Tiled based lighting that is put in a lightmap as a single grayscale pixel and is then scaled up and (with a shader?) smoothed out so that it looks non-tiled. This approach is similar to what I've seen (herehere), but is done in xna and I'm not sure if there is a BlendState equivalent thing. I also had never done anything with shaders and my attempt at smoothing out the tiles ended after I could only smooth them horizontally or vertically (not in a circle as it should be).
Raycasting and drawing each pixel with a certain alpha value for the distance it is away from the light source. This approach is the one that worked, but was inefficient. The first problem I encountered with this is that raycasting with around 360 rays per point light missed a bunch of pixels. I solved this by then using a shader to make a black pixel within the radius of a light the proper color if it was next to at least two non-black pixels, so that it wasn't a shadow. This worked, but sadly, it was far too inefficient, dropping about 300 FPS per light. But did bring me close to what I want, and I would post a picture, but sadly I'm limited to two links :(
Edit3: It works! For the most part, thank you for the help Felsir, but, of course, there are still problems, I've gotten the actual lighting to work, and it's actually MORE than efficient since I don't have to draw the tiles that are not lit up by light, but the problem is, well, darkening the rest of the screen, especially since there will be multiple lights. My first thought would be to not draw the tiles within the radius of the light, but since it creates triangles and not perfect squares like it's supposed to, this happens:
As you can see, it doesn't blacken out the tiles near the edges, and creates some other problems. My other idea was to make a shader that goes through the whole screen and uses a sampler so that if the alpha value is 0, set it black, but, obviously, this doesn't work since the screen doesn't have alpha values other than 1. My last idea would be to make a mesh that's inverted from the light, but that becomes absurdly complicated with multiple lights and probably inefficient, is there any way I can black out the non-lit screen?
Edit3: It works! For the most part, thank you for the help Felsir, but, of course, there are still problems, I've gotten the actual lighting to work, and it's actually MORE than efficient since I don't have to draw the tiles that are not lit up by light, but the problem is, well, darkening the rest of the screen, especially since there will be multiple lights. My first thought would be to not draw the tiles within the radius of the light, but since it creates triangles and not perfect squares like it's supposed to, this happens:
As you can see, it doesn't blacken out the tiles near the edges, and creates some other problems. My other idea was to make a shader that goes through the whole screen and uses a sampler so that if the alpha value is 0, set it black, but, obviously, this doesn't work since the screen doesn't have alpha values other than 1. My last idea would be to make a mesh that's inverted from the light, but that becomes absurdly complicated with multiple lights and probably inefficient, is there any way I can black out the non-lit screen?