It’s funny how every time someone points their fingers towards some long time ignored issues they get “workaround”, “do it yourself” type of replies. Yes there are workarounds and do it yourself ways of helping an issue but that doesn’t address the main concern -> it shouldn’t require tons of workarounds and shouldn’t require bunch of sacrifices in visuals to make up for the performance bottlenecks that can be avoided in the first place.
We’re game developers here, we’re not engine developers with as much resources to make modifications to the engine and make it suitable for open world needs and maintain it from then on.
Regarding real time G.I, unlike what most people in this and other threads say IS NOT unrealistic and impossible. Almost every game being developed on Cryengine is now taking advantage of SVOTI which is production ready and runs pretty butter smooth. But as long as you close your eyes on that it seems unrealistic and impossible because you’re still carrying your very old perceptions about real time G.I with you.
However, is real time G.I realistic thing to expect from Epic? definitely not. It’s a new addition to UE4’s lighting, while the base dynamic lighting itself still needs massive performance improvements before any other fancy features get added to it i.e open world games with dynamic directional light suffer major performance issues, and then volumetric lighting and fog only adds to that performance loss.
Lastly, there are countless threads like this. These type of conversations aren’t productive without Epic rendering engineers jumping in to engage the community and collect feedback with the intention of making improvements but not stickies that fall off the table after months or years.
You can continue the discussion hoping someone from Epic will jump in and flip the card in your favor.