Offset

[Forsaken]

I see. But I think it's possible in very-well optimised programs, not sure about games themselves, but in many 3D-programs you can make a video with a huge amount of polygons by rendering it for a couple of days. I don't think that they have a computer that can run it in realtime yet, or maybe they have the best PC available, but if they do have such a PC, we have nothing to worry about. But I think it's the program.

[Domarius]

...What?

[Forsaken]

Well, your question was how do they make it realtime, and my answer is that they are either making it up and pre-rendering it, either they have the next generation PC...

[Domarius]

Ah. Well I don't really think they're lying.

 

I'm sure its a bit of both - the graphics engine, and the high end PC.

[Forsaken]

There is a chance that they calculate it will work on some PC (like DooM 3 when it was developed - there wasn't powerful enough card yet) later. I'm not saying they are lying, I'm just saying that PO is pretty far away, we can't tell, but I don't know what kind of PC you need to support all those polygons and particles and whatever.

[OrbWeaver]

As I said, it will be a trick. Probably more advanced than "stick an ambient light in your map", but full real-time radiosity simulation is many years away.

[Forsaken]

Is there something in game graphics that isn't a trick?

[Domarius]

Forsaken is right. Nothing in games is nesseciarly simulated to lab quality scientific accuracy for you to believe it just by looking at it; it's not nessecary. They always take shortcuts, that's what makes it possible to do in real time.

[OrbWeaver]

I meant it is a trick compared to the interative energy-propagation technique used to perform radiosity rendering in 3D apps.

[Domarius]

Well yeah. That's what I was saying.

[obscurus]

Well, two things: I was flicking throught the the nVidia website where it (somewhere) claimed that the 7900 supports a realtime global illumination solution (photon mapping or radiosity, it didn't eleborate on what kind of model they used or anything - the implication was that it rendered radiosity lightmaps in realtime in hardware though). Two, the tech demo from Crytec showed an editor view where a light was being moved around in real time, with shadows and diffuse ambient light consistent with some kind of real time global illumination model, and there has been numerous reports of next gen engines supporting real time global illumination of some sort on the horizon. Whether or not all of this is true or not I can't say, but the Crysis demo videos didn't look like any lighting model I've seen in a game yet, it looked like much higher quality lighting than in Doom 3 or any other currently available game engine.

 

OpenGL 2.0 supports realtime radiosity in hardware BTW.

 

Here are some links for you to consider:

 

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article918.asp

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~coombe/research/radiosity/

http://dee.cz/rri/

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/to...topic_id=381120

[woah]

New video from GDC in their downloads section. It has a dragon

 

http://www.projectoffset.com/downloads.html