This has more or less been the standard since lighting in games became its own discipline: Bake your environmental lighting (see you in the morning) and spend weeks very carefully manipulating your budget to balance visual fidelity with performance.
I do mourn the loss of some of the technical side though. It’s a fun challenge to fine tune settings and optimizing a scene, at least for sickos like us. But that just opens up more time to make better scenes and get fancy with it
I’ve definitely had my share of ‘fun’ challenges squeezing every last drop out of assigned budget to get the prettiest pixels I can achieve. At ND we would step through a level room by room fine tuning hundreds of settings to hit the target.
Buuuuut there was never any fun in waiting on bakes :)
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My budget was 4 spotlights. For the entire scene.
We can do unlimited (in a practical sense) light sources, with immediate real-time results. And this will very quickly just became the new standard.
The challenge is no longer “how do I afford the bare minimum of what we need and still make it look good?”
It’s just: “What looks good?”
It’s mind blowing to have the room to find the look almost completely free of technical limitations.
Iteration is the source of good work. A few short years back it would take me OVERNIGHT to see the results of a change. Now, it’s instant.
I sometimes think if I ever had to go back to the old way I’d probably move to the woods and raise chickens or something.
And we still try to use only what we need too. Every ms counts. It’s just that we have more liberty in deciding what we need.
Buuuuut there was never any fun in waiting on bakes :)