I’m trying to add lighting to a certain extent within my tilemap based iPhone game. For lack of a better example, I’m trying to add minecraft style lighting – the further a tile is from the light source the greater “dark” tint it has.
The most efficient way I can think of doing this would be to add some type of mask over the tilemap layer in order to create this effect and simply move the masks with the tilemap as the player moves around.
I haven’t been able to find any documentation on how to add masks to an entire layer, is this possible? Or is it bad practice? Or can you think of a better possible method for achieving this effect?
The simplest and most efficient solution would be to modify the color property of a tile. By default all nodes have the color “white” and by applying gray colors between black & white you’ll be able to control the brightness of the tile.
Note however that when you do treat a tile like a CCSprite, cocos2d will change the tile from its basic implementation and change it into a CCSprite. This may become a performance and/or memory issue. Each CCSprite instance was 420 Bytes last time I checked in cocos2d 0.99.