Best practices for a top-down game?

Hey guys, I’m working on an top-down “isometric” game with a full 3D environment (sci-fi, in space) - gameplay clip here. I’m not a tech artist or engineer, so I have a couple of things that I need some help with. The levels will be both inside (long corridors lighted by small lights) and outside (one directional light - Sun) - Example.

There are no LODS, triangle count and texture resolutions are pretty low and the camera distance means I can get away with a lot of fakes and less details.

Questions are:

  • Should I use dynamic lighting mostly, or a mix of static and dynamic? What works best considering the camera distance and details? So far I’ve used baked lighting. But now I’m expanding the current level to feature a long indoor area. Players will navigate it, then exit outside in open space. I’ll have a ton of utility lights on the indoor parts.

  • I’ve been using blocker boxes set as invisible with" cast hidden shadow" on to remove lighting from the Sun in indoor areas. Should I use instead level streaming to split levels into indoor parts without Sun and outdoor ones? I also want to have dissapearing “roofs” or walls as players enter indoor areas (only at the entrance, afterwards the interiors are Diablo-like corridors with cutaway walls).

  • Other things I can do to optimize performance, best practices or any UE examples for this kind of game I can look at? Thanks!