Well, to start with, you can see single lens flares with your naked eye. Just look at any bright light, do you see it all sparkly like a star? That's a flare. Do you even see stars at night all shiny and pointy? You're actually seeing their flares, not the stars themselves.papercoffee wrote: But you won't see lens flare or coronas with your naked eye. Just because Hollywood upraised it as stylistic device (because they couldn't get rid of that flares) doesn't mean that lights should have them too look plausible. It's more likely vice versa.
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As for multiple lens flares being generated by a single light source, like the sun for example, while with the naked eye you don't see them (generally), that's still a bad argument, for a very simple reason: you don't actually see anything in a game, movie or otherwise, with your naked eye to start with, because you always use a medium just like movies did, in this case your very screen.
And because you're seeing light sources through a screen rather than your naked eye, unless you do something to the light source itself, visually speaking, you won't ever be able to fully perceive it as a light source, let alone assess its brightness by just looking at it.
Plus, several people use glasses (like me), so those people are able to perceive flares much more often. The same happens if you're in a car, or if you're using some sort of visor, among other similar situations.
You wouldn't be able to tell that the sun is brighter than a light inside a room without spicing it up in some way on your screen. The only way you have to perceive it in RL with your naked eye is because one severally hurts your eye while the other does not, you cannot stare at the sun like you can through a screen, so you immediately intuitively know that it's because it's much brighter.
More recent games do a mix of lens flares and actually blinding your screen if you stare the sun directly, among other things, some of which are possible in UT I believe, by increasing the brightness from the center and decreasing visibility from the sides, in order to simulate your iris closing up like it would do when looking at a bright light source.
But I just mentioned one...papercoffee wrote: And that's also a good reason to avoid them ...if you don't have better solutions.

