Can't get my lighting right.

[RickyRoaster]

@Daedalus51;709243

I worked at YAGER before Dead Island got cancelled at that company and was moved over to be rebooted at Sumo Digital

I looked you up. You made that nice lighting academy thing, I’ve watched some of it before it’s very nice. And i read you worked (or still do?) for DICE in frostbite? (Sorry for the offtopic questions i just think it’s nice meeting devs like you)

@Daedalus51;709243

However, Enlighten itself can be worse than Lightmass to use since you either have to build target meshes (instead of Lightmaps) and that process is…well to say it as politely as I can…pain in the ***! XD You have to build simplified models and unwrap them too and the lighting gets built for those and then reprojected onto the actual geometry.

Its not actually baking lightmaps though…its baking how light bounces off of these surfaces into lightmaps. Basically they contain radiosity transfer information. That way they can be relit dynamically during runtime. What it doesnt do is supporting dynamic geometry changes and fast lighting changes because the tech is just to slow for that. So if you would have a fully dynamic light with GI that blings…the GI from that blinking light would always update with a slight delay to the actual lightsource blinking fairly fast.

So yeah…out of the box, Enlighten “might” be better for you. However, we evaluated Enlighten in Unreal 4 too for Dead Island 2 and the world was too large to make Enlighten work properly since you still need to prebake the radiosity transfer and the data can become quite enormous.

All that stuff is the reason why almost every open world game uses some sort of irradiance volumes (read, probe volumes etc) for their lighting. There are a couple of fancy mixed approaches, like what Quantum Break does or the Division…but all in all…everyone uses probe tech for that…even GTA! However, since they have millions of emplayees and money, they can do way more custom stuff. GTA for axample uses probe lighting outdoors and the interiors are actually lightmapped and baked. So you might ask yourself now: how do they update the interiors then when its nighttime for example? Well again…custom solutions sovled via manpower! They just bake like 4 different states of time of day for the interiors and then blend between them based on what time it is. You can totally do that…but it takes a lot of time, resources and money.

Okay I have clearly overestimated the abilities of engines when it comes to lighting haha. Daamn I really wanted an easy way out. Since I’m a one man army with not much budget at all making a quite big project, it’s hell of a challenge and every easy way out of something is always so relieving. I’m not a art kind of guy, I buy assets for my game and that’s all i can pay for, that’s why i’m so unknowledgeable about certain aspects of game dev when it comes to visuals so sorry for asking questions that probably had very obvious answers. That GTA idea is very cool though, I actually thought about programming something like that which is crazy hearing from you that they had kind of the same idea, but i was obviously like: it will be too much work for 1 guy, I have better things to do for my game than make it look that pretty.

So unreal seems to be better at handling bigger maps but unity seems to have a better lighting solution for my situation? Hmm… And light probes, never could wrap my head around what those even do honestly, but i’ll look it up again i guess.
This decision is really painful…
May I ask you since you’re way more experienced? Will it be too much pain for me to make GI work properly for this situation, should i just give up on GI (considering i’m one person)? If i should, then what engine is more suiting. And if i shouldn’t, what engine is more suiting (by more suiting i mean which will be less work, more performance, more overall possible I guess and overall less time consuming for me in particular considering i’m a total newbie at unreal, very familiar with unity and one person)?

Thanks for taking your time answering, seriously, it’s much appreciated.

EDIT: Oh and I’ll try Distance Field stuff and see what that is.