Mirror's Edge look slightly different because it's lighting was built with Beast, not with Unreal Lightmass. Although was Mass Effect with Lightmass or Beast? Maybe it's just the exaggeration of color bleeding in Mirror's Edge and Beast that made it look that different.
I thought Mirror's edge didn't use out-of-the-box beast either--wasn't there was a GDC talk somewhere or something where they went into all the adjustments they made to the technology? Like...the resulting lightmaps had to be hand adjusted to push bounce, color bleed, etc. and they had to go super simple on the diffuse or…
a few things .master shaders .avoid the typical post effects, film grain, vignettes etc .proper gi bakes - this is important probably should be at the top, (look into beast if you can afford it) .dat gloss map .tonemap and colormap dat shiz
Some guys in town do work on this http://www.purelighttech.com/ they've been drastically improving their UDK implementation and it might be an alternative to Beast/Lightmass I've liked what I've seen but I've been too caught up in my own projects to spend time evaluating it.
Beast and Turtle can actually be tuned and fiddled with quite a bit if you want to go digging through the guts. Stuff like bounce behavior can be altered fairly easily (usually bounce boost at least is exposed). The biggest thing to think about is colour correction using curves or a ramp. Without it, it sorta looked like a…
Actually I was able to immediately tell that Max Effect and Borderlands were UE3 games. It might not be the visual cues, though, it might be the animation system or some other thing that tips me off all the time. It's just obvious to me for some reason. Mirror's edge, maybe not. I think it might be because they used Beast…
I'm glad I'm not the only one on this and it's not all in my head. Also I find it interesting that the only game that nobody suspects is Mirror's Edge, which may reveal the overall effect that using Lightmass has on everything. Maybe there's a lightmass setting or two that can be changed to make it run more like Beast.…