Like someone in the thread said, a lot of games actually need volumetric fog / light, and especially this is true in 2016. Sure you can do some stuff with faking light shafts, but that means you have to fill every level with hand placed light shafts, and if the lighting conditions changes (intensity, direction, occlusion, color), you have to re-place them etc, matching them with actual shadows isnt very fun for example and time can be much better spent. Sure you fully understand what dynamic volumetric light encompasses if you are recommending light shafts? Some , for example how would you accomplish light rays hitting a rotating fan with static light shafts? Would you rotate them? what if i add another fan? Things get out of hand very quickly so there’s no question you need real engine support. Maybe the problem is that UE4 uses shadow maps instead of shadow volumes, which could have been leveraged to generate light volumes more easily.
Here’s a good example of what i want to see in UE4, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fXvX10SJXs
Although I’m impressed with how much Epic adds to each iteration of UE4, their priorities are quite weird at times, and having waited for so long for this sadly i’m starting to doubt this will ever be added…