>>718744736
ray tracing is cool, but it's far too expensive for what it is. as a designer, be able to just drop a light into a scene, and it actually affects reflections, and shadows, there's no more work to be done is amazing. the cost is fucking extraordinary. the point of fully dynamic lights is for things like day and night cycles, where if you have baked shadows, as soon as the sun or moon moves, your shadows are fucked. open world games require a bunch of tricks. lights that don't cast shadows is a great one, because you don't need 50 lights casting shadows. another thing we lost is the art of one of the most basic textures; ambient occlusion. the point of this is to make all the places light won't hit dark. ever notice in new games when the lighting is flat and neutral, characters just lose all depth and turn flat? that's because the ambient occlusion map is expecting lights to hit the character from a couple angles. instead, they're not getting hit at all, so you get flat bullshit. we used to bake the ambient occlusion into the color map, so no matter what, there were dark and light spots on characters. it's not dynamic, it 100% messes up hair shadows, so you can't bake hair shadows, but we had screen space occlusion for that, which was good enough.