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What do gamers actually think about Ray-Tracing?

The last time I remember being blown away by lighting effects was probably Doom 3

Something I thought about with the recent DF video on Doom the Dark Ages use of ray tracing - Doom 3 you could also preview the lighting in the editor in real time because it doesn't bake lighting albeit the lighting is far short of what ray tracing can do with a lack of things like indirect bounced lighting, etc.
 
Something I thought about with the recent DF video on Doom the Dark Ages use of ray tracing - Doom 3 you could also preview the lighting in the editor in real time because it doesn't bake lighting albeit the lighting is far short of what ray tracing can do with a lack of things like indirect bounced lighting, etc.

ID Tech has always pushed lighting and atmospheric effects on some level, it's nothing new really. I think my main issue with RT is that it's often used as a crutch rather than a consideration.
 
Forgot I still had this - you could do some quite impressive things with the lighting in Doom 3:

vxgkG6e.png


But if RT/PT was involved that coloured light would also be being bounced around the scene - not just directly painted.
 
Forgot I still had this - you could do some quite impressive things with the lighting in Doom 3:

vxgkG6e.png


But if RT/PT was involved that coloured light would also be being bounced around the scene - not just directly painted.

I'm actually a big fan of the Thief series, love stealth games in general but that's what set me off and it became a life long passion for me. Seemingly I'm far from being alone, there's a strong enough (albeit niche) community who developed a game/level launcher based on the series using Doom 3 due to how well it handled lighting, which was (among sound queues/use) a huge part of the games:


 
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I'm actually a big fan of the Thief series, love stealth games in general but that's what set me off and it became a life long passion for me. Seemingly I'm far from being alone, there's a strong enough (albeit niche) community who developed a game launcher based on the series using Doom 3 due to how well it handled lighting, which was (among sound queues/use) a huge part of the games:

Funny enough I was just browsing through my old screenshots from a Doom 3 mod I was involved with which was based on the Thief style - "A Terrible Secret" which originally started as a Half-Life 2 mod but then I got onboard to help build it on the Doom 3 engine but then they decided to change focus again to HL2 so I parted ways, looks like the mod never got completed in the end.

EDIT: IIRC The Dark Mod also took quite a bit of wind out of their sails as well.

This was really early stuff but an idea of the art direction:

wCumJ9C.png
 
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Funny enough I was just browsing through my old screenshots from a Doom 3 mod I was involved with which was based on the Thief style - "A Terrible Secret" which originally started as a Half-Life 2 mod but then I got onboard to help build it on the Doom 3 engine but then they decided to change focus again to HL2 so I parted ways, looks like the mod never got completed in the end.

EDIT: IIRC The Dark Mod also took quite a bit of wind out of their sails as well.

This was really early stuff but an idea of the art direction:

wCumJ9C.png

Impressive tbh. Shame things didn't go forward, but I'm damned happy The Dark Mod came as far as it did.

Odd to think back really, I remember Source with HL2 and ID4 with D3 releasing around the same time with their own strengths and weaknesses, not counting Bloodlines anyway.

While I think Source had a ton of potential in the general sense, ID4 was by far the better option for a Stealth/Thief-esque game in my mind.
 
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Impressive but again I'd rate Doom 3 on par:


It lacks the physics involved of course, but good lord it was way ahead of its time.
its using a very expensive rendering algorithm, i read in a interview that they had to do one lighting pass per light source, 5 lights would be 5 passes, 10 would be 10 passes and so on..
i think the method is no longer in use and hasnt survived even in a vestigial form
 
Aside from anything else what's with the muddy tint in AC Shadows? it looks bloody awful.

Just the art direction, I guess + YouTube compression.

Looks nice, Shadow Casting Light, quite CPU intensive so used sparingly, again tho there is no RT in that and ironically to create the same effect with RT would cost a lot more.

9 years ago....

For the inside of that house, the lighting happens automatically within the engine or you have to do something in particular? I see the light from the lamp going through the table, that would be the "classic" sign of rasterization. Can you have the lamp cast it's own shadows (the bulb from it) and not go through the table, can it be interactive, destroyed? How many shadow casting lights were usable back then? And most importantly, can the engine switch between what casts a shadow and what doesn't automatically, based on how many shadows casting lights are in your view?
 
its using a very expensive rendering algorithm, i read in a interview that they had to do one lighting pass per light source, 5 lights would be 5 passes, 10 would be 10 passes and so on..
i think the method is no longer in use and hasnt survived even in a vestigial form

As far as I'm aware it was never used outside of ID Tech engines, and I'm not 100% sure in which iteration they stopped.

ID Tech had a ton of unrealised potential over the years unfortunately, they were utilising techniques few others did across the board. Remember the texture (Megatexture) streaming tech they used that would load on the fly as needed? It was supposed to bypass GPU memory constraints unless I'm misremembering, outside of tech demos it was first used in game with Rage from back in 2011. Sounds an awful lot like the direct storage techniques used much more recently, doesn't it?

Awful texture pop though.
 
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Just the art direction, I guess + YouTube compression.


For the inside of that house, the lighting happens automatically within the engine or you have to do something in particular? I see the light from the lamp going through the table, that would be the "classic" sign of rasterization. Can you have the lamp cast it's own shadows (the bulb from it) and not go through the table, can it be interactive, destroyed? How many shadow casting lights were usable back then? And most importantly, can the engine switch between what casts a shadow and what doesn't automatically, based on how many shadows casting lights are in your view?
The lamp on the table isn't shadow casting, notice also its glowing through the shade? Yes i can have it cast its own shadow, that's what i did with the lamp in the celling that i'm shooting at, i can have it turn off if i shoot it, in the same way i had the celling lamp turn off once disconnected from the cord, its all just backend programming.
The lamp on the table its self, like the lamp shade in the celling is not a destructible 3D asset, so while i can physicalise it, like i did with the celling lamp it will not break apart no matter what happened to it, you have to create a very different asset for it to be destructible, i actually did that later on in the video with the wooden structure and the corner of that wall, as well as a brick wall which i did a little differently, i simply physicalised each brick and then stacked them.

How many shadow casting lights you can have depends on engine optimisation, that's assuming the engine is capable of it to begin with, remember CryEngine was one the most sophisticated engines of its time, still is in its current V5.7 form (kingdom Come Deliverance) but also the performance of the CPU, this was 9 or 10 years ago, with the 4690K i had at the time i could put about 5 or 6 in view, after that the frame rates would tank, this sounds like a lot but its not, you may or may not be surprised at how many light sources are often actually in a complex scene.

Yeah Direct Storage and Rebar are a lot more common in games now.
 
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I think this is pretty neat, notice the 9 years ago, around the same time i was messing about in CryEngine 3 this is still back when CIG were using CryEngine 3 near entirely in its original form.

These days even Crytek concede there isn't enough left of CryEngine in what they now call "Star Engine" to claim anything close to it...

 
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Where have they been defensive of unreal engine? They are pro advanced tech, not the engine specifically, they slate the engine at every chance because of stuttergate and all the unoptimised bs it still has. Idtech8 is the only engine to date that DF has essentially been all for thanks to it seemingly having zero optimisation issues whatsoever. And rightly so.

If you are seeing otherwise then you are the very audience Alex is on about in the above lol.
 
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Where have they been defensive of unreal engine? They are pro advanced tech, not the engine specifically, they slate the engine at every chance because of stuttergate and all the unoptimised bs it still has. Idtech8 is the only engine to date that DF has essentially been all for thanks to it seemingly having zero optimisation issues whatsoever. And rightly so.

If you are seeing otherwise then you are the very audience Alex is on about in the above lol.

They are typical modern journalists, somewhat clueless about their subject and get their 'knowledge' from industry advocates and just parrot that, because they don't know any better and worse than just being ignorant act like they are the fountain of knowledge to pass themselves off as a journalistic authority.

There is a problem and these idiots look like part of the problem because they parrot industry shills, knowingly or not.

What they are not is consumer advocates, quite the opposite.

Now this kid, he's pretty smart.

 
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Impressive but again I'd rate Doom 3 on par:


It lacks the physics involved of course, but good lord it was way ahead of its time.


Fixed in position lights right, so unlikely to be RT, just a lot of effort made to bake it in. Its been done in other old games as well, it just takes a lot of work from the developer
 
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