» Sat May 12, 2012 7:18 am
The lighting is static for each area. Since the game already has unique texturing, they baked high quality lighting and shadows directly into the texture, which resulted in very low memory usage but very high quality lighting.
The result is basically that they get high quality shadow and lighting, but without any performance hit what so ever. That is really important, as the consoles have very limited amounts of memory, and that is the reason shadows usually look bad in console games.
IMO dynamic day-night cycles are kinda cool, but serve really no useful/practical purpose (unless the game is built around it) and just end up being giant a waste of resources.
Why redraw the same shadow each frame, if it doesn't change because it's a static object like rubble?
Animated objects however, obviously cast dynamic shadows exclusive to them. Still, a lot of performance is saved.