Vortex Engine v3.4.12 — An overgrown cave with a shaft of light

Vortex Engine v3.4.12 — An overgrown cave with a shaft of light

The Open World cave, reworked after the first look: you see it from the oasis, it is overgrown, and its light has a mood.

• The cave sits at the foot of the escarpment, facing the oasis. Its rock arch opens at ground level, and a curtain of lianas hangs over it. Before, the entrance was hidden behind the hill's shoulder.
• Overgrown: ferns, grass and shrubs around the arch and on the cave floor near the mouth.
• A shaft of sunlight falls through the chamber's ceiling onto a fern garden, with drifting dust and a warm haze in the beam.
• A campfire burns at the far end with a flickering light (FireFlicker.cs), and two patches of glowing moss light the dark stretches.
• Plant inside caves: painted foliage lands on a mesh's real surface, not its box. The brush plants a cave's floor, a rock's top or the ground under an arch. paint_foliage has from_y to paint below a height.
• Dark caves on Windows too: the world lighting cache now runs on DX12. Caves and hollows go dark there as on the Mac, and the sky no longer lights them through the rock.
• No checker pattern from the screen-space bounce anymore. Its rotations follow a 4×4 pattern that the blur averages exactly.
• tools/cave-gen.py generates a shaft of light (--skylight), keeps the floor level into a wide mouth and closes the tunnel with a rock wall.
• VORTEX_GI_LOG=1 prints what the world lighting cache does.

To bring the reworked cave into an existing Open World project, right-click the project in the Project Hub and choose Update from Template…. The cave and its lights are placed in the scene, so tick Scenes (replace existing). That replaces your copy of the scene; the dialog backs the project up first and lists every file before anything changes.