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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

Could this really have not been done with a modern engine and technology?

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see anything that prevents it.

This is modern technology -- the most modern, since it was invented for this game. Global illumination this good is not something you can get off the shelf, to my knowledge.

voxel cone tracing is not a new thing, but the way they are doing it is pretty neat and seems to be giving them good FPS even on console hardware (it's usually pretty beefy to do).

As far as other engines doing GI, Unity uses enlighten wich cheats (brilliantly) by precomputing the scene (not baking) which lets it dynamically do GI in a scene.

> http://www.geomerics.com/enlighten/

VCT has been around for a while, it's been integrated into UE4 at some point (Siggraph 2012 here [1]).

In the end, the global illumination solutions they've had :

* VCT [1], seemed real-time

* Indirect Lighting Cache (similar to Tatarchuk's irradiance volumes), precomputed with their Lightmass tech same as UE3 I think

* LPV (Light Propagation Volumes, contributed by Lionhead Studios) [2]

* Distance Field GI [3]

Global illumination in real-time is a hard problem, there's a lot of interesting research on it at the moment.

[1] https://de45xmedrsdbp.cloudfront.net/Resources/files/The_Tec...

[2] https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Li...

[3] http://timhobsonue4.snappages.com/distance-field-global-illu...

Unity and UE4 can use Enlighten for GI as someone mentioned below.