Nope. Actually they used to repeat “no active development on GI” like a mantra. They didn’t comment on LPV, etc.
Now it’s the first time they came to forums and proclaimed: “We’re assembling a team of lightning Avengers, working on GI, realtime raytracing and Lightmass”.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/deve…96#post1490796
https://forums.unrealengine.com/deve…53#post1493653
And that’s came after:
- Showing off RTX demo - there was some collaboration with Industrial Light&Magic so we could speculate about huge deal behind a scenes to use realtime (or incredibly fast) GI for movies
- Fortnite begun to produce dollars faster than federal money printer, so now it’s time to re-invest profits
I understand if someone would “annoyed” because we see progress on non-game tools, but not GI. Although… in near future we could gain a lot from Epic’s non-game initiatives. It makes a perfect sense to combine now:
- RTX
- needs of movie/archvis/VFX industry
- needs of open world games or smaller games that could benefit from realtime GI
- Microsoft hinted a new console briefly at E3, now it could be a good time to design a tech to support another line of “next-gen” games…
A movie industry used to develop techniques used later in games. Well, maybe now it’s finally time to work simultaneously on game and movie tech?
I’m pretty sure that rectangular lights were added to the engine because some experienced movie artist said: “Guys, why you don’t have this?”. I know, I know, we could live without area lights 