The average night race in Dirt 3 uses about 200 deferred lights, a dramatic reduction from earlier averages of around 1,000. The difference is imperceptible, made up by cunning baking. The real power of modern lighting, though, isn’t complexity so much as the opposite: when it comes to software like Codemasters’ Ego engine and Unreal’s latest light-bouncing solution, Lightmass, it’s actually about simplicity. And that, by extension, is about art.
“It’s robustness,” says Ridgway, who sees Red Dead Redemption as a leading example. “It gives the artists more time to iterate. The sooner you can let them get something into the game and build on it – the less time they’re waiting around for builds – the more they can bring the artistry in there. Lighting-wise, that’s the difference between the games that work and the ones that don’t. There are no silver bullets, and everything that people are doing is fairly similar. Let the artists work, though, and the quality jumps up dramatically.”
