I noticed some weird shadow colorations on the ceiling of my Oligarch Palace elements when importing them into Godot. And on my search to fix it and make the shadows at the top of vaults look more natural, I discovered the Global Illumination feature.

A difference like Day and Night!

This obviously looks nothing like the way 3D games were lit in 1999, or even in 2003. This took me four clicks and is much more advanced than anything that they had back then.

But one of the very first decisions that I made when I had the idea to make a game two and a half years ago was that I want it to have retro-styled models and textures but with nice modern lighting and shadows. So this is still entirely according to plan.

This might actually be a bit too realistic though. But I think once I really get into the entire lighting thing, adjusting the settings to make things less realistic probably shouldn’t that much of an obstacle.