I will begin by saying that I probably don’t have as much command over the subject as I should, to talk about this,
but the deferred rendering pipeline is absolutely amazing, except for two things: transparency and non-realistic
stylizing, even more so for both when light is involved.
Even just looking at the stylized rendering premade environment shows that most of the effort went into making
the diffuse maps stylized instead of making use of shaders. Fake lights had to be made in order to adjust the
diffuse, all in order to make it seem like it was being lit, whereas if you were to move a light, or have to move
some object away from its start location in the level, the effect would be lost. Currently, though the artwork
for the stylized rendering showcase is excellent, it reveals how much one must tiptoe around the deferred lighting
system.
So, I’m just putting it out there, even if an overhaul is needed, that perhaps there could be an efficient way to
use forward rendering or have extra rendering options on select objects, like characters, transparencies, and items.
Deferred rendering is powerful, but it seems that when the PBR workflow was embraced, stylized rendering fell to
the wayside in favor of shiny metals and realism, and I believe it should be looked at, as well as the stubborn nature
of the engine’s shading methods.
to put it briefly, A number of options, or even a set of plugins/replaceable rendering modules that would result in a performance hit but allow for more
shader and post-processing flexibility would be key. I may be new, but I know not everyone needs the engine’s functionality limited to keep framerates up,
when some games with these optimizations might go into several hundred frames per second, and others that require a visually simplistic style have their
devs jumping through shoddy fixes and workarounds. A ridiculously efficient engine is nice, but some groups may want to trade their diminishing returns
in framerate for other graphical goodies.
please, when you tear this my suggestion apart and tell me how it can’t be that way, try to let me down gently. "=3=