I've seen alot of new games use ray tracing limited extent on and full path tracing would melt graphics cards on modern games at the moment but I've seen old looking games that can handle pathtracing fine on new good hardware like minecraft and quake 2 and it should be used in alot more older because it can make 10 and even 20 year old game look incredible, my question is would you guys be implementing it once you hit 1.0? because it future proof the game graphics along with all the texture mods people make for it
The games that tend to cope well with proper path tracing are ones that have some limits on the scene layout that make it cheaper. For example, Quake and the old Doom games were kind of 2D with extras rather than 3D like a modern game is, and Minecraft is all cubes. These properties mean you can skip a lot of rays immediately. Morrowind, while being early, is basically a modern 3D game with all the extra problems that entails, and also a lot fewer restrictions on things that make rendering slow as they didn't make much difference when people with top-end GPUs were happy with a twenty-foot viewing distance. That means in many ways it's actually more complicated to path trace than a recent AAA game. I wouldn't hold out hope for path-traced Morrowind before you get path-traced AAA games.
This is something many people have a hard time with grasping. Morrowind's assets are horribly unoptimised and OpenMW has to do a lot of extra work that most modern AAA game engines do not even bother with because they put limits on the assets.
It's a reason why some games have 50GiB of assets, mostly because they have the same texture and mesh but with varying degrees of detail.
We don't have that luxury, at all, as Morrowind just gives you one and many 4K mods also only have one. We have to do all of that conversion on-the-fly which is very CPU and GPU extensive.
That doesn't mean OpenMW itself can't be just as good as a AAA game engine, I would bet that in its current state, it would kick some serious butt here... but that would require people/modders to make assets the modern way.
What are our real options for 3d asset conversion from other open source/free engines? I briefly looked into this but was left scratching my head... how do the new/proposed formats/standards factor into this?
vk1970 wrote: ↑13 Mar 2021, 18:34
What are our real options for 3d asset conversion from other open source/free engines? I briefly looked into this but was left scratching my head... how do the new/proposed formats/standards factor into this?
Consider the size and scope of the Skywind team + how much time it's taking them for a rough idea. It's not a trivial task. Sill, I would just do what I can, bit by bit.
psi29a wrote: ↑12 Mar 2021, 12:07
We don't have that luxury, at all, as Morrowind just gives you one and many 4K mods also only have one. We have to do all of that conversion on-the-fly which is very CPU and GPU extensive...
...and easy to cache once computed. It could be even pre-computed once before starting the game.
psi29a wrote: ↑12 Mar 2021, 12:07
We don't have that luxury, at all, as Morrowind just gives you one and many 4K mods also only have one. We have to do all of that conversion on-the-fly which is very CPU and GPU extensive...
...and easy to cache once computed. It could be even pre-computed once before starting the game.
Sure, just not on the fly without someone complaining that FPS sucks because your CPU is busy creating that cached object. Then you get into cache invalidation every time someone loads or unloads a mod, repeat process. Doing it all offline before OpenMW starts is also an option, but then you lose out on user-friendly-ness. Try to strike a balance. However you still get a programmatically done version that will suck in comparison having an artist/content creator do it themselves.
psi29a wrote: ↑02 Apr 2021, 09:46
Sure, just not on the fly without someone complaining that FPS sucks because your CPU is busy creating that cached object. Then you get into cache invalidation every time someone loads or unloads a mod, repeat process. Doing it all offline before OpenMW starts is also an option, but then you lose out on user-friendly-ness. Try to strike a balance. However you still get a programmatically done version that will suck in comparison having an artist/content creator do it themselves.
Modern cpus have plenty of cores to spare for those who would like to opt in for such a feature. I also see no need to invalidate the whole cache when loading new mods because we can simply match the checksums and just generate the missing textures.
Having many cores doesn't alleviate the amount of work needed to be done. Your initial FPS is going to tank, especially so if you're unlucky and your OS schedules that thread on the same core that the draw thread is on. There is a reason why modern games do as much as possible before hand so that the game doesn't need to bother with doing any of this in-game.
Cache invalidation is going to be a thing depending on what your mod touches and dependency chain, always consider your worst case scenario.
Just things to consider, especially for any would be contributor that would want to work on this.
Full path tracing option in the future or after 1.0?
but I've seen old looking games that can handle pathtracing fine on new good hardware like minecraft and quake 2 and it should be used in alot more older because it can make 10 and even 20 year old game look incredible, my question is would you guys be implementing it once you hit 1.0? because it future proof the game graphics along with all the texture mods people make for it 
