It's an interesting tech demo to be sure; but as a non Minecraft player it doesn't really look like it would be playable in a lot of cases because virtually all the detail in the view is overpowered by daylight glare and featureless shadow. If you could kill the ambient lighting effects and only use to to make the colored light blocks in the second half of the gallery do their magic maybe...
Or you design the game around the technology. If your character were given, say, a mining helmet, you would always have a light source with you while underground.
Likewise, if you were holding a torch you would be able to see much better in the dark.
If you were overpowered by daylight glare, you would need sunglasses, just like in real life. The other part that isn't modeled in the game is how the atmosphere attenuates sunlight.
In the morning there is more atmosphere between the viewer and the sun, since the sun is coming in at an angle, and more of the light is blocked by the atmosphere, clouds, dust, and aerosols. So to simulate it you would actually reduce the intensity of sunlight by the angle of incidence; at 90 degrees, or directly overhead, you would reduce it by 0%.
At 0 degrees, when the sunlight is streaming directly from the horizon, you might reduce the sunlight by a good 30% or so to account for all the extra atmosphere between the sun and you.
I'd rather they stick to ray traced reflections. Not everyone wants realistic GI and not everyone wants to have to ensure they have proper lighting before going into caves. The 80% hit to FPS doesn't help either. Aesthetically speaking, it's certainly not worth the massive performance hit. For many gamers, rasterized lighting is actually preferable to ray tracing.
>If you were overpowered by daylight glare, you would need sunglasses, just like in real life. Except, I never need sunglasses because I reactively squint (often shutting my right eye completely) to reduce the amount of light entering my retina. So no, I don't need sunglasses, and just because "it's just like real life!" doesn't inherently enhance a game's playability. By that same token, forcing me to watch my player sleep and do nothing for a third of the playtime (8 out of every 24 in-game-hours cycle), and eat, and rest, and poop also often doesn't enhance the gameplay, in say, a typical Mario platforming game. Maybe this might one of many movings parts of the appeal in a survival-genre game, but even in these games, there's a cooperative-competitive multiplayer aspect in which you're trying to manage temperature/hunger/other bodily functions against other players, but there's always a limit to these systems--else the game devolves into a frail human at a PC babysitting an equally frail virtual human in a babysitting simulator.
Furthermore, I don't get the fascination with trying to blind the player in any game. Is the lighting acting more realistically than other games without dynamic lighting? I suppose, but the glares are overdone, and this is especially endemic and problematic in first-person action-oriented games in the past year or two. If the point of the game is to collect ammo and weapons and neutralize NPCs, then I need to be able to see the environment around me. Can't tell you how many games do this garbage of being inside a brightly lit building 2 feet from an OPEN doorway and being able to see everything clearly outside and then getting forcibly blinded for 3 seconds for walking 2 feet out into the open doorway. Wow, it's so """realistic""", walking outside from a brightly lit room blinded me for 3 seconds which was just enough time to die ingame. Brilliant gameplay! It's enough for me to manually disable most of these excess lighting """"features""""" in the settings just so the game can be played without being hamstrung by these overblown effects.
tl;dr: Gameplay is king, and in my opinion many of these overblown blinding light effects specifically detract or blind the player from being able to efficiently identify/complete in-game tasks/objectives. Ergo, we're approaching a point where devs are mistakenly prioritizing visuals over good gameplay.
Indeed, there's a distinct complete lack of ambient lighting, especially in the daytime outside, where fairly sparse tree cover seems to result in near pitch black ground level lighting.
I feel there needs to be a middle ground to get the benefits, but not lose the gameplay. More ambient, maybe cut down on the glare, might do it. Otherwise you'll need more levels of reflections, which will likely mean a full set of reflection textures and normal maps for the game to be developed (I think a few select blocks have them).
Uhm... I'm fairly certain the HD Texture pack includes bump mapping for a lot of the textures, which is really unfair comparison with the vanilla game which doesn't use bump-mapping. 99% of this graphical fidelity can (and is) achieved by path traced lighting run on shaders packs for Minecraft, not Ray Tracing. I was talking to someone who plays A LOT of minecraft and he pointed this out to me.
Example: Take the square end of the wood beam in the first image. The bump-mapping is clearly visible on the "Ray Traced" scene. If we're going to test the merit of Ray Tracing, please install HD/bump mapped textures on the vanilla game with a Rasterised shader effect pack and generally available path traced lighting, so we can see what the actual RT is doing.
I've had a chance to play with Ray Tracing myself, in Metro Exodus which uses RT GI, and the new DLC uses RT lighting effects for the torch/flamethrower. Whilst very good, it is subtle and really not mind blowing compared to well-made normal lighting, but that's beside the point.
Why? The effect is mostly going to be noticed where there are light sources and light bouncing off surfaces, such as underground. Shaders won't do much, and most shaders seem to shine in the overworld where the sun provides plenty of illuminations. Underground, not so much, because shaders aren't doing any work simulating bouncing light.
"Shaders won't do much": Go Google "minecraft shaders" and you'll see what the existing path-based lighting shaders are capable of.
As someone who both plays a lot of Minecraft and has jumped through the hoops necessary to use various shaders, I only see a few value-adds in the images above compared to existing shaders and UV-mapped textures.
Having said that, there are plenty of issues with shaders that I would hope ray tracing to address. Accurately rendering a view through a pane of glass, for example, which shaders typically handle by not shading anything seen through a window. And as was mentioned shaders only make reflective surfaces look shiny, the reflective light doesn't contribute to the illumination of nearby objects.
Caveat: It's a big world, and there are certainly shaders I haven't seen.
As far as the usefulness of ray-tracing underground, don't underestimate how much realistic shadows could add to the game. Existing shaders are just good enough to provide hints - running down a tunnel placing torches and getting jump-scared by my own shadow when a wall happened to line up just right, for example. Without ray-tracing though, they aren't particularly accurate and, worse, don't behave predictably. I would hope expect ray-tracing would improve this.
Having said all of that... "accurate" lighting tends to make many aspects of the gameplay impractical. Players depend on the ridiculously generous lighting model in a lot of subtle ways, such as judging whether a room is lit well enough to prevent mob spawning. Hopefully players will be able to selectively enable the effects they judge to have value (like reflected colored light) and disable the ones that subtract value (being unable to see at night, or even the day based on the above images ).
FWIW, the only shader I enable regularly is the default that ships with Optifine, which doesn't do much beyond bump-mapping.
TLDR; Unable to judge value-add of ray-tracing without comparing to existing shader mods like Optifine w/SEUS 11 and a UV mapped texture pack. Based on the article images, I worry ray-tracing will make the game unplayable.
It's interesting seeing the claim in this article they have extensively covered ray tracing and yet your readers still talk about path tracing making ray tracing unnecessary.
What nVidia does in RT hardware/software is actually more precisely described as path tracing as they are using sparse sample/denoise.
Path tracing is a modified version of 'classic' ray tracing, less computationally intensive and able to handle things like soft shadows far better than traditional ray tracing, yet noisier with more errata apparent.
First of all, there are fundamentally two types of human beings: Those who grew up with Lego and the rest.
I not only grew up with Lego, but with the “right type”. That is Lego before it tried to imitate Playmobil, a Lego that got delivered as a collection of basic building blocks, not a pre-select kit that you assembled following step-by-step instructions.
It’s the difference between getting a set of crayons and drawing by numbers.
Then it’s an age thing. I remember the boundless creativity and the fun of building things with my siblings: The possibilities were endless and the mind transformed those knobly bricks into real-life structures. Lego was a catalyst, gave tactility, but the main transformation happened in the mind:
Any degree of realism was possible, because it was the mind that did it.
And I observed the very same effect with my kids, especially my youngest daughter, who started playing Minecraft at the age of four or five, both on a PC and a tablet. First of all, the virtuosity she achieved, her speed at creating the most complex structures was absolutely stunning. Where I got all to easily distracted by perceived shortcomings in the interface design, she just carved huge structures and villages out of any hillside. I searched for texture packs and add-ons to add the visual quality and cues that obviously only I deemed necessary. She had no issue building a home out of coarse bricks, that to me seemed far to rough, unergonomic, constrained, bland or disproportioned because my old mind could no longer do the on-the-fly transformation of what I saw with my eyes into what my mind would picture.
I felt robbed of the opportunity to play together with her in that world, something she could easily do with her friends and even her older brothers, who came to Minecraft as teens, long after they had stopped playing with Lego.
But in the end we compromised on ARK Surival Evolved, where construction was almost as easy, but realism and a bit of suspense with dinosaurs of all types gave my old mind a stronger dose of eye candy.
Yes, you’re old, but not to old to become a father, so there is your second chance to understand what Lego and Minecraft are all about.
I believe daughter 4.5 is compatible with Minecraft 1.14.4 . Go to Minecraft.net to purchase, download the launcher and play. Have a go yourself so you can teach the basics.
Too young to imprison her in front of a screen. Sorry for being rude here but how about finding more time for your daughter? Don't throw that little cute "annoyance" in front of a screen.
Good advice. It's hard not to raise a screen zombie, but good if you can make some efforts to avoid doing so. Show her all of the great stuff about the real world for as long as you can manage it.
In my case it wasn't a conscious decision or initiative from my side.
We bought notebooks for her older brothers when they entered primary school, Core2 based at the time and basically 2D, only, both for budget and because they were meant to be educational not for gaming. Turns out, they were good enough to run Minecraft when it came out and I consider that educational, mostly.
The daughter is nine years younger than her brothers and like any child she'd be curiously watching her brothers and around the age of 4-5 decided on her own that it was time to try that, too. At that point she had already spent a lot of time with Lego and Playmobil.
My sons explained/demonstrated whenever she came to them with a question and eventually she had none, but started showing off the worlds she had created, often with nice homes included for family and friends.
So the only thing I can recommend is to play with it yourself, enjoy it and see if it colors off. But older kids, cousins etc. may get things rolling much easier: Kids really learn many skills much better from observation and interaction than parent's attempts to teach. They learn even better, when parents allow their kids to teach *them* and a dialogue or exchange evolves.
My daughter is now 13 and an extremely confident PC user and gaming expert on a slightly dated (power hungry) but capable desktop.
Never forget the bloke that bought two GTX6800 and couldn't work out why the guys with crap cards could see him from miles away in WOW and kill him before he saw them or how he could not see openings to caves or other stuff due to all the vegetation. But the environment looked real good as he died. Game developers need to understand how they degrade for performance in multiplayer games or you can disadvantage those that can see all the good stuff.
1: Is this Minecraft Bedrock or Java? Minecraft has a separate C++/DirectX codebase and a Java/OpenGL codebase on PC. The former is more performant, but AFAIK, the latter is the only one that's moddable to any significant degree.
2: The illumination on a Minecraft block is tied to enemy spawning chances, crop growth, light detectors, and other things. That makes RTX kind of problematic, as it hides whatever the block's true "light level" is.
It's the (awful) Bedrock edition. And you're correct, the Java edition does run slower and you can actually do things with it (texture packs are kinda painful to use on the bedrock edition).
Pixelart123 is a website where you can find hundreds of pixel art templates that you can easily create and print, copy or create from scratch. There are templates for drawing - from rainbow unicorns to planets in the solar system. Pixel art has never been so easy: https://pixelart123.de/
Yeah the light level thing would drive me crazy I'd have to turn it off half the time.
The extreme difference in contrast is an issue too for other reasons. It's way too dark in places and far too bright in others. Spelunking expeditions are already dangerous enough, I can only imagine exploring a sprawling mine or nether fortress with this enabled. They need to dial it back, or at least have settings to dial it back.
They could definitely have some kind of minimum illumination for all surfaces to prevent "blackness". I'm sure they'll tune it to the actual game mechanics once they've got the more technical stuff locked down.
I think I prefer looking at RTX bedrock, but PTGI java seems better for playing. Things doesn't look at cinematic but I can actually see something for once.
It looks like a colorized movie, where only the actors are in color, while the background remains in black and white.
In some screenshots the result is bad. In all screenshots the game loses that "old 8bit" feeling and gets instead a feeling of half baked game that doesn't know where it belongs.
As someone who has played a bit of Minecraft, the RT screenshots are interesting to look at, but not so much from a gameplay perspective due to everything being either washed out or too dark to see details and the overall inconsistency. Furthermore, the RT screenshots just don't look like Minecraft to me. I expect the RT effects would be better applied to a game like Skyrim. Maybe it's better in a live game than what I'm seeing in the screenshots, but I'm not paying up for an RTX-2080 to experience RT at a playable frame-rate.
Nvidia already worked with BGS on Fallout 4 (which shares Skyrim SE's engine), so RT Skyrim might actually be doable. It would certainly be better than the *CPU* shadows of the original release...
Scyrim is too complex to 2080ti to handle raytrasing... maybe 2023 there will be scyrim mod with raytrasing. They did chose the minecraft because it has very simple geometria engine and soman run raytrasing somewhat well with todays hardware!
Most people are commenting on the Minecraft-specific effects, and if you limit yourself to artificial worlds then ray-tracing kinda has that problem --- if you don't crank it up to 11, most people don't even notice it.
A more interesting (IMHO) example, and one already serving (or at least available to) a large number of consumers, is ray-tracing as used by Apple for AR. This works on, certainly A12 and later, maybe also A11. The basic idea is to use ray tracing to generate shadows for the artificial objects placed in an AR-scene, to better ground them in the surrounding reality. Given how an AR scene is unpredictable (in a way that a game is less so -- for AR camera orientation and lights can be pretty much anywhere) the more traditional ways of creating fake shadows work a lot less well than ray tracing.
It works surprisingly well, and it can do its job as a subtle effect rather than one that needs to be in your face.
As a long-time Minecraft player these tech demos ultimately come off as disingenuous.
It starts with the non-rtx version apparently having smooth lighting disabled, a default feature which has been in the game for a LONG time (at least in the java-edition, I've never bothered with the other versions of the game so I can't speak on those), and the only reason I can imagine for that being the case is to make the non-rtx version look artificially worse. Typical Nvidia marketing bs. Literally no-one plays the game without smooth lighting, as it makes the sharp edges of the per-block lighting engine invisible, creating a perfectly smooth gradient from any given light source. It even seems to add some rudimentary form of ambient-occlusion. Needles to say, the game already looks way better with it enabled, and most importantly, way easier on the eyes with uniformly lit surfaces.
Based on that alone I'm inclined to dismiss Nvidia's demo entirely, but again, this is only the start. The much larger issue here is that Minecraft RTX has to compete with what the modding community has been achieving these past few years with traditional, non-raytracing tech. Custom shaders have come a long way, casting dynamic shadows, having realistic time-of-day global illumination, custom high-res textures with bump/normal-mapping ect, ect, while sacrificing no playability whatsoever (an issue with MC RTX that has been rightly mentioned by other commentors), to the point where it's pretty standard for your average YouTube gaming channel to have some sort of custom shader enabled. All thanks to people working on their own time and mostly providing these things free of charge for anyone to download.
Furthermore, I believe the modding community deserves to be taken just as seriously as Nvidia and their desperate attempts to market yet another proprietary technology that will ultimately be replaced by a more open standard in the future. People underestimate the educational value and how many kids get into IT and tech in general through modding.
You covered my thoughts too. I haven't played Minecraft since around 2011 and already you could make it look better then than it looks in the non-RTX screenshots here - given how it's entirely clear that RTX-on isn't outright better than RTX-off in these, I can only imagine how much more marginal the results are with a properly configured client.
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DanNeely - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
It's an interesting tech demo to be sure; but as a non Minecraft player it doesn't really look like it would be playable in a lot of cases because virtually all the detail in the view is overpowered by daylight glare and featureless shadow. If you could kill the ambient lighting effects and only use to to make the colored light blocks in the second half of the gallery do their magic maybe...michael2k - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
Or you design the game around the technology. If your character were given, say, a mining helmet, you would always have a light source with you while underground.Likewise, if you were holding a torch you would be able to see much better in the dark.
If you were overpowered by daylight glare, you would need sunglasses, just like in real life. The other part that isn't modeled in the game is how the atmosphere attenuates sunlight.
In the morning there is more atmosphere between the viewer and the sun, since the sun is coming in at an angle, and more of the light is blocked by the atmosphere, clouds, dust, and aerosols. So to simulate it you would actually reduce the intensity of sunlight by the angle of incidence; at 90 degrees, or directly overhead, you would reduce it by 0%.
At 0 degrees, when the sunlight is streaming directly from the horizon, you might reduce the sunlight by a good 30% or so to account for all the extra atmosphere between the sun and you.
evernessince - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
I'd rather they stick to ray traced reflections. Not everyone wants realistic GI and not everyone wants to have to ensure they have proper lighting before going into caves. The 80% hit to FPS doesn't help either. Aesthetically speaking, it's certainly not worth the massive performance hit. For many gamers, rasterized lighting is actually preferable to ray tracing.JoeyJoJo123 - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
>If you were overpowered by daylight glare, you would need sunglasses, just like in real life.Except, I never need sunglasses because I reactively squint (often shutting my right eye completely) to reduce the amount of light entering my retina. So no, I don't need sunglasses, and just because "it's just like real life!" doesn't inherently enhance a game's playability. By that same token, forcing me to watch my player sleep and do nothing for a third of the playtime (8 out of every 24 in-game-hours cycle), and eat, and rest, and poop also often doesn't enhance the gameplay, in say, a typical Mario platforming game. Maybe this might one of many movings parts of the appeal in a survival-genre game, but even in these games, there's a cooperative-competitive multiplayer aspect in which you're trying to manage temperature/hunger/other bodily functions against other players, but there's always a limit to these systems--else the game devolves into a frail human at a PC babysitting an equally frail virtual human in a babysitting simulator.
Furthermore, I don't get the fascination with trying to blind the player in any game. Is the lighting acting more realistically than other games without dynamic lighting? I suppose, but the glares are overdone, and this is especially endemic and problematic in first-person action-oriented games in the past year or two. If the point of the game is to collect ammo and weapons and neutralize NPCs, then I need to be able to see the environment around me. Can't tell you how many games do this garbage of being inside a brightly lit building 2 feet from an OPEN doorway and being able to see everything clearly outside and then getting forcibly blinded for 3 seconds for walking 2 feet out into the open doorway. Wow, it's so """realistic""", walking outside from a brightly lit room blinded me for 3 seconds which was just enough time to die ingame. Brilliant gameplay! It's enough for me to manually disable most of these excess lighting """"features""""" in the settings just so the game can be played without being hamstrung by these overblown effects.
tl;dr:
Gameplay is king, and in my opinion many of these overblown blinding light effects specifically detract or blind the player from being able to efficiently identify/complete in-game tasks/objectives. Ergo, we're approaching a point where devs are mistakenly prioritizing visuals over good gameplay.
GreenReaper - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
Yeah, agreed. I actually prefer the output of the Minecraft mod that doesn't require RTX:https://www.gamecrate.com/how-to-set-up-ray-tracin...
Of course this is just an early build.
psychobriggsy - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Indeed, there's a distinct complete lack of ambient lighting, especially in the daytime outside, where fairly sparse tree cover seems to result in near pitch black ground level lighting.I feel there needs to be a middle ground to get the benefits, but not lose the gameplay. More ambient, maybe cut down on the glare, might do it. Otherwise you'll need more levels of reflections, which will likely mean a full set of reflection textures and normal maps for the game to be developed (I think a few select blocks have them).
AshlayW - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
Uhm... I'm fairly certain the HD Texture pack includes bump mapping for a lot of the textures, which is really unfair comparison with the vanilla game which doesn't use bump-mapping. 99% of this graphical fidelity can (and is) achieved by path traced lighting run on shaders packs for Minecraft, not Ray Tracing. I was talking to someone who plays A LOT of minecraft and he pointed this out to me.Example: Take the square end of the wood beam in the first image. The bump-mapping is clearly visible on the "Ray Traced" scene. If we're going to test the merit of Ray Tracing, please install HD/bump mapped textures on the vanilla game with a Rasterised shader effect pack and generally available path traced lighting, so we can see what the actual RT is doing.
I've had a chance to play with Ray Tracing myself, in Metro Exodus which uses RT GI, and the new DLC uses RT lighting effects for the torch/flamethrower. Whilst very good, it is subtle and really not mind blowing compared to well-made normal lighting, but that's beside the point.
michael2k - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
Why? The effect is mostly going to be noticed where there are light sources and light bouncing off surfaces, such as underground. Shaders won't do much, and most shaders seem to shine in the overworld where the sun provides plenty of illuminations. Underground, not so much, because shaders aren't doing any work simulating bouncing light.BoboDClown073 - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
"Shaders won't do much": Go Google "minecraft shaders" and you'll see what the existing path-based lighting shaders are capable of.As someone who both plays a lot of Minecraft and has jumped through the hoops necessary to use various shaders, I only see a few value-adds in the images above compared to existing shaders and UV-mapped textures.
Having said that, there are plenty of issues with shaders that I would hope ray tracing to address. Accurately rendering a view through a pane of glass, for example, which shaders typically handle by not shading anything seen through a window. And as was mentioned shaders only make reflective surfaces look shiny, the reflective light doesn't contribute to the illumination of nearby objects.
Caveat: It's a big world, and there are certainly shaders I haven't seen.
As far as the usefulness of ray-tracing underground, don't underestimate how much realistic shadows could add to the game. Existing shaders are just good enough to provide hints - running down a tunnel placing torches and getting jump-scared by my own shadow when a wall happened to line up just right, for example. Without ray-tracing though, they aren't particularly accurate and, worse, don't behave predictably. I would hope expect ray-tracing would improve this.
Having said all of that... "accurate" lighting tends to make many aspects of the gameplay impractical. Players depend on the ridiculously generous lighting model in a lot of subtle ways, such as judging whether a room is lit well enough to prevent mob spawning. Hopefully players will be able to selectively enable the effects they judge to have value (like reflected colored light) and disable the ones that subtract value (being unable to see at night, or even the day based on the above images ).
FWIW, the only shader I enable regularly is the default that ships with Optifine, which doesn't do much beyond bump-mapping.
TLDR; Unable to judge value-add of ray-tracing without comparing to existing shader mods like Optifine w/SEUS 11 and a UV mapped texture pack. Based on the article images, I worry ray-tracing will make the game unplayable.
BenSkywalker - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
It's mint chocolate chip, not ice cream!It's interesting seeing the claim in this article they have extensively covered ray tracing and yet your readers still talk about path tracing making ray tracing unnecessary.
What nVidia does in RT hardware/software is actually more precisely described as path tracing as they are using sparse sample/denoise.
Path tracing is a modified version of 'classic' ray tracing, less computationally intensive and able to handle things like soft shadows far better than traditional ray tracing, yet noisier with more errata apparent.
abufrejoval - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
First of all, there are fundamentally two types of human beings: Those who grew up with Lego and the rest.I not only grew up with Lego, but with the “right type”. That is Lego before it tried to imitate Playmobil, a Lego that got delivered as a collection of basic building blocks, not a pre-select kit that you assembled following step-by-step instructions.
It’s the difference between getting a set of crayons and drawing by numbers.
Then it’s an age thing. I remember the boundless creativity and the fun of building things with my siblings: The possibilities were endless and the mind transformed those knobly bricks into real-life structures. Lego was a catalyst, gave tactility, but the main transformation happened in the mind:
Any degree of realism was possible, because it was the mind that did it.
And I observed the very same effect with my kids, especially my youngest daughter, who started playing Minecraft at the age of four or five, both on a PC and a tablet. First of all, the virtuosity she achieved, her speed at creating the most complex structures was absolutely stunning. Where I got all to easily distracted by perceived shortcomings in the interface design, she just carved huge structures and villages out of any hillside. I searched for texture packs and add-ons to add the visual quality and cues that obviously only I deemed necessary. She had no issue building a home out of coarse bricks, that to me seemed far to rough, unergonomic, constrained, bland or disproportioned because my old mind could no longer do the on-the-fly transformation of what I saw with my eyes into what my mind would picture.
I felt robbed of the opportunity to play together with her in that world, something she could easily do with her friends and even her older brothers, who came to Minecraft as teens, long after they had stopped playing with Lego.
But in the end we compromised on ARK Surival Evolved, where construction was almost as easy, but realism and a bit of suspense with dinosaurs of all types gave my old mind a stronger dose of eye candy.
Yes, you’re old, but not to old to become a father, so there is your second chance to understand what Lego and Minecraft are all about.
abufrejoval - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
here a couple of extra "oooooo", where 'too' be came 'to': Seriously need edit!p1esk - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
My daughter is 4.5, would you recommend I introduce her to Minecraft? If so, how? I never tried it myself.DozySpud - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
I believe daughter 4.5 is compatible with Minecraft 1.14.4 . Go to Minecraft.net to purchase, download the launcher and play. Have a go yourself so you can teach the basics.Wardrop - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
Haha, that deserves a laughyannigr2 - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
Too young to imprison her in front of a screen. Sorry for being rude here but how about finding more time for your daughter? Don't throw that little cute "annoyance" in front of a screen.PeachNCream - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
Good advice. It's hard not to raise a screen zombie, but good if you can make some efforts to avoid doing so. Show her all of the great stuff about the real world for as long as you can manage it.abufrejoval - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
In my case it wasn't a conscious decision or initiative from my side.We bought notebooks for her older brothers when they entered primary school, Core2 based at the time and basically 2D, only, both for budget and because they were meant to be educational not for gaming. Turns out, they were good enough to run Minecraft when it came out and I consider that educational, mostly.
The daughter is nine years younger than her brothers and like any child she'd be curiously watching her brothers and around the age of 4-5 decided on her own that it was time to try that, too. At that point she had already spent a lot of time with Lego and Playmobil.
My sons explained/demonstrated whenever she came to them with a question and eventually she had none, but started showing off the worlds she had created, often with nice homes included for family and friends.
So the only thing I can recommend is to play with it yourself, enjoy it and see if it colors off. But older kids, cousins etc. may get things rolling much easier: Kids really learn many skills much better from observation and interaction than parent's attempts to teach. They learn even better, when parents allow their kids to teach *them* and a dialogue or exchange evolves.
My daughter is now 13 and an extremely confident PC user and gaming expert on a slightly dated (power hungry) but capable desktop.
lorribot - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
Never forget the bloke that bought two GTX6800 and couldn't work out why the guys with crap cards could see him from miles away in WOW and kill him before he saw them or how he could not see openings to caves or other stuff due to all the vegetation. But the environment looked real good as he died.Game developers need to understand how they degrade for performance in multiplayer games or you can disadvantage those that can see all the good stuff.
brucethemoose - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
2 things:1: Is this Minecraft Bedrock or Java? Minecraft has a separate C++/DirectX codebase and a Java/OpenGL codebase on PC. The former is more performant, but AFAIK, the latter is the only one that's moddable to any significant degree.
2: The illumination on a Minecraft block is tied to enemy spawning chances, crop growth, light detectors, and other things. That makes RTX kind of problematic, as it hides whatever the block's true "light level" is.
howmanysmall - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
It's the (awful) Bedrock edition. And you're correct, the Java edition does run slower and you can actually do things with it (texture packs are kinda painful to use on the bedrock edition).brucethemoose - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
Nvidia must have source access then. :(Bedrock Edition wouldn't be so bad if the codebase was open source (which you can definitely do with non-free products, see Barotrauma as an example).
davidklayer - Thursday, February 17, 2022 - link
Pixelart123 is a website where you can find hundreds of pixel art templates that you can easily create and print, copy or create from scratch. There are templates for drawing - from rainbow unicorns to planets in the solar system. Pixel art has never been so easy: https://pixelart123.de/Alexvrb - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
Yeah the light level thing would drive me crazy I'd have to turn it off half the time.The extreme difference in contrast is an issue too for other reasons. It's way too dark in places and far too bright in others. Spelunking expeditions are already dangerous enough, I can only imagine exploring a sprawling mine or nether fortress with this enabled. They need to dial it back, or at least have settings to dial it back.
Kenshiro70 - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
Did they say anything about a release target date? They've been dangling this for months now.Ian Cutress - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
Unfortunately not.Rudde - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
"The new year" - Minecraft blog.ABR - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
Looks rather dark and gloomy. Definitely a different vibe from the game.evernessince - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
Unfortunately unless a light ray is hitting the surface or bouncing and hitting the surface, it will appear completely dark.Wardrop - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
They could definitely have some kind of minimum illumination for all surfaces to prevent "blackness". I'm sure they'll tune it to the actual game mechanics once they've got the more technical stuff locked down.hanselltc - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
I think I prefer looking at RTX bedrock, but PTGI java seems better for playing. Things doesn't look at cinematic but I can actually see something for once.yannigr2 - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
It looks like a colorized movie, where only the actors are in color, while the background remains in black and white.In some screenshots the result is bad. In all screenshots the game loses that "old 8bit" feeling and gets instead a feeling of half baked game that doesn't know where it belongs.
digitalgriffin - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
Seus ptgi does an equally well job and doesn't use proprietary hooks. It runs pretty well on Radeon vii and 5700XT.mrvco - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
As someone who has played a bit of Minecraft, the RT screenshots are interesting to look at, but not so much from a gameplay perspective due to everything being either washed out or too dark to see details and the overall inconsistency. Furthermore, the RT screenshots just don't look like Minecraft to me. I expect the RT effects would be better applied to a game like Skyrim. Maybe it's better in a live game than what I'm seeing in the screenshots, but I'm not paying up for an RTX-2080 to experience RT at a playable frame-rate.brucethemoose - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
Nvidia already worked with BGS on Fallout 4 (which shares Skyrim SE's engine), so RT Skyrim might actually be doable. It would certainly be better than the *CPU* shadows of the original release...haukionkannel - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Scyrim is too complex to 2080ti to handle raytrasing... maybe 2023 there will be scyrim mod with raytrasing. They did chose the minecraft because it has very simple geometria engine and soman run raytrasing somewhat well with todays hardware!name99 - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
Most people are commenting on the Minecraft-specific effects, and if you limit yourself to artificial worlds then ray-tracing kinda has that problem --- if you don't crank it up to 11, most people don't even notice it.A more interesting (IMHO) example, and one already serving (or at least available to) a large number of consumers, is ray-tracing as used by Apple for AR. This works on, certainly A12 and later, maybe also A11. The basic idea is to use ray tracing to generate shadows for the artificial objects placed in an AR-scene, to better ground them in the surrounding reality. Given how an AR scene is unpredictable (in a way that a game is less so -- for AR camera orientation and lights can be pretty much anywhere) the more traditional ways of creating fake shadows work a lot less well than ray tracing.
It works surprisingly well, and it can do its job as a subtle effect rather than one that needs to be in your face.
ZeroVelocity - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
Let's Play when?Cyberdrace - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
As a long-time Minecraft player these tech demos ultimately come off as disingenuous.It starts with the non-rtx version apparently having smooth lighting disabled, a default feature which has been in the game for a LONG time (at least in the java-edition, I've never bothered with the other versions of the game so I can't speak on those), and the only reason I can imagine for that being the case is to make the non-rtx version look artificially worse. Typical Nvidia marketing bs. Literally no-one plays the game without smooth lighting, as it makes the sharp edges of the per-block lighting engine invisible, creating a perfectly smooth gradient from any given light source. It even seems to add some rudimentary form of ambient-occlusion. Needles to say, the game already looks way better with it enabled, and most importantly, way easier on the eyes with uniformly lit surfaces.
Based on that alone I'm inclined to dismiss Nvidia's demo entirely, but again, this is only the start. The much larger issue here is that Minecraft RTX has to compete with what the modding community has been achieving these past few years with traditional, non-raytracing tech. Custom shaders have come a long way, casting dynamic shadows, having realistic time-of-day global illumination, custom high-res textures with bump/normal-mapping ect, ect, while sacrificing no playability whatsoever (an issue with MC RTX that has been rightly mentioned by other commentors), to the point where it's pretty standard for your average YouTube gaming channel to have some sort of custom shader enabled. All thanks to people working on their own time and mostly providing these things free of charge for anyone to download.
Furthermore, I believe the modding community deserves to be taken just as seriously as Nvidia and their desperate attempts to market yet another proprietary technology that will ultimately be replaced by a more open standard in the future. People underestimate the educational value and how many kids get into IT and tech in general through modding.
Spunjji - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
You covered my thoughts too. I haven't played Minecraft since around 2011 and already you could make it look better then than it looks in the non-RTX screenshots here - given how it's entirely clear that RTX-on isn't outright better than RTX-off in these, I can only imagine how much more marginal the results are with a properly configured client.Rudde - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
Looking at the official minecraft press release, I believe Ian has played with very weird settings. In particular regarding the contrast.