A Valve engineer fixed 3D lighting so hard he had to tell all the graphics card manufacturers their math was wrong, and the reaction was: 'I hate you'

www.pcgamer.com A Valve engineer fixed 3D lighting so hard he had to tell all the graphics card manufacturers their math was wrong, and the reaction was: 'I hate you'

Ken Birdwell was all about "getting the lighting right."

A Valve engineer fixed 3D lighting so hard he had to tell all the graphics card manufacturers their math was wrong, and the reaction was: 'I hate you'

Lemmy Directory @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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A Valve engineer fixed 3D lighting so hard he had to tell all the graphics card manufacturers their math was wrong, and the reaction was: 'I hate you'

www.pcgamer.com /games/fps/a-valve-engineer-fixed-3d-lighting-so-hard-he-had-to-tell-all-the-graphics-card-manufacturers-their-math-was-wrong-and-the-reaction-was-i-hate-you/

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A Valve engineer fixed 3D lighting so hard he had to tell all the graphics card manufacturers their math was wrong, and the reaction was: 'I hate you'

www.pcgamer.com /games/fps/a-valve-engineer-fixed-3d-lighting-so-hard-he-had-to-tell-all-the-graphics-card-manufacturers-their-math-was-wrong-and-the-reaction-was-i-hate-you/

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Now, can we fix flashlights in games such that we don't get a well defined circle of lit area surrounded by completely a black environment? Light doesn't work that way, it bounces and scatters, meaning that a room with a light in it should almost never be completely dark. I always end up ignoring the "adjust the gamma until some wiggle is just visible" setup pages and just blow the gamma out until I can actually see a reasonable amount in the dark areas.
Yes, really dark places should be really dark. But, once you add a light to the situation, they should be a lot less dark.
- Now, can we fix flashlights in games such that we don’t get a well defined circle of lit area surrounded by completely a black environment?
  Sure, we can do that, but we won't because of the narrative and functional in-game purpose of the flashlight. It's not meant to be realistic, it's meant to make the game feel a specific way.
  
  It's also why a flashlight may be able to run for dozens of hours straight on a single battery but in video games it'll die in minutes if not seconds. Realism is unfair. Also the same reason why nuclear reactors in video games are always dangerous. Because representing them realistically would be boring to the average adrenaline junkie "gamer".
  
  We are now in the age of the continuous flashlight (though Subnautica has operational long-running, replaceable batteries). L4D in 2007 had permanent flashlights that worked pretty well and felt right.
  
  Feels unnecessarily hyperbolic to call the average gamer an "adrenaline junkie". Games need gameplay and fixing things that aren't working, be it a dying flashlight or an erupting reactor, is easy and extensible gameplay.
  
  I think you read that wrong. It is not that the average gamer is an adrenaline junky. The person takes a subgroup of gamers, the "adrenaline junkys", and from that subgroup the average is meant.
  
  The discussion was of a common trope in video games, the person I replied to referenced an unspecific element in video game storytelling, and you expect the primary understanding of the subsequent label to be talking to a sub-section of a sub-section of all gamers?
  Either you are reading a far too charitable (and unrealistic) interpretation of the previous comment, or the original comment needs signficant revision.
  Even if we take your reading as valid, how would the attention span of a minor fraction of all gamers move the needle, in terms of game design, enough to bring about the tropes previously discussed?
- You just described ray tracing. The problem is, it's incredibly computationally expensive. That's why DLSS and FSR were created to try and make up for the slow framerates.
  
  there’s more to dynamic global illumination than just ray tracing
  
  Not in an ideal world. Ray tracing is how light actually works in real life. Everything we do with global illumination right now is a compromised workaround, since doing a lifelike amount of ray tracing in real time, at reasonable framerates, is still to much for our hardware.
  
  Nothing about 3D animation is ideal. It's all about reasonable approximations. Needing to build better GPUs to support tracing individual photons is insane when you could just slightly increase ambient lighting in the area of a light source.
  
  The current flashlight implementation is a reasonable approximation, when the rest of the map is properly lit with very dim light.
  
  I've seen an awesome "kludge" method where, instead of simulating billions of photons bouncing in billions of directions off every surface in the entire world, they are taking extremely low resolution cube map snapshots from the perspective of surfaces on a "one per square(area)" basis once every couple frames and blending between them over distance to inform the diffuse lighting of a scene as if it were ambient light mapping rather than direct light. Which is cool because not only can it represent the brightness of emissive textures, but it also makes it less necessary to manually fill scenes with manually placed key lights, fill lights, and backlights.
  
  I am not educated enough to understand this comment
  
  Light probes, but they don't update well, because you have to render the world from their point of view frequently, so they're not suited for dynamic environments
  
  They don't need to update well; they're a compromise to achieve slightly more reactive lighting than 'baked' ambient lights. Perhaps one could describe it as 'parbaked'. Only the ones directly affected by changes of scene conditions need to be updated, and some tentative precalculations for "likely" changes can be tackled in advance while pre-established probes contribute no additional process load because they aren't being updated unless, as previously stated, something acts on them. IF direct light changes and "sticks" long enough to affect the probes, any perceived 'lag' in the light changes will be glossed over by the player's brain as "oh, my characters' eyes are adjusting, neat how they accommodated for that."--even though it's not actually intentional but rather a drawback of the technology's limitations.
- Shouldnt ray tracing fix that?
  
  Yes, but it's exponentially expensive compared to cheating.
  
  Well they built entire video cards series to address that, I hope they were worth it.
  
  We haven't had decent GPU pricing since we started ramming that onto cards, although I will openly admit we've also had a lifetime of wacky fucking shit go on since then.
  
  and it’s still incredibly computationally expensive
  
  yes and no, ray tracing still requires decisions about fidelity, the same poor decisions can be made in either rendering system
- That's exactly the sort of thing his work improved. He figured out that graphics hardware assumed all lighting intensities were linear when in fact it scaled dramatically as the RGB value increased.
  Example: Red value is 128 out of 255 should be 50% of the maximum brightness, that's what the graphics cards and likely the programmers assumed, but the actual output was 22% brightness.
  So you would have areas that were extremely bright immediately cut off into areas that were extremely dark.
- Unreal Engine 5.5 Lumen supposedly does it well with the light scattering.

95 comments