I recall Quake had those a waaaay back then, and also Star Trek: Elite Force II ( Quake 3 engine) had so called lightmap styles (animated lightmaps essentially).
Is it possible to have (and add) something similar in UE4, where animated lights would created a subset of lightmaps that would “blend” with original, non-animated lightmaps?
Now that we are in VR era, old tricks become relevant again and animated static lighting would breath life into scenes. This is especially critical for mobile VR where stationary lights bog down performance.
That I don’t know, but we have more RAM/VRAM now than back in 1996. Do we really have to have John Carmack and Michael Abrash to make it happen in UE4 ?
I believe it. But I doubt that you’d want to have 100’s of full level lightmaps with different intensity and swap between them for animated lights effect.
Most likely some localized patches required where animated lights are and then those would be additively blended with base lightmap. So it shouldn’t take much more memory than for just static base lightmaps.
But who knows how it can or can not be done. I am sure [MENTION=35]Tim Sweeney[/MENTION] would know for sure
Why are stationary lights a performance hit? Shouldn’t they basically just modulate the color value of the (static) light map?
Also, with deferred rendering, a light that doesn’t cast shadows should be cheap even if you make it dynamic. Have you tried making lights dynamic and not-shadow-casting?
