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There is no explicit geometry, polygons, or GPU acceleration, but raycasting in 3D is certainly 3D.


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it's not raycasting though

Duke Nukem 3D didn't use raycasting, either [0].

0 - http://fabiensanglard.net/duke3d/build_engine_internals.php


Well, raycasting is supposedly trivial to parallelize, right?

Raytracing, not textures.

It's possible that "it does not require ray tracing" means that it does not require extensions like RTX. Perhaps it uses voxel cone tracing, which you may say is technically not ray tracing, but if you called it ray tracing you wouldn't exactly be wrong either.

It's just a simulation with geometry, physics, detailed textures and ray tracing.

Umm ray tracing is still triangles.

Just curious, why do you describe ray casting as a “_pseudo_-3D rendering technique”?

That seems to be ray casting (a la Wolfenstein 3D), not ray tracing.

And this is pure ray tracing without any of the tricks required for real-time ray tracing. You’ll never get something looking quite as good in a game.

To be fair, you are wrong. It is totally a ray tracer, there is the top variable that is the description of the scene and you can hack the positions and see how the scene changes. Also it is proper ray tracing as far as it goes from the point of view of the algorithm used to cast rays, it finds the closest intersection and so forth. The most obvious limitation is just support for a single kind of geometric primitive: the sphere.

Right, it does not seem to be a raycasting algorithm, and the author mentions of it in the youtube comments that it's a "rasterization" meaning perspective projection of textured polygons.

Do you maybe mean "raycasting" as used in Wolfenstein or Doom compared to a proper 3D engine like the Quake games were using?

Could you help us understand how it's not ray casting? OP doesn't mean ray tracing by the way. Ray casting is the tech used in Wolf3D for example, or maybe I'm preaching to the choir.

No, AFAICT it's actually building a representation of a more detailed ray-traced 3D geometry in a way that can be rendered real time from any angle and with realistic lighting

Is it? I thought they rendered everything with ray tracing.

It is not using the GPU to do the drawing: https://github.com/hunterloftis/playfuljs/blob/master/conten...

Note that it is using canvas 2d rather than canvas 3d (aka WebGL[1]).

But if you take ray casting to extreme, you end up with Ray Tracing[2], which is kinda expensive. Which is why we had such an effusive conversation a few months ago about hardware accelerated RayTracing[3].

A sample ray traced scene from AlteredQualia[4] (2nd largest[5] contributor to the famous Three.js Library): http://alteredqualia.com/three/examples/raytracer_sandbox_re...

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/WebGL/Getting_s...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_%28graphics%29

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7425303

[4] https://github.com/alteredq

[5] https://github.com/mrdocob/three.js/graphs/contributors


As always, path tracing is not ray tracing.

Nope! It is not a raycasting engine at all, but instead built similar to old school racing game tech.
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