Quote Originally Posted by iddqd View Post
Well, you could still have all your shader tricks. Some would probably have to be modified - and some will be replaced completely in a raytraced world (for example, HDR/bloom) but yeah.

Actually, the shader bag of tricks keeps growing over the years. I think very soon, you're going to be able to do just about anything with shaders, and not even have to worry about raytracing anymore.

At any rate, raytracing isn't that important. I think fully destructible environments would be more fun.
The thing about raytracing is that all these complicated and stunning effects just drop right out of the bad so to speak. Raytracing is so elegently simply its incredible, all the complicated shaders and reflections and refractions and various other effects come for "free" or with minimal extra coding. Because reaytracing describes how the light really works (sorta) all you have to do is model some basic equations and suddenly you get amazing results. I don't know if anyone here has ever written a raytracing engine before, but I wrote one for my computer graphics class (and i'm a EE not a CS major), and its really quite simple, obviously results were not amazing or anything (niether was efficiency), but I was able to get several object types (spheres, cubes, and triagnles(which could easily be used to make complex meshes)), but also reflection and refraction rays, shadow rays, bump maps, procedural textures etc. It really is dead simple how it works, the problem is just that the current way of hacking everything together is more efficent (but far less elegent and less accurate as well). I'm not saying raytracing will win out anytime soon, but the only thing holding it back is processor power, it beats what we have now in everything but framerates.