Wolfenstein: Ray Tracing on Using WebGL1

https://reindernijhoff.net/2019/03/wolfenstein-raytracing-on-using-webgl1/

by leeoniya • 7 years ago

235 27 7 years ago

reindernijhoff.net

Aeolun• 7 years ago

It’s good to see that after all these years Reinder is still working on (new) raytracers :D

reindernijhoff• 7 years ago

haha :)

accatyyc• 7 years ago

This is very cool. I really like the style that is the result of retro graphics and then raytracing added on top. I hope it will become a common style in games!

leeoniya• 7 years ago

amazing how much the music and door sfx add to the experience/nostalgia. makes me want to fire up DOSBox and play it through again. it looks like you can actually mouse-look in this version. i don't think that was possible in Wolf3D. also enabling the reflections definitely takes a lot away from the retro feel - too shiny!

gattr• 7 years ago

Actually, you could "mouse look" in the original game, sort of - in addition to looking left/right, moving the mouse up/down would also move the character forwards/backwards.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 7 years ago

If you really want to play through it with some enhancements, you probably want ECwolf http://maniacsvault.net/ecwolf/.

skunkworker• 7 years ago

This reminds me of the Quake 2 Path/Tracing Ray Tracing with Nvidia RTX.

The lighting becomes hard to accept because I've been accustomed to the fast, "fake" lighting in current games, but suddenly with Ray tracing the lighting becomes completely different.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRCAfdBMe2Y

_Microft• 7 years ago

Man, I'd like to see Descent (I/II) rendered like that. Or Quake 3 Arena. :)

rzzzt• 7 years ago

A ray tracing renderer for Quake 3 was demonstrated in 2004: http://www.q3rt.de/

qqii• 7 years ago

Actually I'd argue the lighting is hard to accept because the models and textures weren't designed to be ray traced, and they don't exhibit the intended material properties.

sanqui• 7 years ago

Unfortunately, this article crashes my tab on Firefox 63.

Faark• 7 years ago

My edge 42 also can't handle it (freezes). Had to use ff (67, fine there)

neogodless• 7 years ago

Not that it helps you but on Firefox 65 on Windows 10 (core i7 6th gen quad core mobile) it ran great.

Kuraj• 7 years ago

Wait, isn't this kind of a big deal?

I didn't know real time ray tracing was already feasible on non RTX cards.

johndough• 7 years ago

The geometry is very simple. Realtime raytracing for scenes like that has been possible for at least a decade.

c0un7d0wn• 7 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nqhkDm2_Tw running on AMD Vega 56

kingo55• 7 years ago

On mobile too!

lettergram• 7 years ago

I’ve noticed a few people say similar comments recently. Ray tracing is done via software that (typically) doesn’t require any specific hardware. It may be faster on specific hardware, but it’s plenty feasible in most GPUs. The whole RTX thing is marketing

Impossible• 7 years ago

In the 90s you could say rasterization is done via software that (typically) doesn't require any specific hardware. It may be faster on specific hardware, but it's feasible in most CPUs. The whole 3DFX thing is marketing.

More seriously, RTX adds custom acceleration hardware (fixed function hardware ray box and ray triangle intersection). Whether or not this hardware is required (or enough) for feasible mainstream adoption of real-time raytracing in commercial games is up in the air, but at the very least it turns making a performant, GPU accelerated, real-time raytracer from very hard and only usable in toy applications to relatively straightforward and almost usable in real applications. The RTX name is marketing but the hardware does add some value. As with anything once (if?) raytracer hardware is cheaper, more powerful and more ubiquitous it could have major effects on real-time rendering.

dahart2• 7 years ago

You can do ray tracing on an HP calculator or a postscript printer. You can do the calculations by hand too.

Saying it’s marketing is a little like saying your AMD ThreadRipper is just marketing and an ATMega328 is plenty feasible because the 20Mhz 8-bit processor can still compute anything.

The distinguishing feature of the RTX hardware is that it’s faster.

dahart2• 7 years ago

Check out ShaderToy.com

IvanK_net2• 7 years ago

You could do real-time ray tracing fifty years ago :D

But you would only compute like 1 000 rays per frame, while now you can compute like 10 000 000 rays per frame :)

etaioinshrdlu• 7 years ago

NVIDIA's marketing is working superbly!

Not to discount that RTX is a big improvement - acutally it seems to be msotly deep learning based denoising that makes RTX possible.

joosters• 7 years ago

In honour of a famous game review system, I propose an objective, measurable way of rating ray-tracing demos: the 'time-to-sphere': how long is it before a shiny sphere appears in the visuals? It signifies the point at which the creator ran out of ideas and gave up on doing anything original.

Unfortunately, this Wolfenstein demo score 0 seconds. As another reviewer once wrote: It's observably, undeniably bad. It's as if the designer arrived at work on day one, sat down at his desk, sharpened a pencil, threw up his hands and said "well, I can't think of anything."

:) (But on a serious note, what use is ray-tracing if no-one can come up with anything original to show with it?)

Synaesthesia• 7 years ago

That’s because true reflections are a feature of ray tracing, which other technologies cannot achieve.

It’s quite impressive for me to have a real time Ray tracer in my browser.

IvanK_net2• 7 years ago

It reminds me my own ray-traced WebGL game, that I made six years ago :) http://powerstones.ivank.net

axilmar• 7 years ago

Wow, FF run rings around Chrome! this demo is almost 70% faster in FF...

Wolfenstein: Ray Tracing on Using WebGL1

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