Brief summary
The new version will provide much more realistic lights and shadows. In addition to that, lights no longer pass through walls.
In terms of modding, we've started working on the new Plugin API and decided to stick to Java for the API.
Long story
As mentioned in our previous announcement, we will see some major improvements regardings lights and shadows in the new version. In the current Rising World most lights were static (i.e. computed once by the CPU during chunk generation) - this provides good performance, but the visual results weren't that great. In the new version, all lights will be fully dynamic, resulting in a much more realistic lighting. In addition to that, lights are able to cast shadows now. To make sure performance doesn't suffer too much, we will use a deferred renderer (which can handle lots of lights fairly efficiently) and a smart shadow updater (which regenerates shadows only if the environment changed).
We've prepared a small comparision between the new lights (still work-in-progress) and the static lights in the old version of the game:
Shadows play a big role and can be a real game changer. When exploring dungeons, for example, or walking through forests at night (just equipped with a torch), shadows create a completely different atmosphere.
Another big improvement thanks to proper shadows: Lights no longer pass through walls in the new version!
Apart from lights and shadows, we also started working on the new Plugin API. We decided to stick to Java for the API, since this language provides a much better performance (and full multi-threading support) compared to scripting languages. This also means that large parts of the current API stay compatible, however, there are still a few changes to the API so existing plugins need to be updated for the new version. We will post more information about that soon.
Stay tuned for the next status update! If you want to get more information in the meantime, make sure to check out our development roadmap on Trello :)
