The original textures were done by Adrian Carmack. I think he's a genius as much as John. He was capable of making a difficult theme really work: a mix between dark future and fantasy. Specially fantasy with guns is terribly difficult and I don't recall having seen a game that succeeded in making that mix as well as the Quake series.
Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan
71–80 of 169 posts
Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not Glide mode? ;)
Now that you mention it, I don't remember if it was opengl or glide, it was over 20 years ago. Same effect tho. I just remember seeing all of the ambient lights and glows and thinking how amazing it looked. Specifically some early campaign map where you're going through dark sewers that had a bunch of little lights that emit a glow. But after the coolness factor wore off, it was back to using the most minimal setting…
If it was Voodoo you'd be using Glide. That was their proprietary API.
But yeah, the biggest improvement was putting it into Glide/OpenGL and watching all the new lights appear.
Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now it's not like it's only an engine change, for this to work they added PBR layers (metalness, emission, normal, yada yada) to all textures here, and that's a big artistic work. That said… gimme gimme gimme Half Life 1, plssssssss :D !
HL1 already has a modern remake, check out 'Black Mesa' on Steam. It's really good.
As someone passionate about hl1, I dont like Black mesa. Yes it looks nice, but gameplay wise it seems lacking to me. It feels very slow to move, bhopping has been nerfed to death.
It feels more like a reboot than a remaster
Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan
#74The new lighting makes such a dramatic difference. Despite the same low polygon count, the levels seem much more lifelike. If all the game classics are re-released with raytracing engines, I will be all over it. The next years are going to be good.
I would love to see a kickstarter or something to create high quality assets for Open Arena, and add raytracing. Personally, I find that Quake 3 gameplay is more fun than any modern shooter that I've played. It's fast paced, and really well streamlined. It's just pure adrenaline.
Adding things like health regen, cover, alternate fire modes, and so on ultimately just distracts from the action in my opinion. We don't really have any more games like Quake nowadays.
Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan
#75Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan
#76Rtx really shines when applied to a low-fidelity game like Q2. The difference isn't as profound in modern titles where a plethora of lighting techniques and tricks approximates physical lighting closely, though. I wonder if in the end (should we eventually see universal adoption) raytracing will prove more of a boon towards developers rather than end users, as it has been with many other hardware advancements.
But... That's the biggest benefit of raytracing/path tracing. It's why the movie industry is already all-in on it and has been for years. It's just in games where for some reason gamers don't understand the benefits and are so eager to dismiss it if they don't immediately see everything look 10x more amazing or realistic, entirely missing the point.
Perhaps many games do not require realistic light, rather some type of simplistic model serves gameplay well enough, I do not know what kind of light modeling was used in Sunset Overdrive, but that type of oversaturated lighting works for some games.
Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan
#77The new lighting makes such a dramatic difference. Despite the same low polygon count, the levels seem much more lifelike. If all the game classics are re-released with raytracing engines, I will be all over it. The next years are going to be good.
It's cool, but even back in the day people that competitively played Quake 2 & 3 would turn down every detail to be very low, sans the resolution. In part because it helped with lag, but it also made spotting enemies much easier. The lighting in this demo is very nice, but at least in the Quake world, no one would really use it because it's very distracting, specifically the lighting.
Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan
#78https://github.com/cschied/q2vkpt/
That's the source for Q2VKPT. I wonder if the source for Quake II RTX will also be released, which is the main target of discussion in this nVidia article and builds upon Q2VKPT.
Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan
#79Rtx really shines when applied to a low-fidelity game like Q2. The difference isn't as profound in modern titles where a plethora of lighting techniques and tricks approximates physical lighting closely, though. I wonder if in the end (should we eventually see universal adoption) raytracing will prove more of a boon towards developers rather than end users, as it has been with many other hardware advancements.
I guess better tools for developers could mean in a benefit for the player: less time working on one thing could mean more time in others, giving more room to improvement. I guess...
I'm somewhat sceptical because I'm not really seeing this happen anywhere throughout the software development industry. Sure, we get more software than ever, and we get it faster and cheaper, but it's all bloated low-quality (web\electron) apps that are often less usable than their ages-old counterparts. Same thing is happening to games in some extent - most developers choose development speed and convenience over performance.
Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's q2vkpt. It sounds like Quake II RTX is built on top of that but with more features.
No I think they are one and the same. q2vpkt is built on top of VK_NV_ray_tracing which is the Vulkan interface to RTX. It won't run on non-nvidia hardware afaik
They're not the same.
“But what’s new with Quake II RTX compared to Q2VKPT?”, you ask. A lot. We’ve introduced real-time, controllable time of day lighting, with accurate sunlight and indirect illumination; refraction on water and glass; emissive, reflective and transparent surfaces; normal and roughness maps for added surface detail; particle and laser effects for weapons; procedural environment maps featuring mountains, sky and clouds, which are updated when the time of day is changed; a flare gun for illuminating dark corners where enemies lurk; an improved denoiser; SLI support (hands-up if you rolled with Voodoo 2 SLI back in the day); Quake 2 XP high-detail weapons, models and textures; optional NVIDIA Flow fire, smoke and particle effects, and much more!