Designing my 2D First Person Game!

Lol Yeah it's true. I perfectly understand what you mean.

Often lights and shadows are wrong but necessary to create the mood in the game.
Gamers don't care of it... and this is good for artists
Think for example to those who stand to make recriminations on the artistic style of a game.
".. but the light of the sun is wrong!"
".. but in the night the sky is not blue is black!"
".. but the sun rays are not visible in reality!"
".. but the colours in reality are not so desaturated!"
".. but in reality I can see the far  landscape and is not so blurred!"
and so on ....
It doesn't make sense, because you should at least respect the artist's stylistic choices and  technical needs .
At this point you might as well put some photo as backgrounds and you're ok with all of this damn recriminations ... but players don't like this kind of photographic games, so .... 

Off topic : did you know what happened to the forum these days? 

Yes, it got attacked by bastard bots & spammers. I believe Calli is working on creating a moderator class or something.

So, first: I'm not a bot... *beeep*.

The problem of making a REAL scene is very simple: it's freedom. I explain: There isn't a "make good*- or "make correct"-button in any software. Today's renderer are very good in physically correct lights, shadows and diffraction, surfaces and radiosity. But how they do it? The artist has to decide, HOW they work. If you have a water surface, you can adjust the reflexion of light from 0% to 100% free.

You now can look into a list of diffraction indices, can use photos, watch the ocean, use a lot of formulas. But at the end he makes a surface he THINKS it looks correct (because the artist is a keen observer). Disney artists are genial observers in animating cartoon characters very well, it's a lot of work and experience to look at walking, jumping, sneaking, smiling, laughing, angry persons - that's the professional school of animating. Today you can use real actors to import the bone coordinates and make it more real (that's progress for raw animation. Mimik is on the way...).

Landscapes haven't coordinates to make light or reflexions. The structure is similar to reality by using fractals. But how the light will be correct depends on a billion of surfaces, depends on a billion of billion of air molecules. The only way is to make a general simulation. Does the water surface looks like a water surface? It's very, very close to - but not perfect; it couldn't be the same as reality.

The engines now use huuuuuge memory and processor power and to make a "King Kong" or a "2012" you need thousands and thousands of CPUs. It's really better than 10 years ago (really!), unbelievable, very close, sure, but at the end far away from real reality. That means "uncanny valley" for humans, but also for landscapes. Because artist have to make the transparency of skins or water surfaces from their mind. As a watcher or gamer you can "feel" it, because human evolution develops our eyes to watch the world in a phantastic way.

Freedom means: the water surface might look "real" at 75,3 % reflexion in this case. The artist adjust the renderer and it looks similar to "real". Another artists feels that 82,1% looks better. In reality the value changes 2 minutes later after a little rain (the fog is gone, air is clear), it's a white cloud on the sky (new reflexions), in 10 kilometres far away a sandy dust hide the sun,... No button to push for "make it REAL"...

I have seen a lot of science fiction movies. In most cases you can check which renderer was used (yeah, Vray!), how much the huge water front has been cost and so on. It NEVER looks REALLY real. It's the milky, foggy flair of physical renderers and a lot of tiny, tiny, tiny things you can't describe - colours, reflexions, animations, shadows -, which don't fit.

So I'm with Paupasia: better to have a "middle way". The gamer feels good and knows it's unreal, but he like it and make it "real" for himself. It's like a child which knows exactly that the evil wolf is only in the fairy tale book but it is afraid of the wolf...