Creatures Caves

It isn't hard coded to do anything, you write scripts that will fire at sunrise/sunset to change the lighting, the sunrise/sunset times will change based on time time of year, and the latitude you gave the scheduling function. So you can have equal days like around the equator, or norway days, etc.

Yes, if lighting was enabled and you had no lights things would just be black, aside from sprites that don't have sufficient information to be lit.

Okay, when we say above the camera, we mean ABOVE the camera. e.g. if you had a metaroom say 8352x1200 the sun would be located at { 4176, -149600000000 } the reason it's so far away is that at that distance the rays coming down from it are effectively parallel, (this is the same reason our sun's beams are basically parallel). And this is used to build the light mesh that determines if things are inside or outside.

Once that's done, the sun would give the whole metaroom diffuse lighting, then just the outside bits would receive ambient lighting.

ambient -- light that comes from all directions
diffuse -- light that comes from a point source
specular--the color of reflections generated from a light source

You could set the colors of these either with an RGB triplet, or a color temperature.

So the sun wouldn't move, you would just change those variables at different times. If you wanted a moving sun, you would have a second sun that actually moves around the sky, but it isn't lighting anything, it's just a visual effect.

Google "lighting normal gif" and look at the iamges tab, the first one is like a crystal thing, that's a 2D image, it looks 3D because it has lighting and a normal map.

So say you wanted a glass tube like in C2, it has 4 textures you need to fill out: albedo, normal, microsurface and reflectivity.

For the albedo map, you have a very dark green mostly transparent color (alpha at least 16), against a transparent background. Just a solid color is all you need.

For the normal map, you have a gradient from black to bright green going up the tube, that will create normals that will make it look like a round tube, for more detail, you can make another one with the gradient going the other way and put it behind the tube sprite.

for the microsurface you put in little scratches and cracks that appeared on the tube over the years of wear.

for the metalicity, you color it say, red, to indicate that the surface is highly reflective.

And that's it, that will render a 3D glass tube in engine.