I thought you were saying they should focus on ray tracing instead of the Vulkan renderer. Saying they should build a vulkan renderer and a ray tracing renderer is a much different statement than what I was understanding, and sounds like a lot to ask for.
Additionally there's a ton of risk in betting on full ray tracing in several years. Given that they are a small team with a small community and small funding, they simply have to hedge there bets, and myself as a user am damn glad they are. Unity going guns blazing on new shit and having things be broken all the time is a huge reason why I switched to Godot in the first place.
A nice thing about godot is that it's code base is very easy to get your hands in to, so if Juan wants to focus on the big stable market with the raster renderer, the community can work on a ray tracing renderer. Juan is exposing an api called RenderingDevice in 4.0 that should enable the community to write their own renderers easier than from scratch.
> Saying they should build a vulkan renderer and a ray tracing renderer is a much different statement than what I was understanding
Raytracing is an extension on Vulkan. I don't understand what you are trying to say. I am not talking about CPU raytracers.
> Additionally there's a ton of risk in betting on full ray tracing in several years.
They are not commercial, so the risk is minimal. That is why Godot is such a good place for that.
> Unity going guns blazing on new shit and having things be broken all the time is a huge reason why I switched to Godot in the first place.
That is true and it is why most games avoid updating Unity if possible. But I feel if Godot had so many features, it would have the same problem too (or worse, given less manpower).
> the community can work on a ray tracing renderer
Juan is the one with financial support. Most people cannot afford to take on a research-heavy, multi-year project on their own.
Nevertheless, RenderingDevice sounds great for research projects and academia!
Not technically wrong, but an incomplete picture. The way that engine renderers are organized right now does not lend them well to raytracing. The Vulkan extension we're talking about requires you to set up completely separate pipelines, use different kinds of dispatches, and different shaders. Very little is compatible, and most "ray-traced" are bodged in there in a weird way -- they're mostly used for single-bounce specular AA, as we only have a very small ray budget.
I was pointing that out because the other user seemed to think I was talking about a non-accelerated renderer. However, to access RT hardware and compute capabilities you need Vulkan nevertheless (or the non-portable ways that I guess Godot wants to avoid).
My original post was precisely about focusing on such a full RT renderer (via Vulkan). I am not an expert, so it may be a dumb idea, but it would be nice to have a FOSS production-quality renderer by the time full RT becomes a thing for more and more games.
Betting your project development on something that might pay of in the future is not minimal risk, both for the project and for the people being financially supported to work on.
I thought you were saying they should focus on ray tracing instead of the Vulkan renderer. Saying they should build a vulkan renderer and a ray tracing renderer is a much different statement than what I was understanding, and sounds like a lot to ask for.
Additionally there's a ton of risk in betting on full ray tracing in several years. Given that they are a small team with a small community and small funding, they simply have to hedge there bets, and myself as a user am damn glad they are. Unity going guns blazing on new shit and having things be broken all the time is a huge reason why I switched to Godot in the first place.
A nice thing about godot is that it's code base is very easy to get your hands in to, so if Juan wants to focus on the big stable market with the raster renderer, the community can work on a ray tracing renderer. Juan is exposing an api called RenderingDevice in 4.0 that should enable the community to write their own renderers easier than from scratch.