No wonder the game is running like shit. I mean, look at it. It has literally 0 baked shadows. In a static environment, that is considered THE most basic optimalization method. That is 0th class.
@LukeAlmighty Light baking is often abandoned in large or very detailed environments because it often fails to get a good result, takes a long time to perform, and has to be done every time you move anything in the scene.
Modern lighting techniques and hardware has made it largely obsolete.
For a good example of this, check out Valheim.
Lights aren't baked, they just don't cast shadows unless you get close to them.
And even then, if you stand next to several, only 1 or 2 will cast a shadow, looks good enough, and very performant.
What happened here is actually much worse than not baking lights.
Everything in the scene appears to be a dynamic, as opposed to a static, shadow caster.
They literally just placed a directional light with dynamic shadows on everything and called it a day.
To make the windows appear brighter, they cranked up the value on the directional light.
That's why when E;R turned off shadows, it turned entire scenes into flashbangs.
Indoor scenes like that shouldn't be illuminated with a directional light at all, they just got lazy, and instead of making some effect on the windows (Pic B), they relied on the lighting system to do the work for them (Pic A).
@coded_artist
Thank you for the detailed analysis. In the case of game like Life is Strange though, each level is taking in a place with 0 physics and only a few dinamic entities. Unless it's an NPC, it's prety much static. That is why I assumed baking shadows to be the preffered technique.
@LukeAlmighty These days you can just mark a mesh as a static shadow caster.
I watched the stream, the game slowed down when E;R turned the shadows back on to solve the star puzzle because it was barely visible without them.
The drop in performance is telling.
It takes a special kind of incompetence to make a scene this poorly optimized.
I wouldn't even consider optimization in a small room like that.
Some of the meshes there must be VERY detailed for no reason, and have no LODs.
Also I forgot to mention, the fix for this is trivial, and would've taken 20 minutes at the most, per scene.
Some people still bake shadows, but usually only when they want their stuff to look good while working on a potato or mobile.
Some games bake shadows into textures, which is usually frowned upon, but it can help improve performance a lot, since it can save on use of normal maps.
I think Borderlands 1 did that.