Intelligent lighting for a better gaming experience

Lighting assumes many aesthetic and communicative functions in game environments that affect attention, immersion, visibility, and emotions. Game environments are dynamic and highly unpredictable; lighting such experiences to achieve desired visual goals is a very challenging problem. Current lighting methods rely on static manual techniques, which require designers to anticipate and account for all possible situations and user actions. Alternatively, we have developed ELE (Expressive Lighting Engine) -- an intelligent lighting system that automatically sets and adjusts scene lighting in real-time to achieve desired aesthetic and communicative goals. In this paper, we discuss ELE and its utility in dynamically manipulating the lighting in a scene to direct attention, stimulate tension, and maintain visual continuity. ELE has been integrated within Unreal Tournament 2003. The videos shown at [14] shows a demonstration of a first person shooter game developed using the Unreal 2.0 engine, where ELE was configured to dynamically stimulate tension, while maintaining other visual goals.