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Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

godotengine.org

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Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#141

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

mrlala wrote: post #138
Sander_Marechal wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam isn't a monopoly though. They don't force exclusivity on their games and many Steam games can be purchased elsewhere (like on GOG).

>Steam isn't a monopoly though Are you a pc gamer? Because if you are, I don't understand how you can't see Steam as a massive monopoly. Perhaps you don't because they have done almost all GOOD with their monopoly power. Offline mode, library sharing, massive sales, etc.. but they are quite a monopoly. If 99% of my library is on Steam, why should I bother buying somewhere else? It's just an inconvenience to me. Ok I…

The statement is from the perspective of the studios, not customers (studios want to sell in every store they can, customers only buy the game once).

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#142

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #135
jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Epic does not want to be a major store. They want to be the only store. That is why they have been forcing exclusivity. That is the point: they are anticompetitive.

Steam has plenty of money and users. It also had little serious competition before Epic. While I'm a fan of well regulated markets, I don't think punishing Epic would benefit anyone except Steam shareholders.

Except gamers do not care about Steam being a monopoly (they are just a distributor and does not set prices), but would really be hurt if Epic and exclusivity of titles starts to take hold.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#143

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #136
Sander_Marechal wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam isn't a monopoly though. They don't force exclusivity on their games and many Steam games can be purchased elsewhere (like on GOG).

Network effects make Steam a practical monopoly. And it's probably no coincidence it has lower rates for AAA studios since Epic has gained a foothold in the market.

Yeah, but that is a monopoly for the publishers dealing with Steam, not for gamers which don't care as long as it is not broken.

Like Walmart or Amazon, the problem is for devs, not customers.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#144

Post by inDigiNeous »

kaoD wrote: post #93
adanto6840 wrote: post #86

I get why Epic probably funds this, and I love to think how great Godot could be in another year or so (and how they could surpass Unity, etc). What I don't really understand, though: Why wouldn't Unity just implement this now, too?! It's open-source & MIT-licensed; if it's better than Unity's GI -- and it IS better, because Unity does not currently have ANY realtime-GI solution in their latest versions (they stopped…

> I get why Epic probably funds this Is it just to fuck over Unity?

I've been following the discussion in Twitter with Tim Sweeney and Godot, about the MegaGrant that Epic gave Godot. Have seen Tim many times commenting about the good progress they have made, before even granting the money.

I've got the picture that Tim actually likes the software, not just because they want to squash their competition. But of course they might have motivation to take users away from Unity, who knows.

In my books, Godot is a really nice engine that will get closer to AAA -engines when the 4.0 release comes out, their open source policy is really nice and you have access to all the source code, which can help a lot while developing your apps, so It's all positive and everyone who wants to develop games or 3D apps will gain from this if they choose to put their time into Godot, not just Unreal.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#145

Post by inDigiNeous »

krapp wrote: post #48
shmerl wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Godot allow binding with multiple languages? You can even use Rust for that instead of GDScript.

The problem is few of those bindings are mature, nor can they be expected to remain up to date. I don't know of any games in Godot using anything but GDScript or C#. This will probably change in the future (I hope it does, and I really wish Godot just used WASM internally so any language that already compiled to it would work) but as of now it seems there's no point to using anything but GDScript or C#.

C++ is very easy to use with Godot and integrate with the GDScript support. GDScript is also very good as a script language.

Been writing my own application mostly using C++ for the core logic and main application logic using GDScript. The interfacing between C++ and GDScript is suprisingly easy once you set it up.

But yeah stuff like Rust support is depending on the maintainers of that code to update to support latest versions of Godot.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#146

Post by ignaloidas »

hnick wrote: post #117
mrfusion wrote: post #45

So if I wanted to make a simple 2d game, should I go with godot, pygame, or a JavaScript game engine?

Depends if you want to sell it or not, plus your target platforms. IIRC Godot is not great at exporting to Switch or other consoles but maybe that has changed. To add another option to the others, https://www.monogame.net/showcase/ is fairly popular. It's probably worth running through a tutorial in each and seeing what clicks for you if you have no experience.

There have been several games made with Godot released on Switch recently. The main blocker is Nintendo's NDA's. There's a recent twitter thread[0] from developers of one of those games.

[0]: https://twitter.com/monolithofminds/status/12599133551769272...

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#147

Post by bryal »

dahart wrote: post #140
bryal wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know how this ray marching compares to normal ray tracing time complexity wise, with regards to the amount of geometry?

Oh, that's a super good, but very difficult question to answer in general. SDF ray marching is quite commonly used in the demo scene and on ShaderToy without an acceleration structure (or "BVH" - Bounding Volume Hierarchy), while ray tracing usually has one. It's common for SDF ray marching scenes to have a very limited number of procedural hand-coded primitives, while ray tracing usually has a lot of simple primitiv…

> SDF ray marching does a point query against the BVH

Aah, alright. I've written a ray tracer that uses an (L)BVH before, so I'm familiar with how it works for ray tracing. What I couldn't figure out was how you'd use an acceleration structure for ray marching. Now that you spelled it out though, I suddenly think I get exactly how it would work.

> ... ray marching has a slightly higher complexity in practice than ray tracing since it takes multiple iterations ...

Great reply, thanks! It made a lot of sense.

> ... there are some amazing tricks you can play with ray marching to reduce the number of rays, and because ray marching often better utilizes a GPU.

Interesting. Now I'm gettin quite interested in exploring ray marching more.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#148

Post by dahart »

bryal wrote: post #147
dahart wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that's a super good, but very difficult question to answer in general. SDF ray marching is quite commonly used in the demo scene and on ShaderToy without an acceleration structure (or "BVH" - Bounding Volume Hierarchy), while ray tracing usually has one. It's common for SDF ray marching scenes to have a very limited number of procedural hand-coded primitives, while ray tracing usually has a lot of simple primitiv…

> SDF ray marching does a point query against the BVH Aah, alright. I've written a ray tracer that uses an (L)BVH before, so I'm familiar with how it works for ray tracing. What I couldn't figure out was how you'd use an acceleration structure for ray marching. Now that you spelled it out though, I suddenly think I get exactly how it would work. > ... ray marching has a slightly higher complexity in practice than ray…

It's worth exploring ray marching.

I still need to learn more about how Godot is using ray marching, but FWIW there is a lot to learn on ShaderToy and IQ's articles about the basic techniques.

https://www.iquilezles.org/www/index.htm

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/Xds3zN

The Media Molecule team did a pretty amazing job integrating ray marching into a game pipeline and presented it at Siggraph

http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/AlexEvans_SIGGRA...

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#149

Post by kroltan »

kgwxd wrote: post #73
m12k wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Global illumination is orthogonal to photo realism. In fact, GI and lighting in general can help indies get away with untextured and/or low-poly models and still achieve a pleasant look (check out The Witness or Superhot for some examples.

Superhot is the most innovative shooter I've played in years!

Incredibly even more tangential but:

If you have the opportunity, do play Superhot VR.

It is to Superhot as Superhot is to a regular shooter. Absolutely fantastic and one of the best fitting VR "ports" (it is more of a sequel, but I mean the game mechanics got even better in VR than with a kb+m/gamepad)

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#150

Post by Stevvo »

Stevvo wrote: post #120
adanto6840 wrote: post #86

I get why Epic probably funds this, and I love to think how great Godot could be in another year or so (and how they could surpass Unity, etc). What I don't really understand, though: Why wouldn't Unity just implement this now, too?! It's open-source & MIT-licensed; if it's better than Unity's GI -- and it IS better, because Unity does not currently have ANY realtime-GI solution in their latest versions (they stopped…

"Unity does not currently have ANY realtime-GI solution in their latest versions" Not 100% true; there is ray-traced GI.

I take this back. I tried it. It's completely fucking unusable. Editor crashes every couple of minutes, can't get it to work.
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