently doing a line-of-sight march for every voxel. It was faster than I expected (I was only trying to generate some still frames to look at!), but I have a much more efficient method in mind for this, which I'll post about later if it works out (or not).

flinally a thing who i can use to make horror games here

same idea here deshn

Your space map look really awsome ! BTW, dont expect to make a horror game out of voxatron right now ( even with the volumetric lightning ). You could make it feel dark, but not scary !

I beg to differ, blind!

Check out this game, Ib.

http://www.vgperson.com/games/ib.htm

It was a very effective creepy/scary experience and was made using more limited resources than Voxatron. Remember that artists thrive when given limitations! It would take a lot of work, but I believe it could be done, especially with the next update + volumetric lighting.

And awesome work. I was screwing around with a paint solid animation within a monster to cheaply emulate fire light, but this looks infinitely better. Moonlit/sunlit silhouettes will be particularly fun to toy with.

woah, first thought is, car at night game, headlights!

@blind - notice how the many replies here indicate the forum isnt dead, people are just LURKING! also maybe boss of the week is better as boss of the month? more sustainable long term?

Epic :)

Woot! I was wondering for new update and here it is :)

Nice! Something for zep to let us know he is not giving up!

Maybe we could bring up something else: Modifiable sunlight position? We can have it so that the shadows for each object would point a different way than the default? It could help set the time of day, and possibly have dynamic lighting in places like reactor rooms. It can benefit my Starship Combat game so that I can have realistic lighting when near a star.

This is just an idea.

well he did mentioned that it would be possible on a future update when I mentioned the lantern suggestion, actually, he said that the various lightning modes would come before the lantern!

this is AWESOME!

Very very nice, put it in the alpha already ;)

Can you make a color wheel for the lighting and make it so you can place a light source in multiple places?

Yay! I love it! When are you gonna put it in?
It's Awesome!!!!!

You could try to make a night version of Chaos Fortress, as well, that would be amazing!