How lighting works in the XCOM games

Well, the title is a bit misleading. This video isn't specifically about any of the XCOM games, it's also not specifically about "lighting". But if you've ever wondered how the city in Apoc translates from day to night and back (or even the globe in UFO:EU and TFTD), this gives you a pretty good detail of palette techniques used back in the days of DOS games and 8bit computers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

 

Interesting, I'll probably watch it this evening.

The older xcoms (UFO & TFTD) both used a weird index 'shift' to implement lighting too, but apoc doesn't happen to use that. Only interpolating the palette between day/twilight/night palettes in the city. In the battlescape itself I believe the palette is always static and no weird tricks played.

Which feels a bit of a shame, as the battles always appear to be during the day, no matter the clock.

 

There's a section in the video where he talks about a graphic he produced for an X-MEN game based on the character Storm (Starts at around 12 minutes). From the one image he loads several palettes (but retaining the image), and the differences are great. Yeah, I guess they're not "exactly" like Apoc, but using one image with multiple palettes to produce effects is practically the same

 

http://imgur.com/gallery/mhzpp0y