Lighting: praise and a small critique

[Phineas Maxemus]

I really love this game. The sounds, the mechanics, the story, the motivations. I haven't felt this love for a game since I was little. One of the best features of this game is the lighting. And arguably the worst. I do love the early mornings in late autumn where it just reminds me of walking to school before the sun rises and everything is frosted. and the energy of the awakening city can be heard in the distance. but I would walk into town, and at the beginning of my walks, the mornings were grey and quiet and cold. sorry for the rambling. but this game can evoke so. many. memories for me. For example, the first picture i have reminds me of when I was very young and when I would get up and go to my parents, who were still up in the living room. What I am saying is; there's not much I would change for the lighting, BUT in the last photo. I wanted to get a shot of my house all lit up with my new lanterns and windows, but the whimsy and charm felt a little deflated when I when outside. The light was penetrating the walls while still illuminating them making them appear as they were glowing. I've noticed this breaks the immersion that the game had so carefully crafted up until then.

I think native ray tracing would be best. Not tacked on like any post-processing program which comes with its own host of bugs and loading. The game has some realistic lighting and often has scenes that I stop to look at, but I feel that introducing native ray tracing would take this game from best to over the precipice of legendary immersion.

[Facethief]

On the one hand, it could probably work really nicely for all sorts of things, but I feel that you neglect the fact that ray tracing, or probably more accurately path tracing, can also have light leakage issues. If the lighting is processed at a high resolution, it gets laggy quickly, and if the lighting is done at a lower resolution, the light leakage could reappear, possibly worse than before.

[hstone32]

The only time I've ever seen ray tracing make any sort of significant difference is in promotional nvidia videos.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

not everyone games with a raytracing graphics card. Putting ray tracing into the game would limit who can play this game.

[LadyWYT]

33 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

not everyone games with a raytracing graphics card. Putting ray tracing into the game would limit who can play this game.

I mean if it's just an option, I don't really care, but options like that catering exclusively to the absolute highest end(because let's be real, that's what it takes to render stuff like that and still have a playable game) should only be happening once the game itself is complete, because it still takes a lot of time and resources to properly develop.

To my knowledge, the game also already has godray effects(yeah yeah, not the exact same thing, but similar pretty effect), and while those still require some beefier hardware, they can be enjoyed by a wider range of players.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

33 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

To my knowledge, the game also already has godray effects(yeah yeah, not the exact same thing, but similar pretty effect), and while those still require some beefier hardware, they can be enjoyed by a wider range of players.

For voxel-based games, ray tracing is really overkill. Like massively so. Especially so because the terrain and physical objects can update, causing the RT to refresh entirely. Given the multiplayer state of the game, something as simple as a sinkhole would force a redraw of the RT for every block that moved during the cave in.

A better tool would be to use VGI (Voxel-based Global Illumination) because it allows light to propagate from a source until it meets a voxel in the 3D space. Simple trigonometry could be employed to generate realistic shadows. Chiseled blocks and semi-transparent blocks (like leaves) could have separate rendering methods to compute soft shadows based on proximity to the light source and distance to other voxels in the surrounding 3D space.

All in all I think it could be done.

With Ray Tracing? No. It's too expensive and only really doable on high-end GPUs

With VGI and a handful of lightweight rendering techniques? Absolutely. The game already implements it to an extent and the graphics keep getting better.

The game is a WIP and we're playing the alpha. I think given time, Anego would 100% expand the graphics engine to include such options for those with the hardware to handle them.