May 19th, 2020 Livestream Q&A: Why can't you just add lights to the game?

May 19th, 2020 Livestream

Q&A: Why can't you just add lights to the game?

https://youtu.be/IJdIUISe5S4

This question was possibly duplicated with a more recent answer: January 26th, 2021 Livestream Q&A: Lights & Lampposts please? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXbrwFqiS5g

Suggested Wiki Reference Code <ref name="yt-IJdIUISe5S4">[https://youtu.be/IJdIUISe5S4 YouTube - May 19th, 2020 Livestream - Q&A: Why can't you just add lights to the game?]</ref>

Topics

Transcript

yeah so while we're on that subject why not talk about lights a bit, a lot of people have been asking like why why we can't just add lights to the game and we just said like it's it's difficult but maybe you can go more in depth as to like what okay so so first of all you talked a little bit about, the optimization like but you know like the performance budget, what you call it yeah, and like there is it's another thing to that that is worth keeping in mind is that we don't know exactly where the game will end up so exactly what we are required in the end to render and what that will require, in other respects we don't really know like for example right now we can build huge factories we actually run into the limit of the energy and how many objects we can have in the scene yeah and that takes time to process and what will happen with that what will happen what kind of new structures will we have what kind of I don't know it is like there are so many things that can change the final work what we what we really need for story things we need something for it's it's hard to say so we need to always keep a little user budget so we don't have to step down things later because of new requirements that actually needed for like a core feature in the game, but then with that in mind, lighting is very hard because it's so unpredictable and it's it's not logical for most people to understand why it's demanding so if it's suddenly starts tanking your frame rate you might not know why by yourself and we kind of have a responsibility to make that kind of understandable like right now you can't take tank the frame rate by just building a lot of structures that are expensive to render you can you can do that because the start of a game and the end game kind of base is a huge difference in performance, it's inevitable you can't get around that, so we already have that issue but it's more predictable with meshes it's less predictable with lights because the cost of lights is not, how many you have or how big they are or something like that it's it's a combination it's how many pixels on the frame is processed by light and for a model one model covers another model a light doesn't cover another light it means that you can see essentially infinite number of lights on the screen at the same time and that's that can become an issue so all these kind of things is things that we can solve and we can work around like we can turn off we can group lights on the distance like only have one of them on and increase the size and like do all kind of things that we can do to try to keep lights on and like a lot of them at the same time and I would love to it's just that it takes a lot of time in consideration to do it good yeah and it's like we have a lot of other things to do so it's always private prioritization can we do lights now can we do this now it's yeah yeah it's a it's a really interesting kind of optimization problem I think, yeah yeah but it's it's a big thing and and we don't have enough big things in the game already to solve, like in both in terms of like networking and like all the other things in the game, so yeah yeah and and like some people's computers might handle them just fine until they reach down the game and they have a really expensive base and it's yeah it's it's I understand the frustration from some people like they have a really strong piece they have good frame rate and yes one lights, but that's not the case for every player and the yeah yeah that's that's another thing that we have to consider everybody like we can't just consider the high-end the people that have high-end pcs like we have we have a responsibility to make sure that the game kind of runs for everybody, we can work on those like more exclusive stuff for the people who actually just a few people who can use it later potentially but most of the time you want to work on the things that give the most bang for the buck for most people like it's yeah yeah so update first lights all right cool confirm all right fantastic