[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Ray traced environments

[John Buehler]

Chris Richards writes:

> On 3/19/07, Mike Rozak <Mike at mxac.com.au> wrote:
> > - What does provide a huge improvement is stochastic ray tracing, which
> > produces correct soft shadows, blurry reflections, diamonds, wine-glass
> > effects, good motion blur, and secondary light bounces. It's
> 10x-1000x as
> > slow as ray tracing though.
>
> www.projectoffset.com
>
> Their game smells of a technology demo for their Offset Engine, but
> with more game than Doom 3.  Its marketecture contains a lot of the
> buzzwords; one of their big points is the real-time cinematic quality
> including motion blur.  Their small team has created quite the buzz,
> and their demos impress.

Impressive indeed.  High marks for quality of image, and use of audio to
enrich the presentation.  I particularly liked the bowshot.

However, technology demos that focus on graphics - and teams that are
dominated by artists - produce games that I find quite disappointing.  World
of Warcraft knocked my socks off on image quality.  The initial cinematic
after creating a character was rendered live, which stunned me.  But after
playing the game for about an hour, I realized that I was playing a softened
EverQuest with really nice graphics.

The team looks to be composed of 3 software types and 12 content types
(assuming a Technical Director is a content type).  I'd love to see a team
of 12 and 12 working to put some flesh beneath the beautiful skins that they
create.

JB