X3 Reunion graphics again. This time raytraced.

Hades · Post by **Hades** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 3:08 pm

That's a nice idea!

I've also experimented with procedural textures and geometry. That would fit nicely into that kind of scenario.
I'm just not into adventures that much anymore.

Anyway... next thing up is SSE conversion.

MrMat · Post by **MrMat** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 4:22 pm

Wow that looks very impressive. Nice work!

Kaeru Gaman · Post by **Kaeru Gaman** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 4:45 pm

> I'm just not into adventures that much anymore.
that was only an example.
it would be useful for any kind of game where you want stillgrafix as a background,
like the cityscreens in CIV or HEROES,
for Merchant- and Dock-screens in an Elite-Clone,
even for "BombJack" or a PinBall...

I thought about writing a Port for the POVcore a while ago,
but POV just takes too long to render for such an implementation,
because the engine is too powerful and versatile to be quick enough.

thefool · Post by **thefool** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 4:46 pm

Kaeru is having a good idea. You could probably get some nice small stuff with good quality using live rendering

Hades · Post by **Hades** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 5:17 pm

Yes, I like that idea too.

I really want to use it for games somehow.
At first I considered some kind of Doom1 style lo res game, but it just wouldn't be very impressiv (if possible at all)

Hades · Post by **Hades** » Sat Apr 14, 2007 9:13 pm

Hmpf...

The triangle intersection code is already complete SSE. (Almost) branch free, four rays / one triangle.
The ray traversal code is 90% SSE.
Everything not optimal, but at least that part is about 2.5 times faster then my mono ray code.

But... the rest of my code is actually slower, because it wasn't meant to handle four rays at a time. :roll:
That new SSE code is only used for primary rays. I wasn't even able to integrate it for shadow rays, without a major rewrite.

All together it's only about 30% faster than before. I probably have to rewrite the rest of that code too.

Dreglor · Post by **Dreglor** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 4:51 am

ooo shiny,
maybe this will convince me to finish my monster I created
or at least post some working code

Hades · Post by **Hades** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 2:58 pm

I was waiting for your raytracer all the time. When nothing came, I had to start my own, you know.

When everything is in place, I will prepare some kind of demo, but I still don't know if I should go for realtime, or trying to be pretty (ehm... the demo. I'm a hopeless case

)

What do you think?

Kaeru Gaman · Post by **Kaeru Gaman** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 3:53 pm

pretty demo:

create a slideshow that softly blends the images every 3 secs...

Hades · Post by **Hades** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 4:22 pm

The problem with pretty is, my artistic skills are very limited. But maybe I can steal some ideas...

Dreglor · Post by **Dreglor** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 11:45 pm

my tracer backend is complete and infact some of my recent tips and tricks posts are code taken from the tracer
what I really have to do is write the rendering part of the tracer for both math modes (Mono/Packet)

Hades · Post by **Hades** » Tue Apr 17, 2007 3:17 pm

Sounds good.

I still have a 'little' more work to do. Yesterday I've startet to rewrite my main program. I'm going for a streaming approach now.

What kind of acceleration structure do you use? KD-Tree?

Dreglor · Post by **Dreglor** » Tue Apr 17, 2007 6:32 pm

no acceleration structure as of yet, except for a partial kd-tree that doesn't even compile yet, I was planning to use kd-tree solely but i am planning to switch to bih because of it ability to do dynamic scenes with speed slightly slower than kd-tree

Hades · Post by **Hades** » Tue Apr 17, 2007 7:30 pm

At first I was thinking about using KD-Trees for static geometry, and BIH for dynamic objects, but BIH is already that blazing fast, I have a hard time convincing myself to have a need for KD-Trees.
I've created a test scene. Just some static objects made of triangles, very simple shader, primary rays only (no shadows, because they still use that old mono ray path).
Version 1 has 3k triangles, version 2 has 760k triangles (yes, no typo).

@640 x 480 version 1 renders at 10 fps, version 2 at 6-7 fps.

Here are the Pictures:

Derek · Post by **Derek** » Wed Apr 18, 2007 8:10 am

That's very impressive especially the second example, 760K triangles at that speed is brilliant.