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[Herr Edgy]

2005 dude, 2005, about to be 2 decades old. On DX8 API and the very first shader pipeline cards.

Do you understand that I tried to make an evolution of dynamic raster lighting? Your point is bullshit, raster could/can work around dynamic worlds, there was a massive shift circa 2011-2013 where engines started to implement light probes.

I can also spot many places where the latest tech with huge hardware requirements and runs like pixel soup on consoles fails miserably for no benefits.

In fact, BRAVO Lumen for not shadow casting enemies nor have gun nozzle flashes on Stalker 2 in 2024

My point was that your points are not worth considering because you do not know what you are talking about. You just reaffirmed this by the false connection you made between muzzle flashes not causing shadows and Lumen in Stalker 2. Here you go, dynamic lights from muzzle flashes using Lumen. Whipped it up in a couple minutes since I had Lyra open anyways.

 

[Buggy Loop]

My point was that your points are not worth considering because you do not know what you are talking about.

Holy shit, you're way out of your league

There's hours and hours and hours worth of great engine designers explaining the same thing I've said.

 

[Herr Edgy]

There's hours and hours and hours worth of great engine designers explaining the same thing I've said.

And I will gladly talk to them because they will present valid points and perspectives. You are just parroting things you do not understand.

 

[Buggy Loop]

And I will gladly talk to them because they will present valid points and perspectives. You are just parroting things you do not understand.

And what are you providing here in this discussion?

Nothing

You are trying to say that games without ray tracing had no dynamic lights

You have a mountain of proof to provide to even say this, you're not even anywhere near convincing anyone that has been in these threads over the years on GAF









Go ahead and @ these guys on twitter, post a proof of your post, and come back to us with them saying that they had no dynamic lights

 

[mrqs]

The reality is: Unreal Engine 5 enables a broader industry being able to achieve great visuals. Problems always existed. Unreal Engine 3 games could look and perform extremely badly.

Every dev can still have their in-house engine for ultra-specific games.

More people are just using Unreal because their jump was so huge that trying to catch up with in-house engines became unsustainable for the most part.

Badly optimized games in an universe without the Unreal Engine would: 1) Simply not exist. 2) Look worse.

 

[Herr Edgy]

Go ahead and @ these guys on twitter, post a proof of your post, and come back to us with them saying that they had no dynamic lights

If you read any of my posts thinking I said or implied dynamic lights didn't exist before, you have to be either illiterate or disingenuous. I chose to believe the former.
I'm not fond of unproductive discussions, and seeing how you can't even admit you have no clue what you are talking about in regards to the muzzle flash shadow issue, I'm not going to engage with your bad faith posts anymore.
Have a good day.

 

[Soodanim]

He might have some points, but he presents himself like a angry man-baby with his dramatic rants you see by some of the less mentally stable members you see here.

But what's far worse than that is he wrote "creditably" instead of "credibility", so I've lost all respect for him and his makeup wearing, taking himself far too seriously self.

 

[Crayon]

If I had 5 minutes of fame on the internet, I would cash it in too.
5$ welcome everyone. bring it right here.

Monkey paw: they pay you in gaf gold.

I'm not very technical but I can say something about this gif. If you took a game with too much hype, showed this gif from 20 years ago and said "look at our awesome aaa raytracing", tons of enthusiasts would believe it. Maybe even the majority. Not because fear is doing any technical magic, but because the viewers are more going to react to artistic impression no matter how technically savvy they consider themselves to be.

Part of the problem is that these heavy new techniques bring more to accuracy of light and shadow than the artistic impression of it. For the vast majority people playing a game, that general impression of light and shadow over the whole image is infinitely more important than accuracy to real life light.

 

[FireFly]

In fact, BRAVO Lumen for not shadow casting enemies nor have gun nozzle flashes on Stalker 2 in 2024

UE5 doesn't mandate any particular shadowing technology. You can use regular shadow maps, VSMs or ray traced shadows. It's also up to developers to decide what objects are light casting. The tradeoff that gets decided on will depend on the performance profile of the game and the time spent in the optimization phase.

 

[Dr.Morris79]

He might not call them lazy or talentless, but I fucking will.

LAZY cunts, and your games and engine are shit. Tim Cain at obsidian made a video where he discussed dealing with these jobsworths on Outer Worlds.

Have you or anyone in here got a link to the video, wouldn't mind a watch

 

[simpatico]

So not only are devs badly using Unreal Engine and shipping games with horrible performance, but they are also total degenerates on Discord and Reddit and insult people trying to help out? Checks out on both ends.

Think about it. That's probably all that is left in the western game dev market. The exodus is complete. The studios are staffed full of people fresh out of 2-year game development degrees. The real savants have left the western AAA space almost entirely. Beyond buying their games or not, I've got legitimate concerns about what they're doing to the groundwater. Just concentrating all those psych meds and hormone drugs into a single sewage outlet pipe. Goes right through their livers and into the water system. If you share municipal water service with any AAA developer studio, you really need to get your water tested.

 

[Dr.Morris79]

Have you or anyone in here got a link to the video, wouldn't mind a watch

..I think it's this one



I'll have a watch.

 

[Vick]

I'm not very technical but I can say something about this gif. If you took a game with too much hype, showed this gif from 20 years ago and said "look at our awesome aaa raytracing", tons of enthusiasts would believe it. Maybe even the majority. Not because fear is doing any technical magic, but because the viewers are more going to react to artistic impression no matter how technically savvy they consider themselves to be.

But FEAR was kind of doing technical magic stuff back then.

I get the point though. If ND claimed in 2016 "This is our RT bounce", how could people not believe it?

I am also playing Mafia: Definitive Edition, and the game looks like it uses Lumen. It does not obviously, but same-ish Global Illumination, same exact denoising artifacts.. same-ish aesthetic. If Hangar said "The game uses RT lighting", everyone would believe it.

And I think it does actually use RT, just related to reflections as far as I know.

 

[Crayon]

But FEAR was kind of doing technical magic stuff back then.

I get the point though. If ND claimed in 2016 "This is our RT bounce", how could people not believe it?

I am also playing Mafia: Definitive Edition, and the game looks like it uses Lumen. It does not obviously, but same-ish Global Illumination, same exact denoising artifacts.. same-ish aesthetic. If Hangar said "The game uses RT lighting", everyone would believe it.

And I think it does actually use RT, just related to reflections as far as I know.

Smart of them. I think reflections are the one killer rt effect so far. The way ssr squeegees reflections is awful. Rt reflections feels like it's actually fixing a real problem. Ssr comparison aside, rt reflections can really pop.

If I took the rtgi Pepsi challenge like we're talking about, I would not do too well. But the reflections I would get right most of the time.

 

[Gaiff]

..I think it's this one



I'll have a watch.

Here is the video without Asmongold’s ignorant ass interrupting it.

 

[hyperbertha]

Question to you: If we suck so bad, why does Fortnite run and look great for the most part across so many devices?
I am also a gamer so I totally get the frustration with lots of modern games. But trust me that this problem is far more complex than just "uhhh devs lazy and stupid". That just makes you seem pathetic.

Fartnite is a game with some disney style simple graphics. Why are you comparing that game to more realistic looking ones? Even 2007 Crysis is more impressive than fartnite.

 

[ZehDon]

Got around to watching the video, and it's hard to not call this channel a hustle afterwards. We're at the point in the grift where we see what appear to be results and now they're asking for money, promising the real McCoy in the near future. Trying to establish yourself as a developer, while actively picking fights for clout, while actively claiming victimhood, while actively asking for donations, while actively promising the world, is about the most 2024 method of game development imaginable. I gave them the benefit of the doubt up until this point, in particular because they actually understood the overdraw issues with Epic's Nanite's REYES implementation. But when you're putting targets on real people in your video, you're not a developer: you're an activist. And we already have enough of that in this industry. If you want to share cool new approaches, or highlight problems with real solutions, to actively make things better, then do exactly that. But asking for donations while spitting on other people? I'll leave that to the usuals.

... I am also playing Mafia: Definitive Edition, and the game looks like it uses Lumen. It does not obviously, but same-ish Global Illumination, same exact denoising artifacts.. same-ish aesthetic. If Hangar said "The game uses RT lighting", everyone would believe it.

And I think it does actually use RT, just related to reflections as far as I know.

Fun fact in case you didn't know: Mafia Definitive Edition actually uses a software based ray-tracing solution that allows for intelligent SSR merging with cube maps as well as incorporation of global illumination. This approach allows the game to run on an Xbox One while still looking outstanding. To my eyes, the only thing that really gives the game away as a last gen title is the polygon counts:

Spoiler

 

[Dr.Morris79]

Here is the video without Asmongold’s ignorant ass interrupting it.

It's brutal, really. But I've found this with most jobs and people's attitudes these days, no matter the field

No one wants to actually do anything. Even on a basic level.

 

[ScHlAuChi]

For anyone looking for a job - he is currently hiring an Unreal engine developer and Unreal plugin developer:

THREAT INTERACTIVE hiring UE5 Plugin & Engine Developer in Los Angeles Metropolitan Area | LinkedIn

Posted 12:33:58 PM. Company DescriptionTHREAT INTERACTIVE is a new indie game studio based in the Los Angeles…See this and similar jobs on LinkedIn.

www.linkedin.com

If he is such a genius - why cant he do it himself?

Here´s my prediction of what will happen next:
- he will work on this for a year or two and try to sell a plugin of his magic tech
- when it doesnt do well, he will claim Epic is preventing him from success as they feel threatened by his magical tech.
- UE6 releases rendering this guy´s work obsolete and ending the grift

 

[Black_Stride]

In fact, BRAVO Lumen for not shadow casting enemies nor have gun nozzle flashes on Stalker 2 in 2024

Thats is NOT Lumens fault.
Lumen supports enemies and muzzle flashes being Shadow Casting.
Hell with RTXDI you could have basically every light source be it an emission map or an actually light be shadow casting.

You should be bl;aming GSC for not implementing shadow casting muzzle flashes.





Another thing you are forgetting is that we have moved to Deferred Rendering. (hybrid for most games actually)
Which is why games like FEAR and SplinterCell can have that kind of lighting, with Forward Rendering the lighting data and geometry data are intrinsically tied together, this is good for creating shadows but as you are doing multiple full pasess for each light in a scene it isnt particularly efficient............which is why generally in forward rendered games any one scene would have few lights sometimes literally one and those lights would rarely if ever actually overlap with each other.
They could be artificially bound and you would get situations where your shadow is being generated by one light, you walk a bit and your shadow is suddenly facing a completely different direction because youve go out of bounds of light A.


I believe Doom Eternal is one of few modern games thats Forward Rendered.
But thats with some serious trickery going on.
YOu can read about it here......but read the Doom'16 one first.

https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2020/RenderingDoomEternal.pdf

 

[Black_Stride]

For anyone looking for a job - he is currently hiring an Unreal engine developer and Unreal plugin developer:

THREAT INTERACTIVE hiring UE5 Plugin & Engine Developer in Los Angeles Metropolitan Area | LinkedIn

Posted 12:33:58 PM. Company DescriptionTHREAT INTERACTIVE is a new indie game studio based in the Los Angeles…See this and similar jobs on LinkedIn.

www.linkedin.com

If he is such a genius - why cant he do it himself?

Here´s my prediction of what will happen next:
- he will work on this for a year or two and try to sell a plugin of his magic tech
- when it doesnt do well, he will claim Epic is preventing him from success as they feel threatened by his magical tech.
- UE6 releases rendering this guy´s work obsolete and ending the grift

Lol.
The studio has 2 employees and its description is We are a new game studio and YouTube channel
This is a youtube channel grifting as a game studio.
Where are they even gonna get the money to pay this person?

 

[Myths]

Hardly anyone knowledgable takes this guy seriously; he just yaps throwing around rendering technique terms and appeals to the clueless, lowest common denominator gamer that will clap in awe.

As a final thought on the matter, the guy's aim is collecting 900k USD by means of YouTube donations with 0 visibility or accountability while he can not be arsed to pay 15 bucks per year to buy a domain for his website. He also has not demonstrated any capability in the rendering programming realm (I do not doubt he did some hobby projects, but has not demonstrated anything). He is not stupid, but you have to be stupid to believe what he says at face value.

I think he started out with youthful and good intentions but has devolved into a grifter seeing how he got attention.

Jeroen Baert (@jbaert.bsky.social)

It all has a very high "I wanted to get into CG, but vector math is hard and confusing"-energy.

bsky.app

And the parent thread pretty much sums this clown up.

Alex Battaglia (@dachsjaeger.bsky.social)

All I want for Christmas is for everyone to please stop sending me links to *those* videos complaining about "modern graphical technique ruins gaming", how graphics were better a decade ago, and how said person complaining is going to build a special team to fix Unreal Engine. Santa please. PLEASE.

bsky.app

 

[winjer]

Hardly anyone knowledgable takes this guy seriously; he just yaps throwing around rendering technique terms and appeals to the clueless, lowest common denominator gamer that will clap in awe.

Jeroen Baert (@jbaert.bsky.social)

It all has a very high "I wanted to get into CG, but vector math is hard and confusing"-energy.

bsky.app

And the parent thread pretty much sums this clown up.

Alex Battaglia (@dachsjaeger.bsky.social)

All I want for Christmas is for everyone to please stop sending me links to *those* videos complaining about "modern graphical technique ruins gaming", how graphics were better a decade ago, and how said person complaining is going to build a special team to fix Unreal Engine. Santa please. PLEASE.

bsky.app

I just find it very funny you talk about knowledge in graphics, but then put up Alex Battaglia.
Holy shit dude, that is very low bar.

 

[Thief1987]

Hardly anyone knowledgable takes this guy seriously; he just yaps throwing around rendering technique terms and appeals to the clueless, lowest common denominator gamer that will clap in awe.

Jeroen Baert (@jbaert.bsky.social)

It all has a very high "I wanted to get into CG, but vector math is hard and confusing"-energy.

bsky.app

And the parent thread pretty much sums this clown up.

Alex Battaglia (@dachsjaeger.bsky.social)

All I want for Christmas is for everyone to please stop sending me links to *those* videos complaining about "modern graphical technique ruins gaming", how graphics were better a decade ago, and how said person complaining is going to build a special team to fix Unreal Engine. Santa please. PLEASE.

bsky.app

You are really citing Battaglia as someone "knowledgeable"? Seriously

 

[Myths]

You are really citing Battaglia as someone "knowledgeable"? Seriously

Linked the parent thread, which has actual developers working in the field offering insight. Crazy how that works.

 

[Herr Edgy]

For anyone looking for a job - he is currently hiring an Unreal engine developer and Unreal plugin developer:

THREAT INTERACTIVE hiring UE5 Plugin & Engine Developer in Los Angeles Metropolitan Area | LinkedIn

Posted 12:33:58 PM. Company DescriptionTHREAT INTERACTIVE is a new indie game studio based in the Los Angeles…See this and similar jobs on LinkedIn.

www.linkedin.com

If he is such a genius - why cant he do it himself?

Here´s my prediction of what will happen next:
- he will work on this for a year or two and try to sell a plugin of his magic tech
- when it doesnt do well, he will claim Epic is preventing him from success as they feel threatened by his magical tech.
- UE6 releases rendering this guy´s work obsolete and ending the grift

Funny part is you can not change the renderer using plugins. And I agree with your prediction.

 

[winjer]

You are really citing Battaglia as someone "knowledgeable"? Seriously

Exactly. Alex knows very little about hardware and software.
Only when a dev tells him exactly what to say, does he say anything right.

 

[TheThreadsThatBindUs]

Modern game developers suck at coding - News at 11.

It isn't that devs are worse at coding... well it is, on average. But not because individual devs became less competent.

Rather, it's because it now takes 400+ devs to make a game.

You will never find 400 highly competent, highly skilled coders who understand how to tightly optimize a piece of software. So you might have 5 - 10 really really competent devs and 390 mediocre to shit ones. So of course, the highest skilled talent has no time to optimize anything when they're spending their time cleaning up the code of the 390 shitty devs.

 

[Buggy Loop]

Thats is NOT Lumens fault.
Lumen supports enemies and muzzle flashes being Shadow Casting.
Hell with RTXDI you could have basically every light source be it an emission map or an actually light be shadow casting.

You should be bl;aming GSC for not implementing shadow casting muzzle flashes.

Of course they can implement it


But Mr Edgy here is quick to jump on a 2005 game that had static lighting when even 2024 games are lacking effects that the same dev had in their previous engine

You want to find faults in lighting and image quality in modern games? We can spend all week. Lumen and RTGI have plenty.

If you read any of my posts thinking I said or implied dynamic lights didn't exist before, you have to be either illiterate or disingenuous. I chose to believe the former

You say that games are dynamic and thus we move to ray traced solutions.

I’m telling you since the beginning that this is false. The vast majority of games are pretty much static as they have been since decades. The game building philosophy has barely changed since PS3 days.

Fortnite, or any games where you build/destroy something as the main characteristic, like Teardown, make more sense to need RT.

Characters, breakable objects, doors/windows close/opening, vehicles, a specific scene/event, are typically what needs to be dynamic. For a typical game these account for not much of the complexity in lighting. 25%?

Rest of geometry is typically solid, the vegetation etc, they no longer allow you to destroy them, etc. So that’s 75% that can be pre-baked but still have things like dynamic time of day if you want

All that was solved a long time ago. So going back to your original argument, games are mainly static, not dynamic.

Silent Hill 2
Indiana Jones

Two recent games I know full well don’t need RT. And many others

Did devs take shortcut to save time? Well yes.

Indiana Jones in this case decided to throw ~40% of the userbase without RT hardware under the bus. Bold move in a genre that typically does not have massive sales.

The threat interactive guy is 100% correct to call them out on this, the consoles are not even respected as a baseline and UE5 completely obliterates the consoles when you include all the bells and whistles, or you drop image quality to 720p internal res and smear everything.

It’s on devs? 100%. So calling them out on it is the way to do.

This is what Digital Foundry should have been.

 

[Black_Stride]

Of course they can implement it


But Mr Edgy here is quick to jump on a 2005 game that had static lighting when even 2024 games are lacking effects that the same dev had in their previous engine

You want to find faults in lighting and image quality in modern games? We can spend all week. Lumen and RTGI have plenty.

I didnt follow the whole quote train.
But from your post it seemed like you were blaming Lumen or Unreal Engine for muzzle flashes not being shadow casting.
It has nothing to do with the engine.





The RTX20s came out in 2018.
If you dont have a DXR capable GPU now, no one is gonna feel sorry for you and devs should rightly so leave your ass behind.

 

[Herr Edgy]

Of course they can implement it


But Mr Edgy here is quick to jump on a 2005 game that had static lighting when even 2024 games are lacking effects that the same dev had in their previous engine

You want to find faults in lighting and image quality in modern games? We can spend all week. Lumen and RTGI have plenty.




You say that games are dynamic and thus we move to ray traced solutions.

I’m telling you since the beginning that this is false. The vast majority of games are pretty much static as they have been since decades. The game building philosophy has barely changed since PS3 days.

Fortnite, or any games where you build/destroy something as the main characteristic, like Teardown, make more sense to need RT.

Characters, breakable objects, doors/windows close/opening, vehicles, a specific scene/event, are typically what needs to be dynamic. For a typical game these account for not much of the complexity in lighting. 25%?

Rest of geometry is typically solid, the vegetation etc, they no longer allow you to destroy them, etc. So that’s 75% that can be pre-baked but still have things like dynamic time of day if you want

All that was solved a long time ago. So going back to your original argument, games are mainly static, not dynamic.

Silent Hill 2
Indiana Jones

Two recent games I know full well don’t need RT. And many others

Did devs take shortcut to save time? Well yes.

Indiana Jones in this case decided to throw ~40% of the userbase without RT hardware under the bus. Bold move in a genre that typically does not have massive sales.

The threat interactive guy is 100% correct to call them out on this, the consoles are not even respected as a baseline and UE5 completely obliterates the consoles when you include all the bells and whistles, or you drop image quality to 720p internal res and smear everything.

It’s on devs? 100%. So calling them out on it is the way to do.

This is what Digital Foundry should have been.

I will rephrase my points to you one last time because I think you really just didn't understand them; might be because I'm articulating them badly, or otherwise.
So here we go:

I did not say or imply we are moving to raytracing because of games being dynamic in nature.
I did not say or imply dynamic lights didn't exist before Lumen or Mega Lights.
What I *did* say, or mean if we are putting the onus on me to put things into words better, is the following:

• Mega Lights was made for one broad point, and that is to solve limitations imposed by previous tech, that would heavily limit the amount of dynamic, shadow casting lights that can interact with each other.
• Gifs and videos of old games with dynamic lights (including FEAR from 2005) all look very good and impressive, but the underlying tech vastly restricted what you could do with them.
• I did not call out your usage of a gif of a game in 2005 because it wasn't up to modern standards (duh), but because I felt discussion is pointless given we talk two different languages.
• Gifs and videos of games with a moving sun light that casts shadows are nothing new; it's usually one single directional light that was dynamically rendering shadows.
• The limitation comes from the fact that it becomes very expensive very fast, to the point of not being viable at all, to put *multiple* dynamic shadow casting light sources into one scene. That's why it is easy to point to singular good looking lights and say "see, this was working before!" - Yes, because devs only showed you what worked, and not what didn't work.
• Game Dev is a complex process restricted by all kinds of budgets. Be it available personnel, skill, money, time, scope, hardware targets, shifting goals. There is no world in which games are made in a vacuum.
• As such, devs are constantly balancing different factors, trying to make the best decisions under the constraints they have. No dev worth anything will fail to realize obvious issues such as characters draining perf because of lack of LOD or too many non-sensical lights in a scene (small correction to my previous point, it wasn't 4 dynamic lights that was the limit in overlaps, it was stationary lights; which is in-between static lights and dynamic lights. The 5th stationary light would start casting dynamic lights instead). What might happen however is that priorities don't give enough room to fully LOD up the characters. This can happen because of the aforementioned factors pulling devs into certain directions. Ideally all of these issues can be addressed before launch, but sometimes that's simply not the case. Doesn't mean you have to be happy with it. Feel free to put negative reviews up for those games.
• The TI guy is talking crap for many reasons, but in this 'optimized scene' it's because he did what any dev does in a scene with bad perf because of too many lights - turn down the lights!
• What he did even in its most basic form can not be generalized onto an actual game. This is what my examples of 'games being dynamic' meant to emphasize. If game dev was as easy as he made it seem, I'd be out of a job. You typically wouldn't use Ultra Dynamic Sky in a game that never shows you the sky. Taking away UDS is not 'optimization' because the assumption is if it's there, it's needed. This is why the entire video and the premise are stupid. The same applies to the lighting setup and the fact this is a static scene. There is a reason why Epic Mega Lights demo features a ton of *moving* lights that turn on and off. Because that's what it's for. It's not meant to be used in a scene that would work the same if you just turned down the lights.
• The difference is, that the 'turn down the lights' was the *default* for games precisely because of limitations. With Mega Lights, the goal is to allow scenes with many dynamic shadow casting lights *without* going into 5fps territory. It's the same deal with Nanite! No tech is magic and free, but without Nanite you can't put a billion polygon tree into the scene. Now you can. 'Well, lazy devs just don't want to optimize the tree then!' - Nanite IS the optimization. Anything that results in reasonable performance under heavy load IS optimization. Nanite has a cost however, and if you simply compare how much Nanite costs vs. how much the meshes you want to render cost without Nanite, there is the answer to whether you should turn on Nanite or not. If you are going for a low poly style, turning on Nanite is not a good idea, and no dev other than inexperienced indie devs will do that.
• Additionally, TI guy has no clue about game dev realities and is speaking from an idealistic, far-from-reality point of view, similarly to privileged US college kids favoring communism. They have a good thing at heart "Let's make everything better" - but miss the mark so much because they don't have a grip on reality. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
• TI guy has done nothing to warrant trust in his ability. He throws around technical terms with the youthful authority of aforementioned college kids. This impresses the layman. He is speaking half-truths that he doesn't fully understand as his thought process is far removed from applied knowledge.
• Without tech changing and improving and instead deciding that your old tech was good and not worth changing, you are also severely limiting what games can do in general. You are not aware of what this is, because it hasn't been made. You are not a creator, you are a consumer. Even I do not know exactly what this is. But time does, as creators experiment and try things out! If we sticked to old tech because 'it works', you are limiting yourself to games that you already know, you are not seeing beyond the pond you reside in.
• Emerging tech absolutely isn't perfect from the get go, but trusted tech requires emerging tech to happen first. This has always been the case and will continue being the case.
• Laymen do not understand what a game engine even is, and they think of it as a kind of renderering program that is responsible for graphics and performance specifically. That's not exactly correct, or rather, it's a half-truth that leads to wrong assumptions. Just as you explicitly said that Lumen can't do muzzle flash dynamic shadows (I trust you to concede that point). The line between "what can be attributed to the developer" vs "what can be attributed to the engine" is very blurry - because it being blurry is correct. There is no definite line. But there are many, many, many wrong lines drawn by laymen who don't understand anything besides having picked up an extremely loose understanding of tech over the years. I encourage you to just download Unreal 5.5.1 right now from EGS, open up a map as there are many available for free on fab.com, including a super freshly released quixel map, watch a tutorial on lighting and play around with the settings. Google what you have questions about. You will get pretty far doing that, provided you have the curiosity to ask questions for a lengthy period of time.

 

[BlownUpRich]

All he did makes perfect sense if you just want to disregard new tech and its opportunities.
I said myself that replacing UDS here is perfectly valid, for this scene, unchanged. But have you considered once what happens if like in a real game, things change and have dynamic requirements? What if a character walks through here with a torch? What if there are windows that let outside light through?
What if you can exit the building? What he did to 'optimize' this scene was just basic as hell, and what gamers fail to understand is that more experienced devs come to conclusions extrapolating from what they see. It's not interesting to look at a scene that doesn't need dynamic lights, remove the dynamic lights and say 'see, awesome, optimized'. We extrapolate to the aforementioned cases.

If your game absolutely doesn't need any kind of dynamic light because you don't have a moving sun, you don't have movable ingame light sources like torches or spells, it's wholly indoors and static lighting is all you need, yes, you don't need a setup like in the scene in the video. I agree. But that's not a realistic use case of the tech in question.
The premise is faulty to begin with as no dev that doesn't need this kind of dynamic setup would be using this kind of dynamic setup. That's the issue I have with this 'optimization' video. I could optimize any game for you by remaking your game into pong with no lights, but surely that can't be the goal here?

To clarify:
The scene in question is an extremely bad example in the first place.
If you asked this guy to 'optimize' the Mega Lights demo that Epic Games presented while keeping visuals intact (if it was publically available), he couldn't. And that's the point.

Hit the nail on the head, best comment in this thread.