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I imagine the size, shape and layout of the location matter too, because of what you can hide behind a wall. Something like an underground facility with a lot of twists and turns probably frees you up to do a lot more, but something like Orison, where you can see one end of the city from the other, has got to be a hell of a challenge?

TL;DRConfined spaces like habs and shops allow a bigger lighting budget, while outdoor places like Orison need constant rebalancing because adding one light can duplicate across many identical platforms.

Chris CampbellLead Lighting Artist

Yeah, exactly. These kinds of examples, we generally love working on habs and shops and stuff like that because not only are they very self-contained, so you can do a lot, but as you said, because they're very confined environments within a culling volume, we can spend a lot more lighting budget really making it look as good as we envisage it. Whereas something like Orison and outdoor environments in general, there's a lot more variables at play that always have to be rebalanced. So when it comes to lighting somewhere like Orison, there's just a constant process of iterating. You make a bunch of changes. Those get populated because there's so many different platforms which are duplicates of each other. So if you add one light, you could end up adding 500 lights to the overall scene of Orison. Then we have to balance using our various optimization methods to keep our numbers within a certain range.

Star Citizen Live›Gamedev: Mood Lighting·
Published on this date.16 Jul 2021