/vr/ - Retro Games

So didn't he notice he had extremely useful mind control powers until the very moment he decided to escape?

>>8285546
It WAS ray tracing; the key concept though is the level of sophistication involved. Ray tracing at that time didn't include an implementation for indirect lighting (or "global illumination"), which was the major breakthrough in realism that didn't really begin proper until the 2000s. The rays basically stopped where they hit something without resulting in follow-through complex bouncing (to a massive computational cost). Stuff like mirror/reflecting surfaces were exceptions that involved increased computational cost as well.

Back then, if you had a big bright red ball on a concrete floor in your direct-sunlit scene and you wanted red bounced light bleeding into the concrete as would happen in the real world, then you manually set up a small red point light in the ball's position that achieved this job. That's what I meant with "handcrafted" lighting.

Rasterization-based methods (i.e. what you use if you don't do raytracing, like in videogames until now) evolved at the same time, with increasingly sophisticated ways to quickly fake photorealism and complex shading that used to be exclusive to ray tracing: bounce lighting, reflections, ambient occlusion, depth of field, etc.

Long winded explanation but the bottom line is: what could be achieved with ray tracing in the late 90s can be almost perfectly mimicked now with rasterization workarounds. In fact, you need to AVOID lots of the available features in order to actually get the look right.