Fable Legends developer diary details the game's dynamic global illumination

Fable Legends developer Lionhead Studios has posted a rather techy entry on its blog, detailing how it uses Unreal Engine 4's integrated dynamic global illumination.

Lionhead said early on in development it decided to have fully dynamic lighting in the game, as it adds variation to dynamic time of day, and improves "iteration times for artists" and more.

"Dynamic GI can also give higher quality results than baked lighting in some cases, for example, reflections, where lighting needs to take into account the view position, said lead graphics programmer Ben Woodhouse. "Dynamic direct lighting has been around in games for a number of years, but with dynamic indirect lighting, light bouncing off objects in the scene onto other objects."

The post goes on to discuss the work Lionhead accomplished creating deferred renderers, implementing Light Propagation Volumes, 2nd-Order Spherical Harmonics, compute shaders, secondary occlusion and multiple light bounces.

Very techy indeed, but for those who feel most tech talk borders on Esperanto, Lionhead provides a visual sample of what it's discussing. Below, you will two of these visuals, which are comparison shots showing the "difference dynamic GI makes" in Fable Legends. Both are quite lovely.

Fable Legends is in development for Xbox One and is set 400 years before the events of the first game. It is currently without a release date.