Star Citizen developer calls ray tracing "a massive headache"

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Over on the friendly Star Citizen forums, a player of the space sim asked, "Do you, as I, believe that RTX tech will save you devs so much work farther along and look absolutely spanking?"

Ray tracing is the tech everyone's talking about, whether it's Nvidia planning to literally write the book on it or Battlefield 5 players trying to figure out if they can even see it. Meanwhile, if you want to see how it looks in Metro Exodus, here you go.

Cloud Imperium developer Ben Parry initially responded to the question in the negative. "Not in the slightest", he wrote. "I expect, if we use it, it'll be a massive headache and time-sink but might give us some subtle improvements in looks or performance if we get it right."

He followed up by clarifying exactly what he means by headache: "The added headache is that whatever we offered would have to be an "as well" feature rather than an "instead", developing a feature for a single manufacturer's top-end cards means also maintaining feature parity for everyone else's hardware.

"Personally I'd like to use it to make the shadows crispier."

There you have it. On the of chance ray tracing does get added to Star Citizen it'll slow down development even more, and the improvements will be slight.

Replies • 30

Lunar

nice game? i dont think so .. $100 million down the drain with nothing to show but the proof of concept.. this game is 3 years overdue and noone even knows if it will ever see the light of day...

 

the biggest flop in the history of video games


Lunar

Few people understand that the development of a quality video game takes at least 5 years of development and a game with MMORPG features this time doubles being 7 to 10 years of development to have a product that offers quality if you add to all this that has THE BEST QUALITY graphic that a PC Gamer can show the times are complicated

The companies have a way to reduce the time and is adding more funds to the project, one example of the much acclaimed GTA 500,000,000 $ another example Destiny 400,000,000 $ none of these 2 games are full online and none of these projects were best in graphics of the moment

Criticizing is easy from ignorance

If you pay attention to the article the same developer tells you clearly include Ray-Tracing would only further delay the project

Personally the comment of a well-known developer I love: Coming when it’s ready

CD Proyekt Red start proyect 2012 Cyberpunk 2077 .......................Coming when it’s ready


Planetary

At this rate by the time this game is even close to early beta stage, all the tech would be outdated, and would need to be redeveloped.  And yeah, I know, this game IS being actively developed, and yeah, scope of what the devs are planning/working on is huge, but still... can't blame folks for being angry or skeptical at this stage.





STALKER was nicknamed "zhdalker" in russian community. Which is derived from the word "waiting". We've waited for it since IDK when, seems the end of 1990's.


Interstellar
CookedPC said:

STALKER was nicknamed "zhdalker" in russian community. Which is derived from the word "waiting". We've waited for it since IDK when, seems the end of 1990's.

STALKER is a good comparison, as it debuted with graphics that seemed too good to be true, and took so long that they were almost sub-par by the time it released. Ray Tracing is the future, we're already seeing huge leaps forwards in quality for games like Metro Exodus. If Star Citizen wants to exclude it they're going to be in the same place as STALKER by the time they finally release.