[Duke4Beta]

Hello,

I have a question regarding Duke Nukem Forever and their choice of lighting for large outdoor areas. It seems that dynamic lighting ha been chosen over baked shadows for statically lit scenes?

I mean, wouldn't this be more CPU efficient? Guess maybe I don't know as much as I thought.

Would love to get an explanation regarding this. Thanks!

[HulkNukem]

All I know is that the apparent reason it was set during daytime was that the engine couldn't handle all the lights from night time.

There is also a multiplayer level set on the strip at night time.

[Altered Reality]

It could be that the code to handle baked lighting was scrapped when dynamic lighting and real-time shadows were introduced. It's the only explanation to the mention of levels suddenly being all black when the new code was introduced.

[Micky C]

Couldn’t they have kept that code in and just added a toggle or something?

[Duke4Beta]

Well, that's what I was thinking, but they must have been overly confident regarding their new tech, even though it would be logical just to leave it in. a simple bool would be enough to toggle shadow modes. I figure they thought they could just bake the lights in for background models with a 3d modeling program, and then just port the assets in the engine. it seems silly to me to rely on just dynamic shadows...that leaves me to wonder if they wanted to have a day-night system at one point, or it was just too expensive to get the static lighting re-implemented so that it could interact with the dynamic lights in a subtractive manner.

[PokeThePower]

Micky C, on 17 July 2018 - 03:30 AM, said:

Couldn’t they have kept that code in and just added a toggle or something?

Duke4Beta, on 27 July 2018 - 06:16 PM, said:

a simple bool would be enough to toggle shadow modes.

Preface: I'm not defending where DNF landed.

Answer: No.

Now if you had said "Well why didn't their lighting guys support TWO paths to lighting and therefore manually light every single scene twice" then it might have approached some semblance of understanding the problem, though you'll be hard pressed to find any project that considers supporting two lighting paths on the spectrum of sanity. The only place your suggestions have ever had any life are in some kinda interesting "super slow system options" where there is literally zero expectation of acceptable visuals purely to get polys on screen at a functional framerate on below min spec machines.