Mario Kart 8 grafix

[lucidium]

ICStats said:

lucidium said:

useless trivia for you, in GT4 each track had several cubemaps based around the track itself that the engine would pop in and out of depending on where the car was located on the track, it was carefully timed and positioned to give minimal jump when switching maps on the back and front window but the side windows sometimes showed off the effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW67x0Sh00M

Video uploader mistakes this for realtime reflections even though it wasnt really, but it does show the jump between cube maps - in addition to these track based cube maps a secondary overlay cubemap was used to reflect track side lights, this was actually psuedo realtime using shaders, but not as accurate as actual realtime reflections, the secondary reflections were used over the entire car.

I thought it was real time.  The disappearing geometry could be due to distance pop-in, no?  They rendered just very near objects - also very simplified geometry compared to the full track.  Lots of cheating to do reflections and shadows on that game...  Anyway that's what I thought, but cool vid from the past .

common misconception because of the almost-realtime lighting effecting the rest of the car, see doing a realtime reflection of 2d surfaces (lights) is nowhere near as costly back in the day as reflecting geometry, so a series of low resolution cube maps were created per track for that purpose.

some areas used hexagonal maps with no upper and lower faces (just the 8 side faces), especially in tunnels or on night tracks where more detail is shown on the horitontal view than vertical, this basically meant it was still a cube map but with the upper and lower faces shifted to be used as side faces.

Average track would have 50 or so 128x64, 64x128, 64x64, 32x32, 64x32, or 32x64 cube maps for the record, 2d light reflection was 256x128 for night tracks (allowed since tracks generally had less geometry and detail, but more light sources), and 128x64 or 128x128 on day tracks depending on track type.

Useless trivia #2, GT4 had the ability to get punctures and blow your engine, complete with spark particles on the bare rim until you pitstopped, it was removed before prologue due to the ps2 not being powerful enough to handle several cars emitting sparks, or smoke particles for blown engines, it never got revisited even for the final version or subsequent games for the PS3.