I might be in the minority here, but I couldn’t help but think Half-Life 2 still looks really good for a game released in 2004. Obviously “RTX on” is nicer to look at, but all the small details like the magnifying glass that actually magnifies made me appreciate the old assets/graphics so much, what a milestone it was.
I can’t believe we still haven’t had a Steamworld Dig 3. The first two are fantastic games. Not too hard, just fun. I was really excited to see the story didn’t end in number 2 and yet years later we still have no sign of a new game on the horizon. Maybe they also struggle with the number 3 of games like Valve does?
I’d argue they exclusively make absolutely great games! The dig ones are two of my favorite short jump n runs and Steamworld Heist is just such a fun, easy to learn tactical rpgish game with an appropriate amount of tactics and depth. I hope the developer doesn’t burn out on the Steamworld franchise and probably get to expand the scope of their games!
It looks amazing! That said, I backed The Repopulation and Star Citizen on Kickstarter…I’m hesitant to put my money into “hopefully a game” when I can use it now on released games.
they dont expect to be funded only by kickstarter unless they get like ten times the goal but its more to see if people want that sort of game to possibly help securing publisher funding or just fund themselves like they have done the years until now
Ray tracing is about implementing light and representing its behavior. Because reflections are, of course, a huge part of that it gets a lot of attention. Ray traced reflections allow things that aren’t otherwise on screen to be reflected without resorting to other clever tricks.
But other ray traced features implement light in (my opinion) more interesting ways. Global illumination, ambient occlusion, and shadows can all be implemented via RT and because they’re not limited by screen space information can be more accurate and, thus, impressive.
Light and objects in the world look like they belong and just look “right”. The way a sliver of sunlight can subtly light a room or the way an object appears grounded with accurate shadows can make non-RT lighting look wrong.
Can you share any examples? I have yet to see an rtx enabled game that was unusually shiny. Most non RTX game already tend to have way too much specular reflection but the few RTX games I’ve seen were way better with that.
Have you had a look at the RTX trailers of games? Most just show of how great the reflections are and barely anything else. It’s like " Look! We’ve got RTX now! See that puddle? Now you see yourself in there! That’s why we added more puddles!"
I partially disagree, GI is easy to do most of the time with baked lighting, but reflections (especially more diffuse reflections) are hard unless you have very simple environments or tons of gpu resources to spend on rendering alternate camera angles. Even the more modern rasterized reflection techniques such as parallax corrected cubemaps or screen space reflections break easily if you look at them wrong. Raytraced global illumination and soft shadows are still great though, but are more easy to get around with regular rendering in most games where the environments are very static.
that’s just part of RTX remix and somewhat the point of that tool. After all you need to get proper RTX materials in there and why not upres the assets as well while you are at it?
I’m not sure how easy that is with RTX Remix. IIRC the assets aren’t actually added to the game itself, but rather they get injected into the render-pipeline.
You have to use new assets for these old games if you really want to make the most out of ray tracing because PBR materials are necessary to better simulate the way light and reflections bounce off a surface.
I disagree that you really need to put much effort into updating the materials to get benefits from rtx. HL1 RTX looks pretty great with only the bare minimum PBR remasters, because PBR and RTX are 2 separate things that both improve a game’s look. PBR materials help rtx just as much as PBR materials help regular rendering, and rtx helps PBR materials only a little bit more than rtx helps regular materials. All of the effects used in PBR materials apply the same to regular rendering as with RTX.
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