Hi there, Ray Tracing will greatly improve visuals and I highly recommend it. Are there any plans for adding it to Empyrion? Cheers.
Ray Tracing?.... Let them fix first the big and numerous bugs that the game have dude - The game is unable even to detect obstacles when the AI is firing at you - The AI is... err... not existent? - There are problems with the signaling / sensors - There are problems with the ships persistence, even across the same game session / map, either visually or real object persistence - There are problems with the painting tool and copy / paste depending on your language settings - The ships movement is not physicaly realistic. A CV moves the same as a SV - There are no traces of realistic accelerated movement - The dedicated server cannot be configured to listen in a specific IP And I am sure that I forgot a lot more.
Th Empyrion is officially a stable version. AI is a major flaw for a long time now and I doubt that'll change ever.
Ok, so AI will not be enhanced, and what about all other bugs that I listed there? And these are not all of them. If they say that it is stable, because the game consistently is showing the same bugs, in the same situations, then I agree, the game bugs itself in stable way. Don't get me wrong, It would be fantastic getting Ray Tracing support, among much more features, but I think that the bug fixing should to have the higher priority.
Empyrion is in huge lack of development. By the time they fix bugs the game will be in the shadow of Next Gens. RTX is still fresh and not presented in many games. This can be their way to stand out and attract new customer base. The more customers - the more money.
Latest generation of graphics cards: NVIDIA: RTX Series AMD: RDNA2 cards NAVI21, 22 and 23 Intel: Intel Xe series And a processor with the power to feed them
Well I looked up the Requirements given for Ray Tracing under the UNITY-Game-Engine. I found only Software Requirements therefore I asked. Your Info's tell me that a portion of the Community will not be able to handle Ray Tracing as there Rigs are of older Types and would require a sever Hardware upgrade.
"Ray Tracing" is not meant for games but for high fidelity/ high resolution simulations, usually for commercial purposes, and certainly not for gaming and large environment. Games use "fake" ray tracing when the environment is static, and the "lighting" is "baked" onto objects, like high resolution shadows. Then on top of that, depending on the game engine and user chosen level of details, some additional "shadow details" and dynamic lighting are cast over the environment and some objects. From the Unity site : The DX12/DXR API in the HDRP package targets applications for the engineering, architecture, and automotive industries. Download our sample office project from GitHub to get started. So Ray Tracing is ok if the scene is only one object or a fixed environment, but completely inappropriate for gaming, in a "classical" game environment. But Empyrion is anything but a "classical environment" : the terrain can be changed real-time by players and explosions, the playfields are very big (not a stage with a nice detailed car), and there are ships carrying lots of lights around, and a complex voxel system for terrain and constructs that is already taking lots of resources from systems to be rendered without problems. So forget about "ray tracing" as even for less demanding games it is not even an option, apart from very small and specific applications. The next Unreal Engine, which is way more advanced than Unity, can only boast of a new type of "simulated" ray tracing that is a fancy mock-up of genuine ray tracing for gaming purposes, and then again not for games like Empyrion given its characteristics.
Ray tracing is optional. It can be turned OFF and ON. It makes visuals really pop out. It means there won't be any additional System Requirements. It literally transforms the game and it's incredible. Quake 2 is a good example of it. I see you're very active here and I assume you're one of the Empyrion Devs. You should consider this option with your team and see if it is possible adding it. You either make trends or follow them. That's how everything works.
No. Sorry. Not a Dev. I am only a interested Player who try's to understand the point for the 'request'.
Quake 2 is a very good example of what "raytracing" is not. If you would care to learn what raytracing is, and what you are instead asking for ( nVidia RTX) then you would understand that this is never going to be an option in Empyrion, as it would require re-coding the whole game just for RTX, and require all users to buy a specific cla$$ of nVidia cards. https://www.fullexposure.photography/nvidia-turing-rtx-raytracing-explained/ .
Empyrion Galactic Survival, the game that is known for light glitching through every gap it can - but now with Raytracing! At some point Raytracing might have a place in EGS but as of now it does not imo. Other problems first, maybe a few years down the line. And bringing Raytracing to EGS would help the game less than fixing those other problems.