Lighting engine?

Summarizing the topic: the ability to do this kind of lighting may come eventually, but don't make any plans around it.

The link you posted is not a "real" lighting engine either, I don't think. If you look carefully parts of the shadows are "banded" which makes me think it's implemented just like the lighting demo in Construct 2, but with more sprites of customised shapes and some more advanced calculations to determine the opacity of each masking sprite. So it's just a more cleverly done version of the overlay lighting effect.

We do plan to introduce WebGL shaders at some point, but these are just effects that run in 2D. They're not going to do much for you beyond the overlay effect Construct 2 already has.

Ashley> It looks like you were right, big up to you.

Here's a quote from Project Zomboid's dev:

n any case, it's done with multiplied overlay quads with vertex colours, since the tiles are 2D, so it's all completely faked. Not the fastest but we'll hopefully optimize it as we go. Problem is with iso viewpoint is the draw order is rigid so it means it's difficult to optimize to avoid binding new textures each draw.

I'd be very interested into an advanced tutorial of this technique, since its still obscure to me.

Ashley> I assume that using shaders would save a lot of time and performances, and possibly looking prettier.

The overlay technique is an old schoolish approach, yeah you can do that but I'm guessing that using this on a large scale project is awfully time consuming.

I don't think it would be time consuming it all.

At start of layout, for each light source, create light object.

Always set position of light to light source <- takes care of moving light sources

Two events and you're done.

Yeah. Doesn't sound like it would be time consuming. I have done lighting effects before this way.