Enhancement: Baked Speculars #1680
Description
What would this enhancement be for?
Rendering
Describe your enhancement suggestion in more detail
The title.
It's not ideal to use dynamic lights solely for the purpose of having specular highlighting, but people do it, as there's no alternative. If someone intends to have PBR workflow, the new system forces you to use dynamic lighting practically everywhere, even in places when one would usually use everything static, shadowed dynamic speculars would end up eating up the shadow atlas just the same (clarification might be needed, I'm not a graphics programmer).
Source maps are mostly static, at most overcomplicated set of rooms with not a lot of movement going on (because of how everything is annoying to set up). Moreover, HL2 and Portal 2 are both known for having soft lights everywhere with strong key lights guiding the eye, when people are trying to imitate the soft lights with PBR in mind, (e.g light strips, diffuse lights) they are also using way more lights than it was needed before, just so they can imitate the softness of baked lights (which might be another issue altogether, but I have no clue) and make speculars softer too which can affect performance which might not be ideal. Let's say, there's a large room covered in those darn strips from head to toe, they are being rendered a couple of times through portals as well, with fully reflective water present as well, and it's not counting the other FX or geometry being rendered. I'm positive people will do this just to have speculars on.
HLA and some games of 2010s era have an option for baked lights that have speculars on, with usually limit up to 3-4 lights allowed to light the same face; it would be cool to have it as well as an option, but I have no idea how terrible it will mesh with the current VRAD system. HLA, I think, also has a support for light cookies for those lights (which is another reason why someone might want to use a dynamic light - cookies. I've seen VRAD being capable of doing light cookies too, but that's probably another issue altogether.)