Simon noticed that in Anno 1800 there is a fixed sun position enabled by default, making the sun always light up the scene from right to left, leaving fairly long shadows and making buildings more distinguishable.

On the right you can see what happens with more realistic stable sun positioning. It is harder to look and track each separate part of the city.

Which means: don't be afraid to break rules, don't rely on realism fully. Sometimes it may sound odd, it may be unreal, but still does the job better.

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Michael Khaimzon, who worked on Far Cry and Crysis, shared that they were unable to make realistic light scattering in Far Cry, so they made a fake lighting texture for both sides of leaves.

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Bent Normals in Godot 4.5:

The first one is the new Bent Normals setup, the right one is without Bent Normals.

1. The new feature allows much better lighting with fairly cheap self-shadowing and no light leaking. It's still worse than RT, but much better than just Ambient Occlusion.

2. It's being used with AO, not as the replacement of it. Inside the shader I don't even have extra maps, I use Normal and AO + scaling to make Bent Normals.

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