or you move out 

I only saw screenshots of it, and it was on some Quake mappers website. He had quite a lot of levels on there. I think his nickname started with "T"??

The levels in particular I'm interested in is the one(s) were he used that Scourge of Armagon big marble white brick texture.

Any ideas? 

Tyrann? Did Moonlight Assault use that white brick?

http://disenchant.net/ 

http://www.quaddicted.com/spmaps.html
click on the "author" link to sort by names. 

Wasn't him, but I managed to find a link to the person from the page you gave. It was Tronyn and the map was Coven Of Ebony. 

http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-37925-113.html 

But who needs performance anyway, when you've got omg shiny shiny things? gg Intel, working hard on what matters most to gamers everywhere: gloss. 

raytracing is cool and nice and all, and just needs hw support. 

BlackDog

That may be missing the point somewhat. Realtime ray tracing would lead to a very unified looking world where everything is lit in exactly the same way, every reacts properly to lights, etc. It would lead to more immersion which I think would be hard to argue against as a negative. 

There's nothing to stop rasterising hardware from using a unified lighting model. See Doom 3 and Stalker.

Intel is pushing raytracing because they'd really love to sell a bunch of expensive hardware, and they can't compete with GPU performance and quality on traditional rasterising tasks. That shows very clearly in these shots: there's flat shading on the models, crappy texture filtering, terrible performance, and pathetic resolution.

There's also shiny things. Well, colour me unimpressed. 

 

"There's nothing to stop rasterising hardware from using a unified lighting model. See Doom 3 and Stalker."

Ray tracing can bounce light. No current real time engine bounces light. And I will all but guarantee that Doom3 and STALKER are using lightmaps in many areas.

"That shows very clearly in these shots: there's flat shading on the models, crappy texture filtering, terrible performance, and pathetic resolution. "

Eh, that's art assets that were designed for a completely different lighting model. Once the technology is more solidified a killer art team would make it look great. 

I'm not getting into this discussion cause I have no clue, but having gone through most of the Doom3 source maps, no it does not use lightmaps. It actually takes some hacking about with the shaders to even get lightmaps in. 

Doom 3 was completely unified and realtime. Stalker used lightmaps on the world, but for occlusion and not lighting. It also implemented a limited form of bounced lighting, by the way. :)

As for the assets, I wonder if they aren't normalmapped in those shots because of issues getting the shading right or because of the extra performance hit (hgh quality texturing is expensive in a raytracer). 

It'd be awesome if doom3 had lightmap support of some sort. 

gaytracing is so far behind its not funny 

i WISH d3 had proper lightmap support. :\
if only to bake on ambient occlusion, ffs.

i'd be more impressed with realtime ambient occlusion, actually....... 

texturing slower in raytracing? why? at first glance, i'd guess you just need a texture lookup for each ray.

The nice thing about raytracing is that there's basically no hacks involved, much unlike rasterizing where everything is one giant hack ;)

global illumination raytracing isn't really realtime yet, i think. 

... and thinking "when will this be real time?"

Though I guess original-Myst-level stuff has probably been possible in real time for a while now (though obv. I'm talking about ray tracing, not realMyst :) 

is at least one damn good reason to look forward to the development of raytracing, scalability:

http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Raytracing_Topics_Techniques-Part_1_Introduction.shtml

One document especially grabbed my attention. It's titled: "State-of-the-Art in Interactive Ray Tracing", and was written by Wald & Slusallek. I highly recommend this paper. Basically, it summarizes recent efforts to improve the speed of raytracing, and adds a couple of tricks too. But it starts with a list of benefits of raytracing over rasterization-based algorithms. And one of those benefits is that when you go to extremes, raytracing is actually faster than rasterizing. And they prove it: Imagine a huge scene, consisting of, say, 50 million triangles. Toss it at a recent GeForce with enough memory to store all those triangles, and write down the frame rate. It will be in the vicinity of 2-5. If it isn't, double the triangle count. Now, raytrace the same scene. These guys report 8 frames per second on a dual PIII/800. Make that a quad PIII/800 and the speed doubles. Raytracing scales linearly with processing power, but only logarithmically with scene complexity. 

that... doesn't make sense. that means that with enough processing power, you could make a scene infinitely complex without any difference in performance... 

sentence to mean that the ray tracing algorithms will yield a stable product where the problem of rendering is only proportional to the size of the data set that it is handling. 

One of the latter articles features an easy to fallow explanation of kd-trees. 

in monkey phonetics I trust