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Good point.

I would have liked to see examples of human skin, and of cloth. That's hard and important. Rendering the perfect cheese grater and glazed pot is nice, but really, not that important.

Most of the hard problems in graphics today involve scale. Epic's Nanite texture compression system is impressive, but about 60% of the work has to be done in CPUs because GPUs don't have the right stuff for it. And Nanite is still just for rigid objects. Crowds of individually dressed people are still tough to render fast.

NVidia put in ray-tracing hardware into GPUs. It's not used much in games. NVidia was angry with reviewers who just ignored their ray-tracing hardware in reviews. The reviewers were not wrong.

And could we please have good hardware support for order-independent translucency? That should be standard. Then we can get rid of depth sorting of faces, which never works right.

> NVidia put in ray-tracing hardware into GPUs. It's not used much in games.

Well, it's true that the proportion of games that have ray tracing -- over the space of all games released -- is small. But most triple-A games seem to have ray tracing these days. Of the last four such titles I've played three had ray tracing (Resident Evil 4, Jedi Survivor, Hogwarts Legacy). I think that's only going to become more true in the future, as IMO it does materially make an image quality difference.

They had the technology but not the power, so most games still only had bits and pieces using ray tracing and were not globally illuminated by it. Not to mention you have to make the game work on old equipment too. That means all the downsides of old lighting techniques remained and none of the art efficiencies are realized.

We are at the third generation of cards with RTX and there are almost no games using ray traced global illumination, and even if they do they still have to offer rasterized lighting for older hardware.

What do you mean "almost no games using ray traced global illumination"? The games mentioned above and many others are using ray-traced shadows, reflections, and sometimes one bounce of (diffuse) light. Not full path tracing, of course, but these techniques are still considered "ray-traced global illumination".

Only the bounce lighting would be considered global illumination in my understanding, and that still requires other rasterized techniques to make a fully illuminated scene.

This... 100% this. I've dabbled in India game making for a while and have no issue creating the relevant systems etc to make a game work because with good software engineering practises and modern off-the-shelf game engines you can scale that stuff like nobody's business.

What you still can't scale... Art assets... Especially if you're not creatively talented in that way. There's a reason so many AAA games these days have staff that are like 80% artists, 10% developers, 10% everything else.

Pretty sure all the artists are in contracted studios or contractors themselves.

At least in F2P, the 'staff' are 80% artists because cosmetics are ludicrously profitable.

I think part of the point of moving to ray tracing and physically correct global illumination is that if the technology stack works right you don't actually have to work very hard to get your assets to look good.

Let's take for example Second Life. The content is almost all user-generated, and when it originally came out it looked a lot worse than other games that were available at the time. The difference is mostly: since the content is user generated, you don't have some army of artists touching up the textures and pre-baking the lighting to make everything look at least plausibly realistic.

What Second Life was missing was the technology to compute global illumination in real time against arbitrary content so that the user-generated assets look as good as if some artist had specially lit and textured each one. (Maybe even better, because computers are more thorough and exact than humans -- assuming exactness is what you want. Artists sometimes take creative liberties because unrealism sometimes looks better.)

I haven't paid attention to Second Life in a long time; if a few minutes looking at random youtube videos is any indication, it seems they haven't really made much progress on this front. I think eventually companies will figure this out. I haven't paid attention to Facebook's Metaverse project because I expect it to be a flop (for non-technical reasons), but maybe they're banking on the graphics technology being there to make user-generated content look not-fake. I think that part might be achievable now with modest hardware.

As far as this new paper goes, I'm not sure if it makes things easier or harder for content creators. It seems like it makes the rendering stack more complex and harder to understand, but if someone can supply came creators with awesome textures and they don't have to care where they came from or how they work then maybe that's fine.

Easing the creation task for professional uses is definitely "in the pipeline". If you're making a 2D game, diffusion models are already capable enough to act as a shortcut for detailed painting. It's stuff with generating optimized meshes, animation, scene lighting, other details that is still in the research stage. In many ways it's more straightforward and gives a better demo to address the "render the entire scene" case than to go asset-by-asset and work out a better UX for that than "do everything by hand". Even though the latter is what's really being called for.

I wonder how much AI models can help. If they are trained on enough real world content, they should be able to produce rough models based on descriptions: "Generate a tropical island about 5km in width by 10km length with an active volcano in the center" and then then the artists adjust/massage as needed.

https://analyticsindiamag.com/raja-koduri-gives-a-sneak-peek...

Right, we're already there, and the tech is quickly improving. I'm not sure why GP thinks this will remain the most expensive process of game development.

Generating assets using AI will drastically cut costs and turnaround time. I'm eager to see these tools generate assets in real-time. Imagine being able to interact with an endless possibility of scenes. Games would ship with a generative model, and entire levels could be created on the fly, ensuring every play through is as different as the authors want it to be. Exciting stuff.

I never said it will remain the most expensive part; that's what I hope more engineering effort will go into. The graphics capabilities we use today are already commonplace and well written about.

Fast content creation isn't, or the tools are sparse and locked behind small, costly proprietary silos.

I’m not sure text prompts offer the kind of plasticity needed for artists to really do their thing.

Frank Gehry used to do really chaotic abstract drawings and hand them off to aerospace CAD operators to turn them into something that could be engineered and machined and assembled. Lots of people could do the drawings and have magic mushroom facades but Gehry understood the resulting interior spaces as well … I think it’s there is a ton of potential for great tools employing the past decade or so of ML/AI but ISTM it should empower the process rather than replace it.

Sorry I've read the last paragraph multiple times, but still couldn't figure out whether you're saying that id Tech is the best, or the worst...?

I think you're saying that id Tech engine, even the old ones, are the best by a long shot; but some words in that paragraph seem to contradict that.

And despite being a fan of John Carmack's works, I understand that the Unreal engines have its own advantages.

Yeah, I only worked in the business shortly but I would dispute that statement as well.

Back at the time licensing from iD was basically "here's a cd, never call us again." Meanwhile Unreal, at a much more approachable price, also came with support contacts, a private email list and irc channel, etc. It was like night and day between the two.

In my role as a level designer I vastly preferred UnrealEd. The workflow was more interactive, and the BSP implementation way more robust against leaks. There were flaws to Unreal... the initial versions of UnrealScript were not great. But again, there was simply no comparing the two imo.

For gaming you're absolutely right. It's interactive so the threshold for immersive is that much lower.

But imagine the impact on rendered art, VFX, etc. How long until you can ask ChatGPT for a model of a teapot with shaders for blue glaze? The labour involved from inception to render is going to be cut down to a tiny fraction of what's required today.

A long rant about the state of things in game engine techn and quite offtopic. I could not agree less. The id engine was hardly usable for anyone except a few studios with big pockets. With modern game engines you get great documentation and affordable tech. Unreal even comes with free photoreal assets and open source.

How do you think AI and tools like midjourney could improve this asset creation process (if you think they can be used in this scenario)?

I think AI can be a force multiplier for asset turnaround time by helping artists who don’t have particular preferences for vision make generally real-world recognizable objects quickly and build meaningful libraries of models to help build world building sets.

Theres also non-AI work that can help dynamically fill scenes with world meshes to help create seamless transitions between spaces as a part of overall terrain development.

A lot of this tech will be proprietary in nature, and it may be a long time, think decades, if ever that we get to use it as general creators.

It means that the gap between studios and bedroom professionals who used to create the mods that became full fledged intellectual properties that dominated for years will widen and there will be fewer opportunities for individual authors and small teams to become the next generation of production studios.

This will happen while large organizations enjoy extreme technical leverage while not having many great ideas to execute on simply because there will be fewer fiction writers and fewer studios who have concentrated technologies.

I currently don’t see much room for the next Zoid to create the next CTF gamemode.

I don’t really see anything meaningful come out of community contributions to games anymore ever since the introduction of the UGC model which has superseded the traditional modding model.

Instead of modders using game software mechanisms to create something new and interesting organically, UGC structures in games are explicitly designed so that creators can only do nominal things like create hats and skins for the most part.

It’s shifted the mentally from, “Here are the tools we used to create the game,” to “Here’s what you’re allowed to create and put on a marketplace so we can take a cut of profits.”

It’s gross, it sucks, and it’s another example of rug-pulling. Future generations will completely miss out on the previous paradigm because there’s so much focus entrenched on user-generated content versus modding.