Star Engine Tech Demo (Star Citizen 4.0) No Commentary CitizenCon 2953 4K.Subscribe for all the latest trailers and gameplay: http://goo.gl/8LO96FBecome a me...

Since I haven’t seen anyone post this, I thought I’d share the new Star Engine demo video from Cloud Imperium Games.

I like the person casually walking into the fire at 19:05. I also noticed reflections in the water near the edges of the screen don’t show properly, most noticeably at the end of the video.

Amazing tech demo, but I wonder if they’re focusing on the right things. Physics-based nosebleeds are cool, but not as noticeable as getting reflections right.

I also noticed reflections in the water near the edges of the screen don’t show properly,

It’s called screen-space reflections: Things that aren’t on screen don’t reflect because, well, they’re not rendered. The alternative is either not having reflections, having the “screen” not be a rectangle but the inside of a sphere, or, and that’s even more expensive, raytracing.

It’s a bog-standard technique and generally people don’t notice, which is why it’s good enough. Remember the rule #1 of gamedev: Even if not in doubt, fake it. It’s all smoke and mirrors and you want it like that because the alternative is 1fps.

You can also do overscan, but that’s costly since you’re rendering a bigger picture (I am not a rendering engineer but have experience with offline rendering)

Well yes I was answering under the assumption of “eradicate 100% of artefacts”, and as long as you don’t render all the perspectives there’s always going to be some angle somewhere that you’re missing.

Practically everything in rendering is a terrible hack (including common raytracers as they’re not spectral) but realism is overrated, anyway.

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