Map-Size ?

Urgh... Kinda wanted to stay out of the off-topicness here, but since everyone keeps going on about raytracing, let me explain why this would not be possible for a game in this era...
As I study game design at college, I've worked on a real time pathtracing game(called "It's about time") for a few months last year... I believe raytracing is probably more demanding than pathtracing, but let's just say it's about the same... Even pathtracing is WAY too demanding for regular computers, hardly any of us would be able to run a simple game at 1080p without lag, perhaps the developers would since they seem to have really high end computers, but that's probably about it.

Yes, with raytracing engines you can throw basically as many polygons on screen as you want(I think we had a limit of a few million on that game), and you won't get more lag. And yes you can basically make every single material in the map a mirror, and it won't hurt your FPS, or hardly at all...

The only thing that would severly increase lag in a raytracing engine is the resolution and the lightbounces. If you double the resolution in a raytracing engine the computer will actually have to render four times the amount that it previously would. In a normal game resolution will still increase lag not nearly as much as in a raytracing engine.
Apart from that, real time raytracing on a regular computer generates a massive ammount of noise on-screen, since you can't put the light-bounces up and since you'd be running at low resolution.

The engine also didn't support alphas or specular maps, which means trees had to be modelled using individual leaves made up of several polygons.

Basically, when we made our game at school we were running it on a slightly outdated though high end PC, using more than one, iirc, octacore processor, 2 overclocked GTX470s and I believe about 32gb of RAM or something crazy like that. We would usually run it at a reasonably low resolution with the game adapting between 1, 2 and 3 lightbounces enabled to maintain the FPS between 15-20-ish.

As I'm writing this I'm looking up some info on more recent GPUs, and our teacher who developed our engine(called Brigade, by Jacco Bikker) says even with a GTX580 or 6xx, you would most likely need 2 to run these engines properly... Now I know most of us here probably have PCs worth at least a thousand euros/dollars, so perhaps there are some people here who have multiple 580s or even 6XXs, but that's probably 10% of the people the devs are aiming at... Even though I can currently run pretty much any game out there at a steady 60fps, I'm pretty sure my PC wouldn't run that pathtracing game fluently at high resolution.


That's just with a game with hardly any physics involved and not really amazing textures. Imagine how that Cryengine3 map would work? With literally a few hundred trees, all modelled from individual leaves? Not gonna run well is it? Oh, now let's also add the BeamNG physics to that... Yeah, perhaps if you combine several PCs all worth over 2000 dollars it could run smoothly, but that's probably about it. Good luck trying to use an i5 with a single gtx560 and 6gb of ram.

I doubt having massive maps is worth having 15fps constantly...

Apart from that, even though lightning is supposedly very realistic in raytracing and pathtracing engines... The noise it creates is just horridly ugly in my opinion.

CE3 or Unreal are probably the most realistic in graphics we have in this era of games. Only downside I've seen with CE3 is that it doesn't properly support reflections on dynamic objects, but I think we can all live with that...

 

*clap* I went to a collage (texastech) with my scout troop and I went to a 3-D modeling class and we were aloud to use ray tracing to sim light on multiple configurations. For example we would model something and see how long it would take to render. I took a pre-made animation of a fuzzy flower and "rendered" it with ray tracing at 10,000 x 10,000. On my specs (quad i7 w/ 1 5770 and medium ram.(dont remember)) it would take over 5 days straight. Not good for me.+ physics, my computer would die.

 

Ugh, my ray tracing comment ruined the thread. Sorry everyone!

 

Okay to keep the thread on-topic.. lol.

Map sizes in Cryengine can be spectacularly big, pretty much an island equivalent to the size of say Fiji or bigger. Actually probably a lot bigger.


I've messed around with map sizes while designing my own for Crysis and Crysis 2. I made a huge island covered in so much vegetation, but I had a problem with LOD view distances where for some reason super far away vegetation always disappeared no matter what value I entered.
Point of the matter is, trust me you'll be able to design entire cities and probably small continents too if you have enough time and dedication.

Not sure about BeamNG's game though, depends how they implement it but I'm sure map design will still be done in Sandbox Editor or something. Well I hope so.

As for ray tracing.. Yes it is extremely computationally expensive, rendering one frame from one of my scenes takes about 20 seconds per frame (i7 2600 4GHz). That's without Physics or animation of any kind.
There are real-time alternatives but they sacrifice a lot of quality for speed.