How We Designed the Cabin Lighting System in Cabin Crew Life Simulator - devlog #3

Hello everyone, it's me, Simon - the lead developer of the game

1. Lighting in the Game

We faced numerous challenges while designing the lighting for this game. Typically, developers use static lighting (also known as Baked Lighting) to optimize game performance. With this method, lighting is pre-calculated before runtime, and no further calculations are made during gameplay. For more details, you can refer to Unity's documentation on Baked Lighting.

However, in Cabin Crew Life Simulator, many things move, including passengers and the aircraft itself. As previously mentioned, the aircraft simulates real-life movement, from taxiing to takeoff and cruising altitude. Therefore, static lighting is not a viable solution for us.

In addition, as seen in the DEMO, there’s a day/night cycle effect where you might start a flight in the afternoon and finish it in the evening. Changing lightmaps between day and night proved ineffective because, within the aircraft’s reference frame, the direction of sunlight constantly shifts - unlike static structures like houses or airports. This required us to use real-time lighting for the entire flight.

Thus, all lighting - from the sun to the spotlights inside the cabin - uses real-time lighting technology. This significantly enhances the experience as players can feel the changes in lighting direction while the plane is in motion.

What's new ?

In the next update, we’ll reveal the differences between economy, business, and first-class seating on the flight. Stay tuned. Thank you for reading, and please consider wishlisting the game to support us!