#Sims 4 ivisible lights series
#Sims 4 ivisible lights mac

#Sims 4 ivisible lights mac

Literally every surface in this tech demo is swimming in flickering shadows, only possible with the new state-of-the-art Geforce 3, implying that all those graphics-loving gamers will definitely buy a Mac now! Notice that Carmack has a somewhat different agenda: he can't stop talking about his 'unified shadows' system and how it will revolutionize video game rendering. Yes, that's pre-dead pre-turtleneck Steve Jobs (!) hosting John Carmack, one of the founding fathers of first person shooters and 3D game rendering. (The awkward silence at 3:13, before the audience realizes they're supposed to applaud, is fucking beautiful? I can't even imagine how ugly and appalling and artless that would've looked to a Japanese audience in Tokyo.) The cult of hard shadows began on February 21, 2001, at the Macworld conference in Tokyo: We worship shadows while praying for something in return. But that also means we want shadows to pull their weight and help sell the game, to justify the work we put into them. Since shadows are so expensive to do, it's impressive when we manage to do it anyway.

(20% of their entire game! just for shadows!) To give you an idea of how much we sacrifice to shadows, Crytek said in a 2013 SIGGRAPH talk that they offer ~20% of their frame budget (5-7 FPS out of 30 FPS) to the shadows. If these rays hit anything (see diagram above) then that means the light casts shadows past that object. To calculate a shadow in a video game, we must test-fire many light rays out from the light source. One of the most 'expensive' (computer-intensive) parts of 3D video games is rendering shadows.

It might seem annoying to fuss over many details all the time, but this bespoke workflow exists because we need so much control to make sure the lighting calculations doesn't slow our game's framerate. Last time (part 4), we ended with the idea that video game lighting is a carefully assembled pile of hacks / effects that hopefully seems like a unified phenomenon of light.

#Sims 4 ivisible lights series

This is part of a series about a critical theoretical approach to understanding video game lighting, while staying grounded in technical realities, and not focusing on a specific game engine.