Need Advice ...

Hello Fellow Unity Developers

I’ve released a game that is available on Google PlayStore https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ShakeTheAi.RoninMachina now I’ve moved from mobile devices to PC Steam Development.

I’m using URP and Unity 2021.3.f11. The scene has Terrain, Grass, Trees, Flowers, Houses, Water, etc, like the open-world game.

The question I’ve in my mind is how should I Approach Lighting with Global Illumination.

  • Realtime Lighting (Entire Scene Objects marked as static) causes batches to go around 2800 to 4000 and more which is not good (Screenshot Attached) even I’ve only one light in the scene
  • I’m pretty sure I should not bake the light with this huge scene or am I wrong here?

How should I go from here, please advice.

You can still use baked GI. Have you tried baking? It should work fine. If your map is really big, then you might need another solution.

Thank you for answering, Map is so big i still think its not the way to do the Bake ! and still trying to figure it out what’s the “Another Solution” is :slight_smile:

In that case you could try screen space techniques like SSGI and SSAO.

Keep in mind that games certainly can bake GI for very large maps. Warzone is a good example, but they have their own complex system for that.

I imagine you could bake it, but if you don’t want to go down that route, the absolute easiest would be screen space techniques.

Thanks for the TIP, and thanks for Sending me the right example (Warzone).

So let me be more clear on the topic because it confuses me so it might be confusing to others also and make this thread an example for the good start of creating the Open World game.

What I understand is

  • You must bake the lightmap no matter how big your map is
  • Realtime light is very costly. Be very cautious and keep your light setting Important

Yeah I mean you don’t have to bake a lightmap. There are lots of reasons you might not want to. But nothing will ever beat the runtime speed and visuals like lightmaps do.

And realtime lights on PC are way less costly than on platforms like mobile. They are widely used in abundance on PC.

maybe you can try dividing your map into scenes, bake just one scene (bake just one part of your map) as a test until you like it and then, load your other scenes additively (the rest of the map) and bake everything, you can use lower resolutions of lightmaps to make quick tests and stuffs