http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~sidapohl/egoshooter/

This looks pretty cool; they're doing real-time raytracing of Quake 3. Watch the video; the dynamic shadows and the reflective objects are great.

The downside is that it takes 36 Ghz of processing power, and still only runs at 20 fps at 512*512

Very impressive shots, spec requirements aside.

For those of us who have no Earthly clue what raytracing is, want to explain?

Basically, it's the other method for creating 3d scenes, besides rendering. If I remember correctly, with raytracing, you basically have a beam of light emanating from each pixel in the screen, and the reflections and stuff are calculated by following the path of the beam of light.

I'm not actually very knowledgeable on the subject; anyone want to come in here and correct me?

It's not the only other method of creating 3D scenes, and it's still called rendering, even though it is not polygon based. And, most people don't refer to it as a beam of light, just a ray. Other that, you're pretty much right.

It just goes to show, game engines will never die, now to resurrect the blockland engine...

Is it just for Q3 or Q3 based games?

[wait they used just a Q3 demo? I'm confused]

I ended up having to know how ray tracing worked for my Senior Exit project on Special Effects... lets see...

Ray Tracing essentially operates the exact OPPOSITE of the way a camera works. At the most basic level, a camera allows light to enter and imprint on film. Ray Tracing takes that same camera, but shoots the light out of the camera and records the path it follows. So as was kinda stated earlier, it's shooting out a ray for every pixel and tracking its movements and where it ends up.

That's at least ROUGHLY right... It's been almost a year since I had to recite it back to anyone.

...what? They said it was Quake III based. No way they wrote all those features in six months...

FYI: "Normal" 3D engines are called raster engines.

there's a real time raytracing demo... i can pull a 40fps average with it... using the lowest possible settings