Please point out to me how you think Epic is pandering to open world developers. In my opinion they have done nothing to fix open world game development. What did we get from Unreal? The Kite Demo! That thing was about as friendly to real time as my cat is to baths. It was all “Hey, look at us, we’re Epic and our engine can do large open worlds” NOT!!! It was a marketing ploy and no more.
GI is an issue whether you want to use it or not. As said earlier, it should be an option at least. If you need it, YAY it’s there. If you don’t, leave it off.
I would also like to point out that a large chunk of the best selling games are open world. Horizon Zero Dawn, The Witcher, Ghost Recon, Skyrim (all TES games), The Legend of Zelda: Breath of Wild, Fallout, Assassin’s Creed, Red Dead Redemption, Batman: Arkham City. Grand Theft Auto V, 90% of the MMO’s on the market, and the list goes on and on. So if you haven’t played a good open world game in 30 years, you obviously haven’t played many games.
I don’t want to make an open world game because it’s trendy, I want to make an open world game because that’s what I enjoy playing!
Both CryEngine and Lumberyard have implemented SVOGI, and it works! Already being used in games that work! In addition, Lumberyard is also using OIT which is order independent transparency. Guess what! It works! The tech is out there, just read the f**king papers and stop acting like nobody is using it and/or implementing it into games. As someone said earlier, Unreal really isn’t free, so we should be able to expect it to work, not just for mobile, not just for VR, but also for open world games. These other teams of game engines have been working to implement the newest tech into their engines, why can’t epic? Oh, btw, Tessellation has been broken for years. That needs to be fixed also. And shut up about “why do you need to use such and such feature, other teams have found work arounds”. Those teams have a large budget and more times than not, just build their own engine.
Regarding work around’s:
From Horizon Zero Dawn, "World lighting is interesting as well. Horizon makes use of pre-calculated global illumination but to make this work with its dynamic time of day system, the engine blends between six different lighting bakes as the day progresses. This is combined with other lighting passes to effectively give the impression of real indirect lighting with moving sunlight. Horizon also uses a multitude of lighting passes in building each scene, starting with emissive or glow lights such as the sky followed by local direct lights such as these torches. This is then followed by the static indirect lighting and sun bounce passes before the sun and sky are rendered. Next are reflections of light across the scenery just before the final texture layer is presented.
Yeah, it’s a work around, but I’m not really sure how that is more cost effective or time effective than SVOGI. I guess if money grows on trees for you and you have a large team it’s doable.
Look, the bottom line is, If I have to fix a game engine to do what it should do, then why the hell would I pay them royalties for something that didn’t work? Hmmmmm, good point!
Oh, and one last thing. To those of you saying or thinking “well, if you don’t like it, don’t use it”. After a couple of years in development, I can’t afford to make the switch now. It would be wasting 100’s of man hours of time and money, so as unf**king happy as I am with Unreal Engine, I can’t afford to make the switch or I would have already.