How are you handling your project's lighting?

I had been using Terrax, but I realized how much of a resource drain it is.

Are there any other viable plugins?

I found this tutorial earlier today and it seems promising:

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I really like the atmosphere that lighting creates, but I am unwilling to sacrifice a lot of resources. I am focusing on a mobile port.



Thank you in advance,

GEA

I do my lighting myself, using Gimp.

Parallaxing? I heard this is a resource drain as well =(

You're talking about disk size?
You're only saving light maps, not a full map. Mine are all under 100KB, often around 10-20KB.
And they don't drain the CPU like a script/plugin does, for a better looking result (but a bit more work instead)

Performance/FPS is my main concern right now.

I have preferred using Khas' Lighting plugins since Vx Ace, and it is even more awesome in MV.

Khas' lighting plugins are great, but resource intensive. Parallaxing is still the top in terms of performance.

There's also the built-in method of using screen tinting. Not sure how resource intensive it is but probably not too bad and easy to implement.

I'm pretty sure any dynamic lighting plugin is going to be resource intensive because glow effects in general are resource intensive. The only around this is to do as others have mentioned and use either parallax images or the built-in tint system, although the latter looks pretty bad in most cases.

They're also not free for commercial use, which may be of note if that's what the OP is planning on using them for.

commercial license is not that expensive. I wouldn't see it as a problem.
But the resource heaviness is still there, especially when there's an increasing number of events.

As for tint, that should be fine if it's through webgl.

Khas' commercial license is not a big deal, but has anyone been able to contact him lately? It's been a while and i haven't seen any updates on his plugin.

More food for the discussion, I just changed my Terraxxed candles from walking to stepping/fixed and it took my FPS up 10 points.

Maybe that will help other people with their lighting.

That's another thing. MV engine is poorly optimized and a some plugins are even worse in terms of optimization for speed. It would be better to create your own engine, but that will break almost all plugins out there xD

I should probably do a quick rewrite, then. I guess I just saw "is NOT free for commercial projects" in his terms of use summary blurb and assumed it would be worse than it was. A $15 one-time fee for a permanent unlock across all projects is pretty decent.

Does anyone know how the performance is compared to Terrax's script? Since my 11-year-old PC finally died, it's been a lot harder to gauge performance optimizations since everything runs so well on this new machine.