12 ms·

“Can it run Doom” will never be the same, thanks to new ray-tracing mod

285 points by jay_kyburz 5y ago

yeetsfromhellL2 5y ago
We've come full circle, next-gen consoles will just barely be able to run the original Doom (with ray tracing).
keithnz 5y ago
It's very cool, but nothing will compare to when it first came out with its original graphics, we were so blown away, the increase in "Realism" was significant
- allenu 5y ago
  Absolutely. I remember when I first tried the game out in a computer store back then being blown away at how real it all felt. I will say, seeing the ray tracing clip here with the dynamic shadows sort of gave me that same feeling of seeing Doom for the first way back in the early '90s.
sebastos 5y ago
Is it okay if I occupy the following ideological niche: 1. I love original doom. 2. I am very excited about what ray-tracing can do for games. 3. I have a ton of respect for doom modders and the doubtless huge amount of effort that went into this project. 4. I hate how this looks and wouldn't play it except as a curiosity To me, the original doom was a piece of art, tuned by artists (I'll say it!) to look a certain way on the computer screen. Like a great movie, every frame was a painting - a bright blue soul sphere added a nice highlight on top of a muted brownish-green canvas. A pinky demon standing in front of some mid-level gray barrels with greenish ooze... a spare clip - black, with a little orange. I find that modern games tend to be really visually tiresome and unappealing. Often, this seems to come from overly contrasted, poorly lit scenes. Instead of a painting you get a bad photograph with too much or too little exposure. This seems to be largely the effect you get with ray-traced doom. Instead of the painting that is E1M1, you get this black room occasionally washed out by an awful fluorescent glow. I think ray-tracing has the potential to create some amazing stuff, but retroactively applying it to doom rather predictably just makes... poorly balanced doom.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  As a one time Doom modder in the mid-90s I agree the lighting feels out of place. Even most modern renderers in software don't look the same as CRTs over VGA. They're all too bright and often washed out. Tuning contrast and brightness only help so much.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  Yes, I wanted to say something similar. I would love to see what this looked like with all the textures removed and replaced with simple flat colors or nice crisp vector images.
- andrewf 5y ago
  I've often felt this way about spruced-up Doom ports. Bilinear texture filtering and hi-res exposes the simplicity of the geometry and textures, it's like when TV went HD, and TV-quality sets/costumes/makeup suddenly looked "worse". It's probably still a net win if you want to blast through third-party levels. See: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/DOOM%20II%3A%20Hell%20on%20Earth https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/DOOM%20II%3A%20Hell%20o... I personally draw the line at colored lighting :) Naively, I'm interested in whether raytraced Doom would be a good way to experiment with reproducing Doom's original atmospherics in a less pixelated way. Unfiltered texturing, 320x200, and the lossiness of palettized graphics (https://doomwiki.org/wiki/COLORMAP https://doomwiki.org/wiki/COLORMAP looks gross!) makes the world dark and blurry, it'd be cool to have the same atmosphere without the pixelation and moire effects.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    I don't think you can have high resolution without an AI+human up-scaling of the art assets. And ideally without the bill-boarding from projecting sprites on polygons. Better to have always facing sprites IMO. Now if only the up-scaling artists could collaborate with Smooth Doom. That would be a great way to play.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Doom has that "pixel perfect" feeling that many early highly-polished games had. With that few pixels, it's actually possible to consider each one individually and how it works with the whole. The amount of actual 3D polygon detail you need to imitate that is quite high - compare WarCraft 2 to WarCraft III and Starcraft 2.
blarg1 5y ago
Been waiting for someone to do this for a while. Really want to see this section in e1m2 https://youtu.be/lNT0fHva724?t=62 https://youtu.be/lNT0fHva724?t=62 raytraced. That place really scared me when I was a kid.
- thissiteb1lows 5y ago
- dehrmann 5y ago
  I realized I've basically only played e1m1. Might explain why I enjoyed UT more than FPSes with storylines.
smrtinsert 5y ago
Can't initialize ray tracing engine. Had to install some old vcruntime dist to get even that far.
convery 5y ago
From looking at the trailer, some of the scenes kind of seem 'worse' from an art perspective. Not sure how to put it, kind of like when a cartoon includes some live-action art / 3D model or just cheap CGI in general, just feels 'off'. Still, great job by the devs.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Yeah, a bit like sticking the newest, biggest, fanciest engine you can find in the 30 year old car in your garage without any doing further modifications as part of it. Sure, the engine itself is impressive... but the car as a whole is now so unbalanced and hacked together it is worse off than before you messed with it.
  - ruined 5y ago
    Well, I certainly applaud anyone wanting to raytrace doom, but take it from this old code monkey, I've spent my entire adult life in dm-1, and a program like this one can do more harm than good. If you only develop one part of your renderer (and that's all a single exercise like raytracing is going to do for you), you're setting yourself up for artefacts down the road. I've seen it a hundred times. It's like putting a powerful engine in a stock Toyota Tercel. What will you accomplish? You'll blow out the drive train, the clutch, the transmission, etc., because those factory parts aren't designed to handle the power of an engine much more powerful than the factory installed engine. Raytracing basically only renders the shadows and to some extent, transparency. What you really want to do is redevelop your entire graphical pipeline, all the major visual assets (models, textures, uv maps, particles, rigging and animation) at the same time, over the course of a release. And don't forget your level design! I'm proud of you guys wanting to do this. Three cheers! Falling in love with raytracing, rendering, etc., is one of the greatest things you can do for yourself. And you WILL fall in love with it if you can just force yourself to stick with it a year or two and experience the amazing progress you'll make. But do it right, okay? My advice, find a good project, with qualified developers who will assign issues to you (especially in the beginning, until you get the hang of it yourself) and guide you in your quest for sick graphics. Thirty to 45 hours a week, eleven months a year, is all you'll ever need to do (I refuse to believe anyone is so busy that he or she cannot make time for that, especially considering how important it is). And don't worry about being embarrassed or not having dependencies installed the first time you clone the repo. You have to start somewhere and almost every one of us were there ourselves at one time. So no one will say anything to you and very, very slowly after lots of trial and error you will finally just look it up on youtube. Now get out there and do it!
nomilk 5y ago
Technical breakthroughs don't seem correlated to enjoyment, at least not in the short term. My favourite game still has 700 AD graphics and no sound effects, at least until someone blunders.
- ant6n 5y ago
  > 700 AD graphics What’s that, some board game from the dark ages?
  - nomilk 5y ago
    Indeed. Although the 'modern' variant is only a few hundred years old it's based on the same graphics as its predecessors, which date back as early as the ~5-700's. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#Milestones_of_the_game https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#Milestone...
- wongarsu 5y ago
  Many people enjoyed the original Doom, and that was a technical breakthrough (first real-time 3d engine with non-orthogonal surfaces). Of course adding raytracing to Doom doesn't add much enjoyment, you'd have to redesign the game to exploit raytracing to achieve that. And Super Mario or a game of Poker with friends might still be more enjoyable than that, but there's room for different categories of enjoyment
WalterBright 5y ago
My highly sophisticated game from the 1970s used 'A' for armies, 'B' for battleships, etc.
- pedrogpimenta 5y ago
  Okay.
- anthk 5y ago
  VMS empire?
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Yes, although in the 1970s it was PDP-10 Empire.
0des 5y ago
Hang on a second, somehow I got redirected to Ars's WordPress path, which didn't respond but it made me think for a minute, how is Ars run on WordPress? I guess I expected them to have their own thing, I don't know. WordPress just seems so.... I don't know the word, maybe pedestrian? Is that harsh?
- pedrogpimenta 5y ago
  I don't know if using WordPress is pedestrian but thinking that is pedantic, for sure.
  - 0des 5y ago
    What's this have to do with children
    - nottorp 5y ago
      pedantic != pediatric
      - pedrogpimenta 5y ago
        Ahahah thanks :facepalm:
Razengan 5y ago
Why the hell does clicking on the screenshots take me to an ad? Does this happen to anyone else? iPhone Safari I guess it has to do with those annoying behind-content ads that the tap is somehow going through to.
mcbuilder 5y ago
I wonder if the ray tracing will help with my nausea. DOOM engine is one of those "nope" games, that I discovered when I was like 11 and playing Chex Question CD I got in the cereal box. For me it's very engine specific: DOOM makes me feel ill, Quake fine. Source blargh, but can play CS all day on HL 1 engine.
- WithinReason 5y ago
  Might have to do with movement speed
- andrewf 5y ago
  Doom can make me nauseous, especially if I'm watching instead of playing. So does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Fury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Fury (an anachronistic indie game using Duke3D's engine) Theories: Doom's 35fps framerate cap; try an "uncapped framerate" port like GZDoom. Another thing could be the pseudo-3D look up/down used in many software renderers of that vintage; the world is skewed rather than rotated, so that vertical walls remain vertical when projected onto the viewport. Modern 3D-accelerated ports don't do this. (Or you could turn lookup/down off) Neither theory explains Source nausea, unless perhaps you also played it with a low framerate.
- Moru 5y ago
  There's a number of settings that help some people. Try changing Field of View to a smaller value and turn off walk-bobbing if there is any. Some can only play in window mode, others need full screen. Low framerate might be a problem too.
sgillen 5y ago
Am I the only one who thinks this actually looks pretty good? Maybe it’s because I did not play the original doom when it came out.
- spion 5y ago
  I played the original and likewise like it. I think it adds a nice twist to the old familiar levels I fondly remember from the past. I don't think its mind blowing or anything but it seems like a fun new "flavor" to try.
- IE6 5y ago
  I agree. I really liked some of the "UI Enhancements" the ports of Doom to a more modern engine brought and on the surface this looks very similar but I am sure it feels a lot different (since its ray tracing and not just fancy lighting). I'm excited to try it!
riztaak 5y ago
Reminds me of application which was bread and butter of the company. Whole application was 25K+ line of c++ code written as just one c++ function :), an ISAPI extension. It was crazy fast as a webapp and generating lot of revenue for the company so the company keep on investing in it by adding more and more features. Doing any change in that app was months of effort.
tekni5 5y ago
I played a bit of it, it's pretty interesting parts look really good while others not as good with a bunch of bugs here and there. I think I still prefer the original graphics, but with more development and tweaking this could be a good way to replay doom. I recorded a little of gameplay on max settings, it brings my 2080 ti down on rare occasion with 2 light pass, I also did the optional DLSS it offers, not sure if that does anything to performance: https://youtu.be/61x-AKLRoFo https://youtu.be/61x-AKLRoFo
- simulate-me 5y ago
  The part starting at 1:51 where there are demons up on the ledge running back and forth casting shadows was pretty cool.
anthk 5y ago
Will it work with the Freedoom IWAD?
bayesian_horse 5y ago
The size of devices able to run doom shrinks every two years?
- _joel 5y ago
  Carmack's Law
sydthrowaway 5y ago
Looks yawn. Just feed all the textures into a GAN already.
drawingthesun 5y ago
I kind of like this, I feel that it has a sort of realism that probably doesn't translate into a fun game, but showcases perhaps what these scenarios would actually look like. The lighting moves around so fast shifting from dark to light as energy balls and fireballs are thrown around it is hard to track where the enemies are and it's frustrating but perhaps this is what such a chaotic event would look like?
_dain_ 5y ago
See also, Half-Life Raytraced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsteDE8h6jc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsteDE8h6jc Looks beautiful.
marcodiego 5y ago
Does it requires too beefy hardware?
valgaze 5y ago
DLSS & ideas like it outside an idea are really interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning_super_sampling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning_super_sampling Ex. run the base game at an insanely crummy/low resolution. On low(er) it’s possible to run a model to kinda “upscale” in each frame in a performant way. Or even this CNN initiative from Intel where they took Grand Theft Auto & “painted” it with dashcam footage from rural Germany: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IcaBn3ej0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IcaBn3ej0 The results are pretty interesting— all “brown” southern CA mountains were green like in Germany
busterarm 5y ago
This needs its own megawad of levels designed to take advantage of the new lighting features. There are so many cool things that they could do with this.
justsomehnguy 5y ago
While others are said enough, the best thing I learned from this article is what author also made Serious Sam ray traced mod[0] and it really looks awesome both because SS was a full 3D game and because it was made with a good light decisions in the map design which really benefit from the ray tracing. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFUwx8zLKfE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFUwx8zLKfE

285 points by jay_kyburz 5y ago

We've come full circle, next-gen consoles will just barely be able to run the original Doom (with ray tracing).

It's very cool, but nothing will compare to when it first came out with its original graphics, we were so blown away, the increase in "Realism" was significant

allenu 5y ago
Absolutely. I remember when I first tried the game out in a computer store back then being blown away at how real it all felt. I will say, seeing the ray tracing clip here with the dynamic shadows sort of gave me that same feeling of seeing Doom for the first way back in the early '90s.

sebastos 5y ago

Is it okay if I occupy the following ideological niche: 1. I love original doom. 2. I am very excited about what ray-tracing can do for games. 3. I have a ton of respect for doom modders and the doubtless huge amount of effort that went into this project. 4. I hate how this looks and wouldn't play it except as a curiosity To me, the original doom was a piece of art, tuned by artists (I'll say it!) to look a certain way on the computer screen. Like a great movie, every frame was a painting - a bright blue soul sphere added a nice highlight on top of a muted brownish-green canvas. A pinky demon standing in front of some mid-level gray barrels with greenish ooze... a spare clip - black, with a little orange. I find that modern games tend to be really visually tiresome and unappealing. Often, this seems to come from overly contrasted, poorly lit scenes. Instead of a painting you get a bad photograph with too much or too little exposure. This seems to be largely the effect you get with ray-traced doom. Instead of the painting that is E1M1, you get this black room occasionally washed out by an awful fluorescent glow. I think ray-tracing has the potential to create some amazing stuff, but retroactively applying it to doom rather predictably just makes... poorly balanced doom.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
As a one time Doom modder in the mid-90s I agree the lighting feels out of place. Even most modern renderers in software don't look the same as CRTs over VGA. They're all too bright and often washed out. Tuning contrast and brightness only help so much.
jay_kyburz 5y ago
Yes, I wanted to say something similar. I would love to see what this looked like with all the textures removed and replaced with simple flat colors or nice crisp vector images.
andrewf 5y ago
I've often felt this way about spruced-up Doom ports. Bilinear texture filtering and hi-res exposes the simplicity of the geometry and textures, it's like when TV went HD, and TV-quality sets/costumes/makeup suddenly looked "worse". It's probably still a net win if you want to blast through third-party levels. See: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/DOOM%20II%3A%20Hell%20on%20Earth https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/DOOM%20II%3A%20Hell%20o... I personally draw the line at colored lighting :) Naively, I'm interested in whether raytraced Doom would be a good way to experiment with reproducing Doom's original atmospherics in a less pixelated way. Unfiltered texturing, 320x200, and the lossiness of palettized graphics (https://doomwiki.org/wiki/COLORMAP https://doomwiki.org/wiki/COLORMAP looks gross!) makes the world dark and blurry, it'd be cool to have the same atmosphere without the pixelation and moire effects.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  I don't think you can have high resolution without an AI+human up-scaling of the art assets. And ideally without the bill-boarding from projecting sprites on polygons. Better to have always facing sprites IMO. Now if only the up-scaling artists could collaborate with Smooth Doom. That would be a great way to play.
bombcar 5y ago
Doom has that "pixel perfect" feeling that many early highly-polished games had. With that few pixels, it's actually possible to consider each one individually and how it works with the whole. The amount of actual 3D polygon detail you need to imitate that is quite high - compare WarCraft 2 to WarCraft III and Starcraft 2.

blarg1 5y ago

Been waiting for someone to do this for a while. Really want to see this section in e1m2 https://youtu.be/lNT0fHva724?t=62 https://youtu.be/lNT0fHva724?t=62 raytraced. That place really scared me when I was a kid.

thissiteb1lows 5y ago
dehrmann 5y ago
I realized I've basically only played e1m1. Might explain why I enjoyed UT more than FPSes with storylines.

smrtinsert 5y ago

Can't initialize ray tracing engine. Had to install some old vcruntime dist to get even that far.

convery 5y ago

From looking at the trailer, some of the scenes kind of seem 'worse' from an art perspective. Not sure how to put it, kind of like when a cartoon includes some live-action art / 3D model or just cheap CGI in general, just feels 'off'. Still, great job by the devs.

zamadatix 5y ago
Yeah, a bit like sticking the newest, biggest, fanciest engine you can find in the 30 year old car in your garage without any doing further modifications as part of it. Sure, the engine itself is impressive... but the car as a whole is now so unbalanced and hacked together it is worse off than before you messed with it.
- ruined 5y ago
  Well, I certainly applaud anyone wanting to raytrace doom, but take it from this old code monkey, I've spent my entire adult life in dm-1, and a program like this one can do more harm than good. If you only develop one part of your renderer (and that's all a single exercise like raytracing is going to do for you), you're setting yourself up for artefacts down the road. I've seen it a hundred times. It's like putting a powerful engine in a stock Toyota Tercel. What will you accomplish? You'll blow out the drive train, the clutch, the transmission, etc., because those factory parts aren't designed to handle the power of an engine much more powerful than the factory installed engine. Raytracing basically only renders the shadows and to some extent, transparency. What you really want to do is redevelop your entire graphical pipeline, all the major visual assets (models, textures, uv maps, particles, rigging and animation) at the same time, over the course of a release. And don't forget your level design! I'm proud of you guys wanting to do this. Three cheers! Falling in love with raytracing, rendering, etc., is one of the greatest things you can do for yourself. And you WILL fall in love with it if you can just force yourself to stick with it a year or two and experience the amazing progress you'll make. But do it right, okay? My advice, find a good project, with qualified developers who will assign issues to you (especially in the beginning, until you get the hang of it yourself) and guide you in your quest for sick graphics. Thirty to 45 hours a week, eleven months a year, is all you'll ever need to do (I refuse to believe anyone is so busy that he or she cannot make time for that, especially considering how important it is). And don't worry about being embarrassed or not having dependencies installed the first time you clone the repo. You have to start somewhere and almost every one of us were there ourselves at one time. So no one will say anything to you and very, very slowly after lots of trial and error you will finally just look it up on youtube. Now get out there and do it!

nomilk 5y ago

Technical breakthroughs don't seem correlated to enjoyment, at least not in the short term. My favourite game still has 700 AD graphics and no sound effects, at least until someone blunders.

ant6n 5y ago
> 700 AD graphics What’s that, some board game from the dark ages?
- nomilk 5y ago
  Indeed. Although the 'modern' variant is only a few hundred years old it's based on the same graphics as its predecessors, which date back as early as the ~5-700's. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#Milestones_of_the_game https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#Milestone...
wongarsu 5y ago
Many people enjoyed the original Doom, and that was a technical breakthrough (first real-time 3d engine with non-orthogonal surfaces). Of course adding raytracing to Doom doesn't add much enjoyment, you'd have to redesign the game to exploit raytracing to achieve that. And Super Mario or a game of Poker with friends might still be more enjoyable than that, but there's room for different categories of enjoyment

WalterBright 5y ago

My highly sophisticated game from the 1970s used 'A' for armies, 'B' for battleships, etc.

pedrogpimenta 5y ago
Okay.
anthk 5y ago
VMS empire?
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Yes, although in the 1970s it was PDP-10 Empire.

0des 5y ago

Hang on a second, somehow I got redirected to Ars's WordPress path, which didn't respond but it made me think for a minute, how is Ars run on WordPress? I guess I expected them to have their own thing, I don't know. WordPress just seems so.... I don't know the word, maybe pedestrian? Is that harsh?

pedrogpimenta 5y ago
I don't know if using WordPress is pedestrian but thinking that is pedantic, for sure.
- 0des 5y ago
  What's this have to do with children
  - nottorp 5y ago
    pedantic != pediatric
    - pedrogpimenta 5y ago
      Ahahah thanks :facepalm:

Razengan 5y ago

Why the hell does clicking on the screenshots take me to an ad? Does this happen to anyone else? iPhone Safari I guess it has to do with those annoying behind-content ads that the tap is somehow going through to.

mcbuilder 5y ago

I wonder if the ray tracing will help with my nausea. DOOM engine is one of those "nope" games, that I discovered when I was like 11 and playing Chex Question CD I got in the cereal box. For me it's very engine specific: DOOM makes me feel ill, Quake fine. Source blargh, but can play CS all day on HL 1 engine.

WithinReason 5y ago
Might have to do with movement speed
andrewf 5y ago
Doom can make me nauseous, especially if I'm watching instead of playing. So does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Fury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Fury (an anachronistic indie game using Duke3D's engine) Theories: Doom's 35fps framerate cap; try an "uncapped framerate" port like GZDoom. Another thing could be the pseudo-3D look up/down used in many software renderers of that vintage; the world is skewed rather than rotated, so that vertical walls remain vertical when projected onto the viewport. Modern 3D-accelerated ports don't do this. (Or you could turn lookup/down off) Neither theory explains Source nausea, unless perhaps you also played it with a low framerate.
Moru 5y ago
There's a number of settings that help some people. Try changing Field of View to a smaller value and turn off walk-bobbing if there is any. Some can only play in window mode, others need full screen. Low framerate might be a problem too.

sgillen 5y ago

Am I the only one who thinks this actually looks pretty good? Maybe it’s because I did not play the original doom when it came out.

spion 5y ago
I played the original and likewise like it. I think it adds a nice twist to the old familiar levels I fondly remember from the past. I don't think its mind blowing or anything but it seems like a fun new "flavor" to try.
IE6 5y ago
I agree. I really liked some of the "UI Enhancements" the ports of Doom to a more modern engine brought and on the surface this looks very similar but I am sure it feels a lot different (since its ray tracing and not just fancy lighting). I'm excited to try it!

riztaak 5y ago

Reminds me of application which was bread and butter of the company. Whole application was 25K+ line of c++ code written as just one c++ function :), an ISAPI extension. It was crazy fast as a webapp and generating lot of revenue for the company so the company keep on investing in it by adding more and more features. Doing any change in that app was months of effort.

tekni5 5y ago

I played a bit of it, it's pretty interesting parts look really good while others not as good with a bunch of bugs here and there. I think I still prefer the original graphics, but with more development and tweaking this could be a good way to replay doom. I recorded a little of gameplay on max settings, it brings my 2080 ti down on rare occasion with 2 light pass, I also did the optional DLSS it offers, not sure if that does anything to performance: https://youtu.be/61x-AKLRoFo https://youtu.be/61x-AKLRoFo

simulate-me 5y ago
The part starting at 1:51 where there are demons up on the ledge running back and forth casting shadows was pretty cool.

anthk 5y ago

Will it work with the Freedoom IWAD?

bayesian_horse 5y ago

The size of devices able to run doom shrinks every two years?

_joel 5y ago
Carmack's Law

sydthrowaway 5y ago

Looks yawn. Just feed all the textures into a GAN already.

drawingthesun 5y ago

I kind of like this, I feel that it has a sort of realism that probably doesn't translate into a fun game, but showcases perhaps what these scenarios would actually look like. The lighting moves around so fast shifting from dark to light as energy balls and fireballs are thrown around it is hard to track where the enemies are and it's frustrating but perhaps this is what such a chaotic event would look like?

_dain_ 5y ago

See also, Half-Life Raytraced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsteDE8h6jc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsteDE8h6jc Looks beautiful.

marcodiego 5y ago

Does it requires too beefy hardware?

valgaze 5y ago

DLSS & ideas like it outside an idea are really interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning_super_sampling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning_super_sampling Ex. run the base game at an insanely crummy/low resolution. On low(er) it’s possible to run a model to kinda “upscale” in each frame in a performant way. Or even this CNN initiative from Intel where they took Grand Theft Auto & “painted” it with dashcam footage from rural Germany: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IcaBn3ej0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IcaBn3ej0 The results are pretty interesting— all “brown” southern CA mountains were green like in Germany

busterarm 5y ago

This needs its own megawad of levels designed to take advantage of the new lighting features. There are so many cool things that they could do with this.

justsomehnguy 5y ago

While others are said enough, the best thing I learned from this article is what author also made Serious Sam ray traced mod[0] and it really looks awesome both because SS was a full 3D game and because it was made with a good light decisions in the map design which really benefit from the ray tracing. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFUwx8zLKfE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFUwx8zLKfE