Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

Post by fwip » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

ladon86 wrote: post #104

pizza234 wrote: post #16

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I'm very skeptical. This is not just RTT; there's a big amount of rework. Likely, any old game would look significantly better with such development effort (in other words, with any good remastering). This could be considered a great market stunt - the graphical improvement is touted to be due to RTX (ray tracing), while it's actually due to many factors. On top of that, it misleads people into thinking that this typ…

But it's not down to polygons or details in the environment - the simple architecture still looks realistic with the addition of realistic lighting. In the quest for realism, modern games have so many details, dirt and grit everywhere [1]. Perhaps going forward artists can let the lighting do more work and still represent realistic clean environments. I loved this blocky room in Half Life 1 for the dramatic (prebaked…

Post by hellofunk » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

kuzehanka wrote: post #129

seanalltogether wrote: post #68

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I thought path tracing was just ray tracing with additional random scatters traced, is it not?

In the realtime graphics world, Ray tracing = initiate rays from light sources, bounce them around, accumulate them on camera. This is accurate but incredibly inefficient. This is how pre-baked light mapping and GI works. Path tracing = initiate rays from camera, induce bounce rays toward light sources. Not quite as accurate but orders of magnitude mode efficient in terms of producing an acceptable image.

Post by jsgo » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

gagege wrote: post #122

quadcore wrote: post #71

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.

Maybe this isn't what you're talking about, but Bungie's game Destiny is a pretty great example of medieval fantasy transposed several thousand years into the future.

Post by estebank » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 6:20 PM UTC

TomBombadildoze wrote: post #87

fb03 wrote: post #60

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Yes, but I remember you still had to use a really contrived way of explaining that 3d 'geometry' on the editor (BUILD.exe). Basically you still drew in 2d but you could overlap rooms with other lines that wouldn't intersect with any already existing lines, and that would configure 'a room above/below the current room'. Then you had to slope the floor until it actually connected with the newer room. It was pretty stra…

> Basically you still drew in 2d but you could overlap rooms with other lines that wouldn't intersect with any already existing lines, and that would configure 'a room above/below the current room'. Elaborating a bit -- the Build engine had a feature called "sector effectors" that, when triggered, would teleport the player to a completely different sector in the map. The transition was seamless and permitted interest…

Post by frigaardj » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:49 PM UTC

mattnewport wrote: post #85

cyxxon wrote: post #61

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I would argue that VR is the next step like this. Even taking an "old" title like Skyrim drives home that no matter how nice the renderer makes it look on a screen, it is still flat. With VR you are in the place. Does the raytracing look really, really nice? Yes, definitely. Is it that much better? I don't think so (personal opinion, of course)...

Working in VR, I think ray tracing is really going to come into its own with VR. Some of the effects that are mostly just nice visuals on a monitor actually make VR more usable. Accurate contact shadows for example are super important to our brain when picking up and putting down objects off surfaces to help get an accurate sense of distance and are extremely hard to do well with rasterization based techniques but th…