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Comment by luchak | Hacker News Reader

In any case, running global illumination often causes a major increase in rendering time. So it's understandable that Pixar, which has to render a huge number of frames at huge resolutions, did not traditionally use it much.

There's also another factor at play, which is directability. Physical correctness is not usually a priority except as far as it advances the artistic goals of the people making the movie. If the director says, "can you make the right side of that table look less red?", you need to have some way for the artist to achieve that goal, even if that's not how the scene would "really" look. I expect that the development of new tools and processes to allow precise manipulation of the lighting in globally illuminated scenes was just as much, if not more, of a barrier than the additional cost in rendering time.

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For an interesting parallel, this is analogous to my experience with emergent gameplay when I was in the game industry. Everyone really likes the idea of emergent gameplay and the open-ended-ness and flexibility that gives you. But you sacrifice a lot of control when you go that way. This can leave game designers and producers feeling like their hands are tied when the game doesn't play the way they want.

Less flexible, more scripted behavior is often the smarter choice when you want to be able to ensure a certain gameplay experience.

And less flexible, more scripted behaviour is one of the biggest things driving me away from gaming these days. Most seem to end up as a sequence of action bubbles punctuated by cut-scenes, often with super-heavy hints about the "correct" way to handle the situation - sometimes even unwinnable (through e.g. infinitely spawning enemies) until you do things the "right" way.

And the resulting primary gameplay experience is boredom; felt most heavily recently with Bioshock Infinite.

The other type of game is the open world formula, featured in Assassin's Creed and GTA, and to a certain extent Fallout, Skyrim etc. But these become boring in another way; they rely on making navigating the territory interesting, but eventually the novelty wears off and you just want to enable the "instant teleport" function.

I still miss games like Thief, where navigating the territory was the main challenge of the game, but the territory was carefully enough designed, yet still very open, and not seen repeatedly enough to become boring. Dishonored came within 60%, but the player character was too powerful.

>I still miss games like Thief

To that list i'll add system shock 2 and Dues Ex 1

I disagree.

Saying "I disagree" is a pretty useless comment. Say why you disagree, or don't bother saying anything at all.

'Dark Souls' and 'Demon Souls' do this extremely well I feel.

Team Ico games come close too.

This is something that is often overlooked in any analysis of global vs. local illumination. Local illumination gives you perfect control, and allows you to "paint with light", which is the cornerstone of the pixar lighting process.

We used GI at pixar when it was appropriate, even at the expense of long render times - that is to say, only when it made the final product look better. How you get to the result doesn't matter, only what it looks like on screen.

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