[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Ray traced environments

[John Buehler]

Jeffrey Kesselman writes:

> On 3/17/07, John Buehler <johnbue at msn.com> wrote:
> >
> > 2. Is there any real value in going with raytracing?  Are
> photo-realistic
> > environments a niche feature for games?  Is this the point
> where the visuals
> > just make the rest of the game look bad by comparison?
>
> Question  2a:
> With all the multi-pass rendering tricks now available and fast thanks
> to programmable GPUs, is there any significant [b]value[/b] to ray
> tracing any more?

Simplification, quality, synergy, scaling and new effects.  Why hobble along
on obscure tricks when a raytracer inherently does those things with ease?
I don't know about you, but when I have spaghetti code and I figure out how
to clean it up, I do it.  Riding on the coattails of Hollywood special
effects houses would be nice.  Imagine what the world of raytracing could be
like with those guys and the games guys all working to push the state of the
art.

It would be nice to have games casually include fuzzed shadows, refraction
and reflection effects, fluid atmospheric effects, broad vistas and so on.
Tricks can only take the industry so far, and the more obscure the trick,
the less frequently it gets used.

Raytracing's biggest hurdle is that it consumes too many computes.  But we
may be to the point where we can leap that hurdle.

JB