Adding lights to entities

I implemented static lightmap support some time ago with nice results. However moving stuff did not yet have a lighting solution.

I wanted to have something in which the data for lighting would be common for static and dynamic objects. What I what I came up with is to save the light data (position, color, power, radius) that is used to generate lightmaps and use it also to create localized lights for entities.

By localized I mean that each entity creates its own set of lights, which affect only it. This allows for attaching quite a lot of them, as the lights will affect only a small amount of geometry and gives a lot opportunity for LOD optimizations. The only down-side is that this method will not support shadow casting. However, in the end, this is not that big of a drawback, as such an amount of dynamic shadows would kill the framerate anyway.

I created a component for that, so making an entity dynamically lit, is now trivial. The first test can be seen here:

The map from which this video was taken:

The scene had 8 lights and with 7 entities the fps was around 2700. So far not bad.