MoonlightVRC/README.md

MoonlightVRC

Idea

When creating a World for VRChat that reveals items around the player as they walk up to them, I stumbled across the problem that Quest doesn't handle realtime lights well. As a result, I may have ended up spending tens of hours coding my own light system.

What this includes:

• Point/spotlights editable at runtime.
• A couple of premade shaders (standard, particle).
• Premade code handling lights, normals and a Lambertian diffuse.

Work in progress:

• Water shader
• Documentation
• More performance testing/improvements

Planned:

• Basic shadows via a shadow emitter map. The plan is to only sample the highest points of a map area and then calculate if the light ray is intersecting the object. This should provide basic shadow casting that is much more performant than raycasting.
• Support for addative baked light maps and ambient lighting.

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Performance

Early testing showed the Quest 3 dropping to around 30 FPS when having 100 spotlights active in a scene at once. This test was conducted with 5 material targets. Since then the shader has grown in size significantly and I have also included some optimizations in the code transferring light data to the objects. Reading the light data and transferring it to the shader seems to be a major bottleneck at the moment but there is room for improvements.

On PC, I haven't encountered any frame drops in the editor at all, even with 400 concurrent lights.

Quick start

1. Clone the code into your project.

2. Add the PlayerPositionsToShader component to a GameObject in your scene:

   • Inspect the script in the inspector and assign targets (Objects that use a compatible shader) and optional otherLightSources (Transforms as described in step 3).
   • Tweak strength/intensity of the local and remote player if you want them to have an attached light.

3. For lights, attach LightdataStorage to a Transform and configure:

   • range, type, color, intensity, and spotAngleDeg.

4. Use the provided shader include Shader/MoonsLight.cginc in your CGPROGRAM blocks to consume the arrays and compute lighting.

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Editor preview

• While not in Play mode, the editor helper PlayerPositionsToShaderPreview (EditorPreview/Editor/PlayerPositionsToShaderPreview.cs) writes the same property blocks to assigned Renderers so you can preview emissive/lighting effects in the Scene view. Those update 10 times a second.
• The editor partial helper for building preview arrays is in EditorPreview/PlayerPositionsToShader.Editor.cs.

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Tips

• Match maxLights in the component with the #define MAX_LIGHTS in your shaders (default is 80 — see Performance).

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Contributing

If you want to help with development, please contact me on Discord (@demuenu) so we can coordinate our efforts.