I recently stumbled across some old posts that talked about whether raytracing could be added in the future. To me it seems like it would be an objective improvement to the visuals but a lot of replies to these posts weren't so sure, and others that pointed to reshade as already having RT and were under the impression that there wouldn't be any point (reshade isnt true RT). As a result of reading these posts I thought I'd make an example of the difference RT reflections could make if it was officially implemented. While the following images are all created in a raytraced renderer for the sake of comparison, I've disabled RT reflections and enabled them again to show the difference they can make. The reflections in the 'off' images are only of the environment (which is how reflections in beamng currently work). The other images reflects the environment AND the car which is what raytraced reflections would allow for. RT Reflections Off RT Reflections On RT Reflections Off RT Reflections On There's still a question as to whether RT reflections would be worth the dev time, but I hope I've helped anyone who stumbles across this post understand what the difference could be.
I used the ray traced renderer in blender but disabled and enabled the ray traced reflections. Technically the entire image is still ray traced in both images, the shadows, bounce lighting etc. The reflections are all that change
I don't know if your strictly supposed to, but the car model and textures are all there in the game files in formats blender can read. I think the models just need to be imported as a .dae
I don't think it's worth it yet, graphics engine is pretty old and probably doesn't support RT, so development would take a lot longer. barely anyone has a card that is capable of RT and the low end RT capable cards aren't very good, especially without DLSS or FSR which the game doesn't have.
Ive got an rtx 2060s which is pretty low end for an rt card and you'd be surprised at what it can do. Rt makes a bigger difference than most ultra settings or 4k so I usually run a lot of games at high 1440p RT at about 60fps. I can even run forza horizon 5 at a full 60fps at maxed settings 1440p with a mod that enables rt during gameplay, all on a 2060s. You'd be surprised what it's capable of. Oh, and if your not using rt reflections on any rough surfaces (possibly on a medium rt setting?) it's basically the fastest form of raytracing possible as you don't need more than 1 ray and 1 bounce per pixel
Forza only raytraces shadows i believe. so it isn't that impressive. plus it's a well optimized game compared to BeamNG.drive.
Would take a crap ton of time for the devs to implement, and the game already has optimization issues. Ray tracing would absolutely sink performance. And yes, it would be togglable, but everyone would expect a good framerate with it on. The game is already pretty damn good-looking with PBR, we really don't need this. It would be neat but there are higher priorities.
Forza raytraces reflections, although only the reflections of the car on the car, the environment falls back to a cubemap --- Post updated --- of course, I'm not suggesting raytracing is the most important feature, but I wouldn't underestimate how well raytracing can perform on modern hardware. The way I see it in a car game where youve got a big reflective box in the middle of your screen at all times, making sure the reflective box is reflecting properly is pretty important to the visuals. Honest question, has there actually been any info that suggests raytracing is a difficult thing to implement? anything in game dev is hard, Im not suggesting RT would be easy, but there are comments exactly like yours on almost any post that brings up RT and it always makes me wonder how difficult it actually is. Surely if anything it would be easier than most graphical features as the core concept of RT is pretty simple, its just historically been pretty slow. Certainly everything I've seen suggests that its easier to work with than the alternatives rather than the other way around
I guess it mostly depends if Torque3D supports RT or not, even if it didn't the devs could probably implement it but it would take a lot of work. They said almost no code was left untouched from torque though.
