|
||||||||||||||
XL2 Demonstrates Raytracing on the SaturnRaytracing isn’t just for modern video cards, apparently — homebrew developer XL2 is making it happen on the 31-year-old Sega Saturn. Raytracing is a technique for simulating the way light bounces around a room. It’s used to light a room dynamically and realistically. XL2 uploaded a YouTube video today showing off raytracing on the Saturn. In the video, a light source causes objects in a room to cast shadows on the walls. The shadows are rendered in real time and change in real time when the light source’s position changes. “The function is pretty simple and could be optimized further: I simply test all the vertices using the BSP,” XL2 says in the video description — BSP stands for Binary Space Partitioning, a method of rendering 3D environments that efficiently gives spatial information about the objects in a scene, such as objects being ordered from front-to-back with respect to a viewer at a given location. “The light source is, for this test, simply the position of the last active dynamic light source (so pretty much the point of impact of the dispersion pistol),” he continues. “The raytracing doesn’t affect the entities yet, but that part should be super easy (a simple ray to test if they are affected or not). “The room you see has no static light, but the raytracing could be used for adding dynamic raytraced lights on top of the static light sources. I only update 1/4 the vertices per frame. When a vertex fails the test, I smoothly darken it back to 0. When it passes, it goes full bright right away. I don’t do any fancy tests right now for the light (like using the surface’s normal or the light’s distance), so it could look better with a bit more maths.” He uploaded shorter clips to the SHIRO! and SegaXtreme Discord servers earlier in the day. And yesterday, he first revealed what he was working on with a screenshot in the SegaXtreme Discord, saying, “A bit uselesss, but I got realtime raytracing shadow rendering working on the Saturn.”  XL2 is well known for his technically impressive homebrew games Sonic Z-Treme , HellSlave and Irréal — a recreation of the first couple levels of Unreal. He hasn’t published a project since Irréal in December 2022 but in recent years has helped another homebrew developer, Frogbull, with his projects . Other developers have shown off impressive technical feats for the Saturn, like Hassmaschine demonstrating normal mapping in 2024. It’s unknown whether XL2 plans to use raytracing for a new game or update one of his older ones with it.
|
||||||||||||||
