Light Cookies

Light Cookies is the tasty term used to represent textures that can be used on light projections, people that are familiar with Source 1 commonly remember it as a projected texture.

Source 2 initially only supported a pre-set list of light cookies which are baked in a specific texture and not mutable at runtime, this isn't what we want. So I decided to make a system to handle all of this.

On the frontend you only need to worry about setting which texture you want to be used for your light, using the same Texture API we use for everything else means you can even use images from the web.

Having our own system to manage light cookies allows us to uniformly allow for some interesting effects, you can use a render target in a light cookie to use it in a projector as an instance. One fun curiosity is that even specularity is affected by cookies, so you should have good fidelity no matter what you do.