Lighting in Video Games

It's easier from a HR point of view, which is all that matters. You don't have to look for people skilled at stylizing or being efficient, just hire as many drones as you can and tell them to slap as many post-processing effects on as much shit as possible then fire them all a week before their residual payment contract goes into effect.

It takes more effort to come up with a unique artstyle that works and designing things around it than modeling a weapon 1:1 off an existing base. The latter requires way less thought and you can get away with more detail due to higher processing power, so you don't need to simplify (which would be even more work). Limitations breed creativity, and since those limitations are no longer necessary you only see samey shit these days. It has nothing to do with normalfags expecting realistic graphics since that's not how it used to be until 10 years ago. Maybe the minimum requirement for most is that the game is 3D, but highly stylized games still do well.

Because they don't hire that talent. Because hiring professionals costs way more than to employ a bunch of college graduates and interns you can exploit for a year or two, then fire and then employ the next truckload who is hoping to get into making video games like the suckers before them. It's an assembly line, there's no "veterans" anymore because everyone who gets into the industry stops bothering after being fired due to how shitty the conditions are. And the ones in higher positions usually get there via nepotism and thus don't bring the necessary qualities.

Why do you think smaller devs are seeing such huge success lately? A large part of the indie scene is plagued by the exact same derivative mindset and corruption as AAA, but some of them do try to make something new because they're not afraid to take risks. Most of them are in a position that's closer to studios in the 80's or 90's. In terms of budget, creative freedom, team size and such.

Silent Hill 2 still looks amazing. Meanwhile some 360 and PS3 games already look like shit.

While I will forever decry the design of Xrd Potemkin among others, I will say that yes, the lighting and shading of Xrd are done well.
It still would have made a better BB game

Are you high or just retarded?

If by textures you mean texture resolution then yes. Textures as a whole are inseparable from lighting in games though. Textures are how you make metal look like metal and stone like stone. No "lighting" can save your game's look if every material looks like plastic (naturally lit, convincing plastic) or clay or paper or metal. So devs do need to put a lot of effort into textures, it only makes sense that they would optimize the resolution while they're at it.

Another thing to consider is that you can't just take the resources needed for higher texture resolution and instead use them for lighting. Different tasks are bottlenecked by different parts of the hardware. Dialing back textures doesn't necessarily give you more headroom for lighting.

I'll disagree with both of these points. The base model is well done and the lighting is far from great. The guy's hair is bright like a lamp and his skin is too dark.

LOL no way. Lighting is very important yes, but what your saying is practically like saying "Audio should be higher priority than gameplay" or something stupid like that. its essential, but on the same level as those other things.

shit thread OP, learn to word your posts better.

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Half Life 1 with better lighting would not look better than Black Mesa Source with HL1's lighting. Are you fucking retarded?

Hard to say. BMS has better models, textures and lighting. HL1 with modern lighting would still have simplistic 1990s models. To make a fair comparison you would have to create two mods/tweaks for BMS, one using something like picmip to blur all textures and another that replaces all the baked lighting with HL1 tier lighting. Blurring the textures should be easy and require no change to the actual game. Redoing the lighting is not easy, you would have to recompile a BMS map with HL1 style settings, I guess. I have no idea how feasible this is or how long Hammer takes to compile a BMS map.

Doing this comparison isn't feasible unless you're a Hammer dev / modder and looking to spend some time on it.

Alternatively we can look at other games with low res textures such as Dishonored or Overwatch. Both games have blurry, flat textures but lighting is much better in UE4 than UE3. I would say Overwatch looks much, much better than Dishonored. Would it be easier to add higher res textures to Dishonored? It depends on the platform. On PC you can have higher res textures with basically no performance impact. On consoles however most games had bad textures last-gen, wether they were going for realism or not. On last-gen consoles improving the lighting might have been the path of least resistance.

Well at some point, the whole discussion becomes completely subjective.. take for example Quake 1. its got shit models, shit textures, shit lighting, and shit color variety… yet its very very aesthetically pleasing and atmospheric and even immersive.

In fact, theres a mod that makes adds "HD" lighting that completely ruins the aesthetic of the game, proving OP's point wrong. Vid Related.

Nigger, it is. Designing a sci-fi gun with doodads, special particle effects, proportions and texture work that has to align with an artstyle your team agreed on is more work than googling "M16" and modeling the piece of shit off a reference. Both are gonna take work to look good, but the latter considerably less.
Nevermind the fact that filesize and optimization keep getting worse despite hardware improving.

Another mod that adds new models and textures. If you replace all the textures you can't then go and blame the lighting for a decline in aesthetics.

Because western developers have the artistic sense of a donut.

Not really. Real life firearms have hundreds of internal parts inside of them and devs have to model those.

He's a big guy.

lighting, shading, art direction, polygons are all important

They don't model all the internals you dummy, only the stuff that's visible. If all the internals were modeled the performance would tank as soon as you spawn in more than one gun.
That's like saying you have to model a persons skeleton and organs when you create a character.

wow, nobody talks about lighting in CG? you're fucking retarded.

I'm not OP but there is a very significant difference between "HD/Realistic" Lighting and lighting that is properly stylized to fit the game which is what I would assume OP is talking about.

Lighting in videogames will forever be shit until ray tracing becomes a viable thing.

ericwa.github.io/tyrutils-ericw/
These map compilation tools for Quake improve the lighting a lot without clashing with Quake's style, lighting looks more realistic and gives less really dark shadows in lightmaps. Compare modern community maps lighting with the original games and it's a vast improvement.

It's too much of a resource hog. We'll find something better and efficient eventually.