Topic: Tech Focus: A thread about the tech, the history and aspects of games and game development...

Ever wanted too know about the various methods developers have used over the years to create realistic lighting or water over the years, wanted to know what Chequerboard Rendering or what Aliasing is?

This thread is for you.

If you find a video explaining any aspect of game development, how developers have used different methods over the years to create the games and their look, please feel free to add them.

I have created this thread here as I think its educational and will help people have a better understanding of games and how the developers have created the believable and stunning visuals. With the PS5 on the horizon and the expectation of Ray Tracing at high resolution and frame rates, this thread will hopefully teach people what things like Ray Tracing is and maybe even show how the next gen consoles offer. With Millions of Colours, HDR, Dolby Atmos (or other spatial audio), Variable Refresh Rates and high resolution (admittedly some on XB1X but should be on PS5) available now, it maybe difficult to see what the next gen consoles offer other than higher native resolutions and maybe better frame rates too. We may see deep learning supersampling, or DLSS too - DLSS leverages a deep neural network to extract multidimensional features of the rendered scene and intelligently combine details from multiple frames to construct a high-quality final image. DLSS uses fewer input samples than traditional techniques such as temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) while avoiding the algorithmic difficulties such techniques face with transparency and other complex scene elements. In other words, AI upscaling to put it more simply.

Therefore, I think its very useful to know and understand what all this means and explained with the aid of Video to show and highlight its use in games. Just because the console is sending a 4k (3840 x 2160) image, that doesn't mean that the image drawn every frame is 4k - not that it matters if you are still drawn into the world but I still think its useful to know and understand what methods are used.

The ultimate aim of this thread is to help people understand, to educate and show the history of game design and development. If you are not interested and want to keep the 'magic', then this thread may not be for you but for the rest, I hope you find this useful and helpful.

This video prompted me to make this thread and I found it very interesting and informative. As usual, Digital Foundry are behind this Tech Focus and this one is all about Volumetric Lighting - God Rays, Atmospheric/ Fog Rendering, & More. This shows the history of the 'God Rays' and the early method of creating them from Super Mario 64 all the way up to Red Dead Redemption 2. Some old techniques are still being used to...