How come Half Life 2 and old STALKER games in general have more realistic looking lighting and shadow effects than good chunk of modern vidya games?
>>729159483all that shit is prebaked
>>729159814>food analogy
FEAR had pretty good lighting too, which is crucial for a horror game
HL2 is a moviegame, so it was easy for the devs to prioritize grafix and physics.
>>729159483some of modern games literally just expect rtx tracing to do all the work and they just drop it. just loot at cyberpunk, lighting is completely fucked specially when the human or object is in the shadow, it only look resoneble when you turn on that gay ass rtx path tracing, but older games worked on lighting with map designs in mind, so it was optimized and looked good.
Prebaked lighting takes more time and planning but runs better and looks better. Modern games just slap on default global illumination even when they aren't using dynamic light sources or day night cycles where it wouldn't work.
>>729160192>HL2 is a moviegamelol
>>729159483Prebaked lighting takes more time and more effort but looks roughly the same on everyone's machine and generally higher quality for a good chunk of users.But with prebaked lighting, you can't turn it on/off. Modern games like to play with the lighting a bit. Modern games engines let you use lights that work in real time for things like dynamic shadows, dimming, color changes, on/off, etc, etc and are easy to use, so most just go with thatOn top of that raytracing actually does give you some pretty realistic dynamic lighting. If your computer can't run raytracing lights, well you're just getting a worse experience.
>>729162875>But with prebaked lighting, you can't turn it on/off. Modern games like to play with the lighting a bit. Modern games engines let you use lights that work in real time for things like dynamic shadows, dimming, color changes, on/off, etc, etc and are easy to use, so most just go with thatHalf-Life 2 had heaps of dynamic lighting stuff though?Using flares and your flashlight is a whole level gimmick in HL2Ep1
>>729159483x-ray engine is black magic
>>729159483Because games used to have competent devs, now they are all DEI communists or jeets.
>>729165330Breddy much yep..... devs before the post modern nu-GAYmer era created their own engines , were all men, and passionate
>realisticit's not realistic and that's why it's good
>>729161049 Exactly this. Devs back then actually had to *craft* the lighting with intent because they couldn’t just rely on tech to slap a filter over everything and call it immersive. Every shadow, every warm glow, was part of the world design, not just a checkbox in Unity/UE5. Now it’s “just throw RTX on it lol” and pray the performance isn’t dogwater. That’s why HL2 and STALKER still *feel* atmospheric. They were built, not streamed.
