It’s not like almost every single game is open world exploration game nowadays. Yes, out of the box support for Time of Day mechanism would be really nice, but IMHO it’s easy to script it too. Did it for one game and it didn’t feel like missing anything.
Of course yeah… different game, different needs. But that’s probably not right topic to discuss it
Yes, it’s totally limiting. I hate it as designer. Still… there a lot of games need it. VR and mobile games need lightmaps to achieve proper framerate.
Even open world games use it. Assasin’s Creed series doesn’t use dynamic Time of Day, they’re baking few lightning states representing noon, evening, night, etc + smart use of dynamics.
The atmospheric game like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, that I was working on, had to use prebaked lights. Not only because of the perfomance, artists relied on soft “eerie” looks of static lightning to create specific mood of the game. Sold around 500K copies on Steam alone in the first year. I bet there are a lot more successful titles using baked lightning out there
That being said… we’re still far from efficient GI in UE4. There’s a lot issues and features waiting for ages. I agree on that, but I do accept harsh truth: this engine needs to satisfy needs of very different games. Like one of Bioware’s developers said “Frostbite is like Formula 1. UE4 is like SUV, a car for entire family”.
I didn’t say there should be any time of day mechanism built into the engine, that’s not what we’re talking about here. Rotating a directional light is really not an. The is that with static lighting you can’t do it.
I don’t like how you both make it sound as if VR games wouldn’t want to use dynamic lighting. I am interested so much in dynamic lighting improvements because I am working on a VR game that uses fully dynamic lighting. So it is completely doable. I spent a lot of time with editing shaders, optimizing other stuff in the source and adding my own dynamic “GI” that works for my game, so it isn’t easy of course and it takes a lot of hard work, but it’s not like “VR Games” and “games that need dynamic lighting” are on opposite ends of the spectrum or anything like that.
I really don’t want to work on a VR game with static lighting. Especially in VR it feels great when everything is dynamic, dynamic lighting is really what makes it come to life.
Well, a Tesla Model X (that’s a SUV) isn’t far from the acceleration of a formula 1 car, so it greatly depends on what kind of SUV you are looking at. Would be nice if UE4 could be such a SUV It’s a nice quote though, I agree.
And I love Tesla Model X comparison
Well, I’m curious what happens when rendering guys finally add all the “platforms”. You know VR, AR, forward rendering, Metal, Vulkan, DX12, Nintento Switch… That’s crazy amount of work for engine team.
You are making no sense. Vulkan can cover VR, AR, forward rendering and mobile. And it’s not even a platform. Switch is most likely GLES 3.x (or even Vulkan), which is already supported.
False. Assassin’s Creed Origins have fully dynamic lighting and time cycle. Ghost Recon: Wildlands as well (both use them same engine).
IDK what tech they are using now for it, but I guess it’s developed version of their probe based lighting. But considering the size of game, they are not baking entire cubemaps and instead just bake light transport (which would be required to have dynamic lighting anyway).
I’d like to see similiar solution in Unreal. As it gives you a lot of benfits of static lightmaps (it’s pretty fast and results are comparable to offline light tracer), but also gives you dynamic light sources.
AC:O looks incredible, the lighting transitions between outside/inside environment are smooth.
Oh I am sorry, from my poor VR dev knowledge I had the impression people in VR only use static lighting (like in Archviz) because of performance reasons.
I like what you say with “Especially in VR it feels great when everything is dynamic, dynamic lighting is really what makes it come to life.”, because this is also on point for most other (non-vr) projects.
It also creates so many more creative gameplay possibilities, even just thinking about it gives me tons of new ideas of what it can be used for.
Any one else have problems with ios? I noticed that performance is very bad. Frame time is doubled versus 4.17. There is also some sort of glitch that shake up dynamic shadows and materials that use worldposition based texture coordinates at pixel shader. Basically unusable.
I installed UE4.18 after official release but after a while it became UE4 Preview 4, WTF?
Reinstalled, 2 days it was UE 4.18 and now it back to “Preview4”.
To be sure, did you turn on APEX Destruction plugin?
Destruction module has been moved to plugin and turned off by default. Everyone get this error at 4.18 upgrade if there’s any destructible mesh in content.
This was mentioned in Release Notes
I have encountered an trying to build a dedicated server for a 4.18 project. The engine was built from source, then a binary version was created from that.
My problem is the content of the “MyGame.Server.Target.cs” file located in the MyGame/Source folder.
using UnrealBuildTool;
using System.Collections.Generic;
public class MyGameServerTarget : TargetRules
{
public MyGameServerTarget(TargetInfo Target)
{
Type = TargetType.Server;
bUsesSteam = true;
}
// TargetRules interface.
public override bool GetSupportedPlatforms(ref List<UnrealTargetPlatform> OutPlatforms)
{
// It is valid for only server platforms
return UnrealBuildTool.UnrealBuildTool.GetAllServerPlatforms(ref OutPlatforms, false);
}
public override void SetupBinaries
(
TargetInfo Target, ref List<UEBuildBinaryConfiguration> OutBuildBinaryConfigurations,
ref List<string> OutExtraModuleNames
)
{
OutExtraModuleNames.Add("MyGame");
}
}
Now as far as I know that is outdated, so I changed it to this:
using UnrealBuildTool;
using System.Collections.Generic;
public class MyGameServerTarget : TargetRules
{
public MyGameServerTarget(TargetInfo Target) : base(Target)
{
Type = TargetType.Server;
bUsesSteam = true;
ExtraModuleNames.AddRange( new string] { "MyGame" } );
}
// TargetRules interface.
public override bool GetSupportedPlatforms(ref List<UnrealTargetPlatform> OutPlatforms)
{
// It is valid for only server platforms
return UnrealBuildTool.UnrealBuildTool.GetAllServerPlatforms(ref OutPlatforms, false);
}
}
However, upon generating the project files, I get the following error:
ERROR: c:\MyProjectPath\MyGame\Source\MyGameServer.Target.cs(22,36) : error CS0122: 'UnrealBuildTool.UnrealBuildTool' is inaccessible due to its protection level
ERROR: c:\MyProjectPath\MyGame\Source\MyGameServer.Target.cs(22,52) : error CS0117: 'UnrealBuildTool.UnrealBuildTool' does not contain a definition for 'GetAllServerPlatforms'
ERROR: UnrealBuildTool Exception: Unable to compile source files.
Where is tango things? Not ArCore, tango. Tango plugin is missing there. I have Asus Zenfone AR and there is no documentation and plugin is dropped. In 4.17 tango plugin is present
4.18: [SPOILER]
[/SPOILER]
4.17
all tango classes is present, such as mesh reconstruction, area learning
[SPOILER]
[/SPOILER] tangoMapConfigurationActor is missing on 4.18[SPOILER]
[/SPOILER]
It’s a nice quote though, I agree.
