Here is the manual so far by the way (it is not even close to finish however):

FireFly Lighting 1.0
-Michael Auerbach 1008-

In the FireFly Engine 1.0, there are 3 kinds of lights that can be easily implemented into your gamestudio project:

Omni-directional : casts light in all directions

Spotlight : casts light in a cone shape in one direction

Directional light : casts light in a single direction as sunlight or a non-point light source


Each light source can have any of several variables and flags checked to customize each light’s properties:

Shadows : if true, this light will render a shadow map. See sub properties below:

ShadowRes : select a resolution for the shadow map. An integer between 1 and 10 where 10 is the highest quality. The

default is 5.

ShadowBlur : FireFly 1.0 support high-quality Percentage Closer Filtering for all shadow maps. This property can be

modified to control how blurry a shadow should be. This must be an integer between 0 and 10 where 10 is the most blurry. When

set to 0, shadow blurring is shut off.

ShadowCol : One extraordinary feature of FireFly is the “pure” lighting equation. By default, shadows will equate to

a value of 0.0f light from the light source. The result is a realistic rendering that, however, requires lights to be placed

abundantly as to influence other light’s shadows. However, as this is often computationally expensive, a simple “ambient” value

can be set to override the standard 0.0f shadow value. It is recommended that this is not changed.
NOTE: the deferred shading algorithm ensures that the 0.0f shadow value will not automatically clamp the final pixel value

to 0.

Color : a 3 floating point or char (0-255) value to represent rgb color. The color is augmented with the range and HDR

light strengths as shown below.

Range : this represents the light’s “range” and is virtually identical to light range in the standard Gamestudio engine.

Longer ranges will provide a larger attenuation area when lighting your world.

Gamma(HDR) : this value represents the actual brightness or strength of the light. This value is used in the HDR

calculations and affects the scenes “mood.” For example, the HDR values for a couple of indoor lights might be set to a low value

and an outdoor sunlight set to a very high gamma. When the camera moves from the indoor lighting into the sunlight, the indoor

area will become very dark and the outside will become a normalized light value.


Lights also have basic properties:

Position : 3D World coordinates in Gamestudio x,y,z format. These are automatically converted to x,z,y format

(DirectX) for convenience

Pan : Light direction for spotlight and directional lights.

Arc : width of light cone for spotlights (between 1 and 120)