Create lightmaps at runtime

Hello!

I am developing a simple 2D puzzle game. I would like to give the user the option to design their own levels, so i have built a simple level editor, so they can upload play with their levels.

The game comes with many levels made by me, and they look pretty nice, as i have a single unity scene for each level, and i've been able to set up the lights, and bake the lightmaps easily into the scene.

My problem comes when i want the levels made with my level editor to have a decent lightning. As for now, my level editor only generates a simple xml that contains the necessary information to instanstiate all the objects at runtime ( walls, enemies, objects, etc.. ), and show the level as it was designed. Applying lightmaps to these levels is a whole different story thought. How i am supposed to do that?

I can let the user place lights using the editor, but, how can i make it so i can bake the lightmap into that level? Dynamic lights is not an option, as i would like to have shadows on android/iphone, and as far as i know, that is not supported.

The only soultion i've come up with, is to generate a .unity instead of an xml file ( don't really know if that is possible, by the way ), and somehow apply a process to that scene that bakes the lights into a lightmap and applies it. Is that even possible, or i'm daydreaming?

Do you guys know any other way to achieve what i want to do?

Thanks in advance!

 

From my point of view, this is not possible at all. Baking can only be done in the editor. Unity 4 comes with realtime shadows for mobiles, that's about the only way I can imagine.

 

Okay, let's forget about runtime then. Looking for a workaround, i thought of the following:

1.- Imagine there is a server somewhere, that receives the .xml file with the information of the designed level from the level editor. That server is made with unity, so he can create a scene, and save it as a unity file. ( That can be done using EditorApplication class ).

2.- The created unity file has all the objects at his correct place, the lights correctly placed, so the only thing left to do is to bake the lightmap. Is there a way to do this automatically? Something like a batch process that receives a .unity file and automatically bakes and applys a lightmap to a scene, that would do the trick! Basically i want the editor to do the Window-->Lightmapping-->Bake scene on its own, how to tell him that??

Thanks for your help!

 

You could look at launching a command line argument:

http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/CommandLineArguments.html

 

If the Unity editor is open, you have everything loaded, you can start the lightmap baking with a script: Lightmapping.
Though, it is theoretically possible to do that, it is a huge amount of tricky work. Good luck with it! I wouldn't want to do that