Thanks… 
As far as engine updates goes, I’ll say in general it’s not bad for me. I’ve had my bad moments, especially with the 4.7 preview builds, which of course is my own fault for jumping over too soon. But now, having jumped over to 4.8 Preview 4, it’s about as smooth as a transition can be. Some small things changed because of how things work in certain cases that I had to go back and update. Not really all that different from older versions, having gone through every version. They’ve all had their things I had to deal with but nothing major I can remember. But that is the price to pay for using an engine under development. With that said, it’s not that bad, not for me anyway. The good far outweigh the bad. I’ll say in the worst cases, it was actually my own fault having the trouble I had.
With the dynamic lighting, well that actually has a very small difference in the way that I use it. It is dynamic but it is not animated. The biggest impact dynamic lighting has in my game is on the interior scenes. With exterior you basically have a sun and the sky. With a static lighting setup, the only difference is the sky, because the sun is basically still a dynamic light, but it does cast static shadows on static meshes, so that is cheaper. So I also have smaller light on there but they have very little overlap and no shadow casting, and really shadows is where you can probably lose more fps. So the overall exterior impact on my game, with dynamic lighting, is minimal.
With interiors, it’s a different story. There are more lights used and there are more shadow casters. So I use some old “Doom3” lighting theory, keep it simple and keep the overlaps to a minimum. In some key places I have blueprint lights that will basically scale out based on distance so in the back, they cost nothing. For the “deeper” scenes, that gives me back some fps, especially more noticeable in higher resolutions. So speed wise, I just have to keep a close eye on it, compared to static lighting. So with static lighting you just need to deal with using stationary or static. Though I always just used stationary lights, which is also why my transition to dynamic lighting went as easily as it did. Stationary lights are basically dynamic lights with static shadows on static mesh and can contribute to bounce light, but you can only have limited overlaps, I think 3 or 4, can’t remember now exactly. So my interior lighting was close to working with dynamic setup even as a static setup. All I really had to do is deal with the fact I have no bounces, which I do with sky light, and some optimizing of overlap sizes in my major lights.
Comparing to UDK, just in general, without dealing with animated lights… etc… it’s way better. In UDK I was never able to successfully go with fully dynamic. It never worked for me, no matter what tricks I tried. I’m a bit **** with fps, and I couldn’t get satisfactory results. It just simply cost too much. I can’t really speak towards matinee animated lights because I have not used it. I have lights that technically move, like the health pickups, the sword power up, that kind of thing. They don’t seem to do much in terms of impacting fps but they are fairly small and not many of them. The lights I have that moves the most is the lava rocks from the Boss attacks. The big rocks emit light and when they break, the smaller ones also emit light and you can kick them around. To be honest, they did not impact fps much from what I could determine, but they are pretty small lights and as long as they are small you can get away with a lot there. The bigger the light, the more easily you can run into fps problems with regards to having more than one light and of course shadow casting. But matinee animated driven lights, I’m not sure. I think anyway if I had to animate a light, like time of day… or something like that, it would just be a blueprint with a timeline to drive it, not with matinee. I can’t say if that will have the same implications to fps impact or not.
Anyway… I’m typing a lot so I guess I’ll leave it there…
