Are space sim / combat games particularly suited to ray-tracing?

Quartz

Quartz

Quartz

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Paging @Rroff .

Are games set in space, like space sims and space combat games particularly suited to ray-tracing? You've got one big main light source in the local star, perhaps one or two secondary sources as planets (which also reflect the star's light), and the shapes are relatively simple. Minor illuminations like portholes can just be done as textures. Then you've got the glows from the weapons.

Or am I mistaken?
 
There is an nVidia demo somewhere of a space game with ray tracing.

It is a bit of a mixed bag though as there are relatively limited opportunities to make the most out of reflections, less enhancement from indirect lighting unless you have close up sections and want that "space look" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJBNQeSR8LQ ). Stuff like caustics potentially less useful. But it can do space scenes very well.
 
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Rroff said:
is a bit of a mixed bag though as there are relatively limited opportunities to make the most out of reflections,
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I wasn't thinking so much of cool-looking reflections, though it would be very cool to have a spaceship lit on one side by the harsh sun and on the other by the softer light reflected by the planet, as making the lighting much easier for the programmers.
 
There's a couple of, to me, disconcerting effects in Elite Dangerous that might be mitigated by some concept of ray/path tracing.

The first is that the lighting falling on your ship has an impact on the lighting of bodies you can see. For example, if approaching a pair of bodies (e.g. planet+close moon, or pair of similar sized moons/planets in the same solar orbit) such that you can see the terminators on both bodies and you pass "behind" the closer one (so your ship is now in shadow), then the "daylight" on the 2nd body is immediately turned off until you pass out of the shadow of the 1st.

The other is the way that if travelling between stars in a binary system the lighting of your ship just switches almost instantly from one to the other around the half-way point. This isn't always obvious, as it does seem to depend on the relative luminance of the stars, but when it does it looks like somebody quickly moving a lamp from the back of the ship to the front.

Whether those actually need ray tracing or not to solve, I have no idea. But they do spoil the effect, a bit, for me when they happen.

On the general point, of ray tracing making it easier for programmers, I would hazard it wouldn't be if you also count the background - there's throusands of light sources out there which ought to make a difference to even local lighting when in the galactic core.
 
Space in "real life" isn't all that exciting to the human eye. In games and media, it's the artistic direction. No doubt all game engines will use fully path traced GI in the near future, but games still need great artists
 
d_brennen said:
Space in "real life" isn't all that exciting to the human eye. In games and media, it's the artistic direction. No doubt all game engines will use fully path traced GI in the near future, but games still need great artists
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Surely this is subjective. I like seeing the stars from here on earth where the atmosphere interferes. I would imagine it looks even better from space. Also look down on earth from space would surely be exciting no :D
 
Quartz said:
Paging @Rroff .

Are games set in space, like space sims and space combat games particularly suited to ray-tracing? You've got one big main light source in the local star, perhaps one or two secondary sources as planets (which also reflect the star's light), and the shapes are relatively simple. Minor illuminations like portholes can just be done as textures. Then you've got the glows from the weapons.

Or am I mistaken?
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If you want to go for a realistic look, everything is suited to ray tracing.
 
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