I’m sure all those people making games with changing environments and dynamic ToD, find lightmass and lightmaps in particular, very useful.
Not to mention big environments, where where lightmap memory (used on player machine), will out weight any possible benefits.
^^ .
even Epic themselves aren’t using lightmass on Fortnite because of dynamic time of the day
Yeah, you could probably be right.
At the same time (and that’s from my own experience, so take with a grain of salt) from a business standpoint you would have to be a very solid and financially backed-up dev to develop a huge open world game with dynamic lighting on mobile.
I don’t want to sound disrespectful to anyone here, since the community here is much nicer than the unity one, but you all know what means.
Whoever wants to do big time stuff on mobile either develop their own tech to be used inside of any engine or they just release their games without complicated gfx features, focusing instead on gameplay and novelty. For me at least that’s the smart way to go.
Not to mention that you could just split your open world and manage it in tiles using streaming and lods.
You have less than 32Gb on you dev machine, honestly? just buy it, ram is dirt cheap these days. The roi on an investment like that is a day , and human time is much more precious than cpu cycles.
The only real problem I could see for lightmass on mobile is memory management on the device (as Inside said), and with careful prep work that can be done right.
Also destructibles could be a pain, but those are edge cases on mobile really.
In any case really, I’m one of the first that started a thread about alternative GI methods so it’s not that I don’t want that to happen.
I also have come to grips with Lightmass and its convoluted workflow and final gathering nonsense: really UE devs, seems like working in mental ray, unexposed properties, no precise documentation with use cases, leaking if you don’t snap on the grid?? What about DCCs with no UV grid (like cinema 4d?) and again, Final effin’ Gathering? in the meantime Arnold, Octane and many others came and blew MR and similar tech out of the atmosphere with a bazooka.
Anyways, I just like to be realistic, and work with the tools I have now.
Besides, I’m so much accustomed to waiting times on vfx that lightmass baking seems like a joke to me! I usually wait 20min to 2 hrs (depending on complexity) for just a frame 
Seems to me that a lot of people want “GI now!” just because it’s looming on the horizon and it’s way cooler than other stuff. I’d settle with better reflections and penumbra shadows with geometry area lights anytime, gi can be faked in so many ways.
Ofcourse the workflow would be soooo much nicer with that, but you’re not gonna use it on mobile now. 2-3 yrs maybe, not now.
For now I’d worry about realtime shadows for instance. Or performance for those who can’t use metal.
@
Aw man, sorry for hijacking the thread. Of course I’m looking forward to your stuff! Thanks a lot.
Ok. entire discussion spanned from unfortunate mention of mobile hardware.
Not everyone is working on mobile games. I’m of mind that mobile gaming end on chess, or other simple 2D game. In that case you don’t even need lighting beyond emissive material ;). For tha matter It’s beyond my mind why would anyone make 3D mobile game. When I see that game is 3D in PlayStore, I just skip it and look for another 0o.
There is a reason why I have beefy PC. To develop and to play beefy, fancy games ;).
It’s beyond my head why would play shooter or complex 3D RPG (which would really use fully dynamic lighting) on mobile device ;p.
Anyway. I have a question. Serious one. How do you want to fake GI with:
Sorry, I might missunderstood you then^^ I was not talking about mobile 
I was talking about next gen games with large worlds (like what we are working on with Dead Island 2) And there, Lightmass just kills everything.
Also, I was talking about you guys when I mentioned the power of the PC. Of course I have enough RAM at the office^^ But I would say that not everybody who uses Unreal 4 on the subscription right now has a machine as strong as the Devs at Epic. So thats why I said it. Also, our world is split up into multiple tiles etc…but nope, Lightmass still cant handle it. So I dont know what your example is based on (have you tried building a 10x10km landscape filled with tons interactive objects, breakable physicalized objects, houses that can fully be explored, millions of grass patches and thousands of trees and rocks and what not?). Mine is based on the fact we tried to build our game with Lightmass which was a complete failure. So of course I want something that makes whole workflow just way more manageable and less unstable.
And just to say something to what Inside mentioned…he is totally right! PBR breaks extremely fast if the lighting is not holding up to it, so that is something very crucial as well (and I would say that lighting and reflections belong so closely together that you cant split them up…at least not with PBR).
Cheers!
People people, I know how fun it is to discuss about topic, but
lets try to keep thread focused.
Hijackers will be prosecuted!
Sorry man I opened up Pandora’s box here.
I’ll copypaste some of the more relevant replies and open a thread in rendering, because it’s still and interesting topic.
Have a nice one!
Yeah…sorry^^ I just love talking about these things 
But you are completely right with what you were saying and my mouth shall be closed on from now on Lets just talk about cool AHR!
Cheers
Great then! I’m in for a thread discussing all . Where are you going to post it?
Here’s a brand new rendering thread for you all: The Ultimate Rendering Thread - Community & Industry Discussion - Epic Developer Community Forums
Can’t wait to see more of your magic, !
Great! Subscribed to that thread already :).
Can anyone provide some guide about plugins? Maybe a tutorial? I want to get to know the system before I start to code.
@, good to see that someone still is up to GI research! For me, it was always such a pain in <you-know-where> to see things like tesselation and destruction physics developing - instead of making real-time area GI, soft shadows with variable penumbra (*Although I’ve heard in 4.5 some dramatic changes are coming!), and shadow-casting light bounces.
Keep up the good work, man!
Get a hold of me next time I’m on Skype. I can help you out there, I’ve written a few plugins already.
Talk to you later then
Lol , I hope you are joking:
@ Great work, I hope you make it work on PS4 (I doubt the Xbone can do it), and why not use the same procedure The tomorrow children used (if you know exactly what they used).
Sorry for the slow updates guys, but have mid term exams all along week. Will be way more active next week
Limited applications, very narrow focus. The technique is very nice, but can only be made possible on very managed environments. It’s not suitable for general purposes.
You cannot use that NOW in open ended maps for instance. Applications would be best suited in somewhat enclosed spaces or in very sparsely populated scenes (as the game you linked)
Search posts by and SVOGI to understand better about it, and why it’s not currently possible in a general engine as UE4.
Hopefully it will scale better on future hardware though, so it’s not entirely without merits.
In any case mods opened a thread for GI discussions, so let’s talk about over there!
@
I’m extatic to see new developments on , even if it’s not going to get realtime now it could be used to have previews in the viewport without building time and accurate lightmass simulation, and could very well become a path traced lightmapper replacing what we have now.
A world without seams, oh god what a thing would be.
It still will be better than LPV as it currently stands, So I would still love for to be real-time for users with a rig that can handle it