Yeah man don’t worry.
Yep, don’t sweat it! You’ve pleased a lot of people around here with mammoth undertaking! If I dedicated the rest of my life to what you’ve done in such a short time frame, it still wouldn’t be enough. Great job… enjoy a respite!
Think I’ll try the particles stuff, kinda excited about it. Will have more updates soon.
would it be possible to create volume-metric lights (light shafts) or hazy volumes that would allow lights to cast visible glows with-in that radius that would shadow properly using system or one like it?
Sure, that’s the beauty of AHR , is highly scalable. For example, if you want fog, is just creating a Voxel grid, tracing light from each Voxel, and then rendering that with raymarching and trilinear filtering(that last part is standard volumetric rendering).
The problem, as always, is performance. As a rule of thumb, I use that (going to a low range to be sure, it actually runs faster) I can trace 300 Million rays per second on my gtx 750 ti. I use that as a rough estimative of the total cost.
from what I have already done on my project, it’s clear I would need Titan X’s or what ever is top of the line once I get to that point, I am currently running a GTX780.
Also after having watched a lot of Game Demo’s from E3 year, and seeing that a lot of the high end games are running fully dynamic Volumetric lighting on consoles it’s clear that Epic made a mistake in dropping their method for what is going on right now. So I have a high degree of confidence that it’s possible to create a system that is both efficient enough to use, and of sufficient quality. After that it’s just a matter of GPU power for how far you could potentially take the tech.
Thats something i don’t understand, UE4 is really a great engine but it seems that it is almost the last engine on planet without fully dynamic lighting, thats really sad.
Like Bookman wrote, E3 made it very clear that every upcoming game is using some kind of fully dynmaic lighting, i simply don’t get it why Epic isn’t working with highspeed on a fully dynamic lighting solution… I mean it is so important these days.
Of course it’s not an easy task but why the heck all the other engines have a solution for fully dynamic lighting ? 
- Fortnite requires a realtime lighting solution, so it is something they are focusing on.
- There’s 4+ realtime lighting solutions for UE4, LPV (which Fable Legends is using and CryEngine uses), DFGI (and heightfield GI), VXGI, Enlighten (which Unity uses).
- There’s plenty of nextgen games that use baked lighting, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End comes to mind.
Actually non of your 4+ realtime solutions are really usable, they all are a work in progress or simply broken.
Please check your information source cause Uncharted 4 isn’t using lightmaps for his massive levels they are uisng Dynamic lighting, and
for Cryengine you are also wrong, cryengine dropped almost a year ago they’re LPV system and chnaged to Envoirement probes for GI.
Just found from a simple source about Uncharted 4, source http://www.trustedreviews.com/
“Exclusive to PS4, Uncharted 4 looks fantastic, with realtime shadowing and dynamic lighting put to good use in the demo.”
From my understanding you wont find a nextgen game which is using lightmaps, especially not for huge outdoor environments, it simply makes no sense, imagine the building times and the size of all your lightmaps…
First, dynamic lighting doesn’t imply dynamic indirect lighting. Secondly, it depends on the level of dynamics you need. For example, environment probes only account for light change(direction, color, intensity, etc) but not for geometry change. I’m yet to see an engine that support real GI for dynamic scenes at a quality higher than LPV (something that VXGI and AHR achive, even as broke as they are). Lastly, lot of games are using baked lighting, but that doesn’t imply lightmaps, for example, the environment probes you mentioned can be considered baked lighting, and is something similar to what ubisoft did with ac unity. Light baked to spherical harmonics probes. Something similar to the good ol’ PRT.
I maybe be wrong though, if you have any example of a really dynamic engine, I would love to see that, been looking for it for ages 
Uncharted must use some form of light maps or baked lighting, I saw on Facebook one of my artist friends of friends complaining that in one of the press release screen shots had broken light maps for an environment they worked on. They probably use a mix of baked and dynamic lighting depending on the scene, but I’d expect that entire car chase sequence has baked lighting.
Snowdrop Engine! A Friend works there and he said they never bake light, it just updates the probes on runtime. But he didnt go into more detail, cause he is not allowed to. I think all the new **** from Ubisoft allows to be updated dynamically. FarCry 3 was using spherical harmonics as well and on PC they could update the probes around the player in realtime. So I think that should be possible with todays consoles Also, check out the new Ghost Recon: Wildlands… thing just looks unbelievable…almost like someone is using black magic xD Also…Quantum Break from Remedy. Our graphics programmer has a friend working there on the rendering and he said they have a team of engineers that has been working for 3 years now on a fully dynamic GI system that uses some kind of hybrid approach. I didnt fully understand it but apparently its some kind of mix between enlighten and raytracing with the possibility to update the radienstransfer information at runtime when geometry changes.
So yeah…lots of cool **** in the pipeline there^^
That sounds depressing you guys. 
Hahaha…just imagine our Studio Head watching E3 videos seeing what all these big player can pull off with their 6 studios working on one title compared to us struggling with UE4 
Its crazy…his cousin works as graphics engineer for DICE…they have ****ING 90 (!!!) graphic programmers in the Frostbite Tech Team to support all the individual teams. Now you understand why Battlefront runs at 60 FPS and 1080p on a XBone and still looks better that almost any other game out there^^
I think some people misunderstood med here, i’m not talking here about a perfect fully dynamic lighted world with 3 bounces “GI”… I’m just talking about a solution which allows a dynmaic world with dynamic lighting and good looking results combined with good performance. Most of the announced games are even working on a Xbox One or PS4… with dynamic lighting! So to be clear i would love to see any dynamic lighting solution which provides the performance and qulity of the showed E3 Games. And is no offense to wonderful engine “UE4” when i’m writing that the lighting and GI solutions “not lightmass” are not the greatest or even one on the worst i have seen so far, compared to what is on the market and what games studios are working with. Claiming that UE4 has to offer a workable solution for dynamic lighting and GI is just wrong.
And yeah Ghost Reacon looks absolutly amazing! All the ubisoft games are using really nice engines, at least the results are looking just fantastic.
For thoose who didn’t the trailer…
“Just” is good…what you want is still one of the most complex things in computer graphic history. Some things are definitely possible, but they need an insane amount of people working on them because its basically brute force 
Nobody has done it before, so everybody is just running around like crazy and tries everything he can imagine to make it somehow work^^ For example, and sorry I will probably say some things wrong because I dont remember the exact details, but it should give you an impression. When we talked about the 90 render guys from DICE and Battlefront at the office, my friend said that they had to do an insane amount of trial and error testing on how to optimize the use of compute shaders since there are apparently no tools for it. So they had teams (!!) of graphic programmers dedicated to just one little task, one small bit of the renderer, and they tested hundreds of different configurations over all platforms until they found the sweet spot for each of them. That took an insane amount of time and yes, in the end they were able to make **** run that normally wouldnt, but you have to have the people, the time and the money to do . Also…sometimes those things can even have a greater effect on a production than you imagine in the beginning. They wanted for example to have all clothing physicalized. After they moved that whole physics stuff over to compute shaders and did their black magic, they found out that method only performs well if there are no vertices with more that 3 edges to it. So yeah…character department started building characters before that was clear, so in the end they had to redo (or retopologize) ALL character from the game to make sure they work with these specifications.
Anyway…long story short…yeah tech advances etc…but it also gets so much more complicated and time consuming to squeeze every bit out of it. Its really hard and takes a lot of effort. And I know I would like what you said as well…like really really badly! But I also know how hard it is to do and Epic doesnt make an engine specific to one game and platform. So there is that as well 
Cheers!
Fable Legends uses UE4 and is fully dynamic
Many of the games have a specifically built dynamic lighting system that only works on their game, no one’s got a perfect dynamic GI system yet.
As far as volumetric lighting goes, a number of games have had that for a while, Alan Wake, even the first Uncharted. Those are specifically designed features though, they’re not a part of a dynamic GI system. I would think all of the games currently that do volumetric lighting do it that way.
And again guys please don’t get me wrong is no offense, i’m not saying that UE4 is a bad engine cause it is clearly not. What i wrote is just the reaction of all the games that use some kind of fully dynamic lighting.
@Daedalus51, you are right, i really have no idea what it takes to develope all features, but it’s just sad to see all big worlds and solutions of other companys and than going back to lightmaps or LPV
I hope we will get one day a good and powerfull solution for dynamic lighting and GI… And by the way i’m still curious how you guys are handling the lighting and GI “problems” or let’s say challenge in the new Dead Island…
Hehe…I hope there comes the time where I can talk abit more about the specifics. All I can say is we use kind of dynamic lighting but not LPVs^^ And yes…we are struggling as well All the features from the Kite Demo are amazing (oh and btw…I also just want to point out that I really love the engine! I think its remarkable what Epic does, but still…I also have my concerns^^) but the problem with the Kite Demo is…its a Demo, a Cinematic. Its not a Game. Why are there no houses in the Kite Demo? One good point for is probably that it wasnt needed to tell the story, but another one might as well be: they have no propper solution yet to have good dynamic interior rendering! It works well for landscapes and outdoors, but there is nothing for interiors. So they just skipped it. Another even huger problem is, that all the features used are insanely highend. So the question is, why can GTA5 look almost as good as the kite demo BUT with loads and loads and looooads of more stuff run on consoles fully in realtime and the Kite Demo cant? And here we are again at the spot of veeery game and platform specific engine programming. A lot of these issues have been buggin me for the last 2 years Working in a production is just so ****ing fascinating and I learn so much. Great stuff!
Cheers!
Running faster/better is not game specific I’d think. I hear a lot in the forum where people justify it by saying it’s game specific.