What people are missing is that light mapping is a great tech but very memory limited. Light mapping is already using rays to cast its shadows, but because those rays are stored as textures, the resolution is extremely low. Even then they take up a LOT of me memory.
So, when you apply ray tracing to an older lightmapped game, people jump up and say “looks like shit/no different”.
What you’re forgetting so that light mapping is baked, it’s not something you change the fly. But ray tracing is giving the same effect in real time. So you can get light bounce etc all in real time, and with a small memory footprint. It’s also rendered at whatever resolution you can manage, and of course, can be dynamic.
People say it looks odd because of “light bounce”. They are used to hard lighting with hard shadows and surfaces being dark if not hot by a light source at all on its first bounce. As games tech progresses over he next few years, expect to see less and less “dark areas” unless the artist specifies them. Dark patches are just not very common in real life.
Give the tech time to mature. No tech was great first time around. Do you not remember env mapping and bloom?
Aintitcool
- the co-op run through format of having to physically move three dudes though the game feels slow and clunky compared to the precise and highly produced nature of DF's usual analytical content.
