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You mentioned performance very casually there, but there's always this ever-looming shadow over everything you do where you have to resist the urge to go hog wild, but at the same time one of the tenets of Star Citizen is always pushing the envelope as far as we can. How do you balance that?

Chris CampbellLead Lighting Artist

Exactly. I mean, as you say, we're certainly not shying away from expensive lighting setups and pushing the boundaries there. But at the same time, obviously, we want people to be able to run the game at a somewhat decent frame rate. So when we're building our lighting for environments, we always just try and keep in the back of our mind some rough guidelines of how many lights we can use, how many shadow casting lights we can use, and how many lights are overlapping in the scene at any given moment. And those are just things that you feel out as you work on the project a little bit more. I've got some numbers in my head, and it's more a habit at this point, so I just try and stick with it.

Star Citizen Live›Let There Be Light·
Published on this date.4 Sep 2020