UE4 Users Wishlist

[Maximum-Dev]

@Riley1389;557880

… Accidentally hit post before I was finished -_-

Now also take into account that we are talking about real-time lighting computation here. Technology has come extremely far, but we aren’t yet at the point where you can have your cake and eat it, too. Even a stationary directional light on the production setting can easily take a 30-50fps hit. Concessions need to be made to hit certain performance thresholds. Especially since most developers want to support as much hardware as possible in order to reach a wider audience.

I don’t believe that a expecting a fully dynamic GI that will come without a significant cost of either performance or quality is fair. No matter what kind of coding magic is being used. Even moreso because of how adaptable the engine is for different use scenarios. Sure, there may be some real-time engines that can manage high quality real-time GI and yet still have decent performance. But all of those are almost certainly engines built from the ground up with that particular goal in mind and use in mind. Such engines are only used internally and for one maybe two types of games. If anyone has ever used CryEngine they’d understand how restrictive it is compared to UE4.

Something like fully dynamic GI isn’t something that can merely be tossed in like most other features. Unlike the newer shading models, there’s very few shortcuts that are feasible.

I understand it’s something people want a lot. But at the same time, they also need to remember that people at Epic are likely working on it. But it’s a very intense feature, such things take time to get right. And even if they’re not working on it, I can’t blame them. There are some things that just aren’t possible in a commercial engine yet.

It is correct that UE4 isn’t built for real time from the ground up, and then it’s hard to implement real time features init. But it’s not like they cannot make changes to it. In cryengine you can throw hundreds of dynamic lights in a level and don’t worry about anything. In UE4 put a few dynamic lights and suffer the consequences. If a directional light could take 30-50 FPS hit in some cases it’s not a reason to halt other advancements because this simply light is already taking so much of the resources. It’s the directional light and more generally, the lighting that needs to be fixed/improved and that is very important. The static game environments are coming to an end and yet when we talk about anything real-time we hear no no no it’s hard answers.