dcharlieJP wrote:Remember that Ray tracing in real time discussion?
Jonnyram just sent me a link to the 5 Faces demo by Fairlight from the Revision 2013 scene event - it placed first. If you have a PC of note, you can download this and run it.
Here's the vid on Youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLPAHHb8j20
i said "h*ly f****** s***" - especially near the end. God dammmmmn.
Hot damn, that was impressive. Accurate reflection and refraction, and that liquid was coooooooool. I do not have a PC of note though, all my machines are ass.
Also, the real reason I'm so big on raytracing is that lighting+shading is the most important thing in 3D graphics. You can have a fairly low-poly model, and it can look smooth and stylish with the right lighting and shading [see: Vagrant Story on the PS1 for a great example]. Raytracing is designed around proper lighting. Doing this through rasterization, you need all sort of fake workarounds [example: the global illumination system in Sonic Unleashed/Generations, it's impressive [light looks like it reflects off surfaces properly], but it's prebaked by a powerful server array, and you have to use a radically simplified real-time model for non-static geometry like Sonic and the badniks], often extremely computationally expensive in and of themselves. Especially with things like reflections, which usually are just environment mapped, which is cheap but optically wrong.
With a few simplifications [so you're not going to get amazing POV-RAY images here [rendering a low-res frame with it still takes a half second, jeez], but at the same time, you will be doing better than rasterization immediately [notice how games tend to have nasty pixelated shadows? Properly drawn shadows are easy to implement through raytracing], and you could reasonably do game-worthy [as in have CPU time for game logic] raytracing at 640x480 at a playable framerate on a PC of today.
Much of the slowness with raytracing is as follows: Rays go out from the eye, reflect off objects [making new rays each reflection], and hopefully they hit a light [you'd stop making rays after a certain point in case they never hit a light]. If they do, then you can do the calculations for each ray. Do this each pixel. Very expensive, but quite worth it. Very simple too.
read on this: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~rademach/xroads- ... ticle.html
@ST Dragon:
Sonic Unleashed and Generations are prettier than After Burner Climax. Yeah, I'm cheating by calling out a Sega game that's full of the bright Sega style, but still. My only major visual gripe with Generations is the blurred backgrounds, because they look gorgeous, and there's little reason to have that depth of field effect obscuring them. I've seen the game with it disabled on the PC version [modded of course, the PC video options are worthless], the backgrounds could be foreground objects [maybe with a slightly higher poly count, but that affirms my point way above -- you can make a low-poly object look amazing with the right lighting and shading, which were incredibly important to Sega when making the Hedgehog Engine that powers both games [Generations doesn't have the Hedgehog Engine logo, but it's very definitely using it]].
On a related unrelated note, my friends and I were playing OutRunners today, and I saw a video of the 'sequel', Cool Riders [which apparently was Sega's last Super Scaler game, running on their H1 board that was only used in Cool Riders, probably because by 1995, polygons had won] because Haze was working getting it working in MAME.
I really want to play it, it's like an even wackier OutRunners, and it's got all that mid-90s flair to it, right down to the digitized character sprites.
Apparently the H1 board is a mix of Model 2 like hardware and System 32 style hardware. The game runs at Model 2 medium res [512x384, yeaaaaah], although it only gets 30fps instead of 60 like OutRunners though... looked like fun though.