My intent of my post was to find out if anyone else was interested in adding ray tracing to the Dolphin Emulator or if it was just me (I had searched throughout the site and was surprised that the topic of ray-tracing specifically hadn't even been mentioned).
Dolphin is very sophisticated at this point, and I was just thinking about what The Big Plan for Dolphin is.
Let's theorize that in the near future, Dolphin is revised so that the compatibility rating for each GameCube/Wii game is 100%.
So does Dolphin then have its final release, or is there something else that can be done?
Since there are already features (such as higher resolution support, per-pixel lighting, free camera movement, etcetera) of Dolphin that enable you to play GameCube and Wii games in a way that surpasses the limits of those systems, I just wanted to see if anyone else was interested in adding one more feature that the GameCube/Wii didn't have.
GameCube is a great console but it does have limitations (as does everything); one was displaying of shadows. In Super Mario Sunshine, some shadows are actually just dark circles drawn beneath an object. I thought adding Global Illumination would make it look better.
Addressing what others wrote about how a scene can look great with rasterization and be drawn much faster than with raytracing, I agree. In my ignorance, though, I just don't know what is planned for Dolphin for the future to make games look even better. For example, I could building myself a quad-SLI system so that I could play Dolphin games with 128x antialiasing (I hate jaggies!), but is there anything planned for Dolphin software to make it look better in some other way? For example, could a tessellation or geometry shader be added, to take existing vertices and normals and create even more geometry (in Mario Kart Double Dash, there is a Chomp-Chomp which is mostly just a sphere; with a geometry shader, the Chomp-Chomp could be rendered with more vertices so it'll appear rounder, and with lighting, it'll look more realistic; the Chomp-Chomp is just an example--this technique could be universally applied to every object in every GameCube/Wii game). Another example is the GameCube's bumpmap support--could Dolphin take bumpmaps and create the geometry that the bumpmap is attempting to mimic (that way it looks correct from any viewing angle)?
Dolphin is awesome and I just wanted to share my ideas of how I think Dolphin could be made to be even better.
(I've only thought of a few ideas--I'm sure that everybody has a few ideas of how to make Dolphin better; maybe there should just be a forum dedicated to suggestions/ideas for future versions).
Here's one of my more ambitious ideas that would require a ridiculous amount of effort for very little payout (so don't try this anytime soon unless you really want to challenge yourself). In some GameCube/Wii games, there's a "demo" of its gameplay (like after the title screen, if you don't press any buttons). Sometimes instead of displaying graphics that's rendered on-the-fly, it displays a pre-recordered video file (perhaps out of concern that it plays exactly the same each time). When you play a GameCube game on a high-resolution display, the movie is upscaled to match the display's resolution; of course, this doesn't look anywhere near as good as if the scene was rendered natively at the higher-resolution. So Dolphin could have a feature that tries to recreate that scene using the game's geometric objects. To make it easier, the user can play the game normally and "click" on the screen where a relevant object is currently being displayed. Then Dolphin could do its best to try to "fit" the object in the scene. Eventually, every object would be found, transformed, and lit appropriately to match the movie, and it would be rendered on-the-fly at the display's native resolution.
Another idea is to have 3-D printer support (which I haven't worked with myself), so you can print out the various ships in F-Zero GX, for example. I wouldn't use this feature any time soon (since I don't have a 3-D printer), but in the distant future I might (so it could be on the list of things to to after every game has a 100% compatibility rating).
Dolphin is very sophisticated at this point, and I was just thinking about what The Big Plan for Dolphin is.
Let's theorize that in the near future, Dolphin is revised so that the compatibility rating for each GameCube/Wii game is 100%.
So does Dolphin then have its final release, or is there something else that can be done?
Since there are already features (such as higher resolution support, per-pixel lighting, free camera movement, etcetera) of Dolphin that enable you to play GameCube and Wii games in a way that surpasses the limits of those systems, I just wanted to see if anyone else was interested in adding one more feature that the GameCube/Wii didn't have.
GameCube is a great console but it does have limitations (as does everything); one was displaying of shadows. In Super Mario Sunshine, some shadows are actually just dark circles drawn beneath an object. I thought adding Global Illumination would make it look better.
Addressing what others wrote about how a scene can look great with rasterization and be drawn much faster than with raytracing, I agree. In my ignorance, though, I just don't know what is planned for Dolphin for the future to make games look even better. For example, I could building myself a quad-SLI system so that I could play Dolphin games with 128x antialiasing (I hate jaggies!), but is there anything planned for Dolphin software to make it look better in some other way? For example, could a tessellation or geometry shader be added, to take existing vertices and normals and create even more geometry (in Mario Kart Double Dash, there is a Chomp-Chomp which is mostly just a sphere; with a geometry shader, the Chomp-Chomp could be rendered with more vertices so it'll appear rounder, and with lighting, it'll look more realistic; the Chomp-Chomp is just an example--this technique could be universally applied to every object in every GameCube/Wii game). Another example is the GameCube's bumpmap support--could Dolphin take bumpmaps and create the geometry that the bumpmap is attempting to mimic (that way it looks correct from any viewing angle)?
Dolphin is awesome and I just wanted to share my ideas of how I think Dolphin could be made to be even better.
(I've only thought of a few ideas--I'm sure that everybody has a few ideas of how to make Dolphin better; maybe there should just be a forum dedicated to suggestions/ideas for future versions).
Here's one of my more ambitious ideas that would require a ridiculous amount of effort for very little payout (so don't try this anytime soon unless you really want to challenge yourself). In some GameCube/Wii games, there's a "demo" of its gameplay (like after the title screen, if you don't press any buttons). Sometimes instead of displaying graphics that's rendered on-the-fly, it displays a pre-recordered video file (perhaps out of concern that it plays exactly the same each time). When you play a GameCube game on a high-resolution display, the movie is upscaled to match the display's resolution; of course, this doesn't look anywhere near as good as if the scene was rendered natively at the higher-resolution. So Dolphin could have a feature that tries to recreate that scene using the game's geometric objects. To make it easier, the user can play the game normally and "click" on the screen where a relevant object is currently being displayed. Then Dolphin could do its best to try to "fit" the object in the scene. Eventually, every object would be found, transformed, and lit appropriately to match the movie, and it would be rendered on-the-fly at the display's native resolution.
Another idea is to have 3-D printer support (which I haven't worked with myself), so you can print out the various ships in F-Zero GX, for example. I wouldn't use this feature any time soon (since I don't have a 3-D printer), but in the distant future I might (so it could be on the list of things to to after every game has a 100% compatibility rating).