Realtime raytracing is here. what about minetest?

[thomasthespacefox]

Its about time someone address the raytraced elephant in the room...

I'm sure many of you have seen how a (certain other block-building game) has, (thanks to Nvidia) managed to make Minetest look like a PS1 game... (let alone putting some AAA games to shame...)

What I'm getting at is this:

- Imagine Minetest with raytraced graphics...
- from what I've seen, raytracing actually solves the problem of lighting in a game world that's completely dynamic.
- eventually, a day will come when raytracing starts outright replacing ye old rasterization... where will Minetest be then?
- its obvious, but someone has to say it: Minetest's graphics have been put another generation behind...

irrlicht being a dinosaur of an engine isn't helping anything, but that's besides the point here...

And before someone says graphics aren't the point of Minetest, i get that... I just wanted to get my thoughts out there and maybe start a constructive discussion on raytracing and Minetest...

[philipbenr]

Let me know when you've found devs that are able and willing to do it...

Snarkiness aside, I think that it will be a long time before Minetest is in a place where movement to real time ray tracing is possible. On top of that AFAIK there are no good ray tracing solutions compatible with Minetest, which seems to make rolling your own solution necessary. Which also sounds like a disaster unless you can find a team that is willing and available to implement and continually develop it.

I think if you're interested in getting a ray traced game, you should go get Minecraft based solutions, as Minetest probably won't be getting one any time soon. Whether that's Minecraft with RTX or SonicEther stuff, whatever. And if you refuse to get Minecraft due to "it costs money", that's ridiculous considering the technical cost of the solution. Microsoft account based things I'd make more of an exception for.

And as for constructive discussion, what one is there to be had? I don't see one aside from "This tech is cool and we want it for X reason", which really isn't constructive. I get the industry is moving forward, but it is not a requirement for your project to be a part of the industry standard, especially if it does what you want. There are plenty of examples of this out there. You need to start by doing research into what engines or frameworks that can be used to implement ray-tracing. After that, you need to identify technical challenges with migration to that engine or framework or whatnot. THEN a constructive discussion can be had...

[benrob0329]

I have yet to see that raytracing provides any reasonable advantage compared to more standard lighting tricks right now. It theoretocally provides more realistic lighting and makes everything physically based by default, but PBR isn't new tech and raytracing needs a huge amount of power to do in realtime.

Minetest needs so many other things first, namely more control of the rendering engine from Lua code and assets, performance improvements, and general API improvements. Additionally, Minetest targets a low-res cuboid type of visual style and (while this is personal opinion) I don't think that just slapping some realistic lighting on an otherwise very low-res game(s) looks very graphically consistent. Graphical effects should first add to the gameplay, and secondly enhance the intended mood of the game.

[philipbenr]

...namely more control of the rendering engine from Lua code and assets, performance improvements, and general API improvements

To be fair, two of the three of these likely could be done with a migration to a new engine (and would have to be redone with the new engine anyway). So its not like they can't be developed alongside or I suppose through each other.

I'm also of the opinion that voxel doesn't necessarily imply minimalist. I actually quite enjoy the aesthetic of high quality lighting in a cuboid world. Eye candy is still eye candy.

Spoiler

You have both low res, good light:



and high res, good light:



And while some may think it looks strange due to the voxel nature of the world, I'd argue the idea still looks brilliant when executed right.

[thomasthespacefox]

...namely more control of the rendering engine from Lua code and assets, performance improvements, and general API improvements

To be fair, two of the three of these likely could be done with a migration to a new engine (and would have to be redone with the new engine anyway). So its not like they can't be developed alongside or I suppose through each other.

I'm also of the opinion that voxel doesn't necessarily imply minimalist. I actually quite enjoy the aesthetic of high quality lighting in a cuboid world. Eye candy is still eye candy.

Spoiler

You have both low res, good light:



and high res, good light:



And while some may think it looks strange due to the voxel nature of the world, I'd argue the idea still looks brilliant when executed right.

if I'm being honest, I'm kinda partial to eye candy myself... and i definitely agree on the high quality lighting...

[chaosomnium]

maybe this discussion will be more relevant with irrlichtMT.

[cHyperspeed]

https://www.indiedb.com/games/minetest/ ... f-minetest