Nice to see Dev discussion going on here. Honestly I don’t care what the method is as long it’s dynamic and not dependent on static baked scenes.
Aside from distance based cascading, I also had radial cascading around emissive light sources in mind. Distance field AO is indeed impressive, glad you’re working on a game that is dynamic!
Has there been any investigation into DX11.2’s Tiled Resources + 3D Textures? (Partially resident textures) IIRC both PS4 and XboxOne Support Tiled Resources. I know there was discussion of ditching Octree from SVOGI in favor of 3D textures in combination with Tiled Resources, though I haven’t seen any great usage yet. Obviously there are other promising methods on the rise as well. Though I always hate the idea of upgrading windows just for a new version of DX.
As far as LPVs go, UE4 isn’t Open Source, but it’s close. I watched the the back and fourth exchange as Rama was trying to get his Snap feature integrated into the engine. There were a lot of special conditions, standards and rules he had to adapt to, changes he had to make to fit the “Epic way”.
@JamesG: Remember how your fluid surface plugin request turned out? 
So I was thinking, for features backlogged on the roadmap in general, why not release guidelines like that for all of those features. Whether it is internal notes or a white paper. Perhaps not to finish the feature completely, but to help fast track it. Or if there’s an experimental feature documented in a paper you can’t justify spending time on implementing.
This is an interesting paper, though since it is based on screenspace it will probably break easily when things are changing off screen. Just wondering if there’s a hybrid solution to take the cheapest technique and use an optimization or method on a conditional basis to compensate for weaknesses.
If I were a programmer with some spare time, that’s what I would be doing right now.
(Forgive me if any of this has been addressed already, been out of town and unable to keep up)
-Xod