Spooky scary greetings, friends!
When I was younger, I played a lot of games on my computer and very often saw a green logo a lot of you might know already: "Nvidia, the way it's meant to be played". Nvidia. For me, it was just a big brand producing graphic cards for gamers and doing some programming stuff, but I didn't know exactly what that was. I just knew it was BIG! For me it was not even possible to think about working with Nvidia. A big dream for an 18 year old boy…
But that's the thing with dreams, sometimes they come true: A few month ago, thanks to Pumpkin Jack, I received a request: "Would you like to add Nvidia RTX to Pumpkin Jack?". At this moment I couldn't believe it... Who could have imagined that? Such a big company was interested in my game?!? I said "yes" of course, and so started the process of adding this new technology to my game.
At first, when I received the files I was supposed to use, I couldn't understand anything and almost decided to give it up. But a few weeks later, I had some free time and decided to get my hands REALLY dirty this time. And so, I started to read the full documentation, trying to understand how things work - or don't work.
So, what is ray tracing anyway?
"Ray tracing is the holy grail of gaming graphics, simulating the physical behavior of light to bring real-time, cinematic-quality rendering to even the most visually intense games." (NVIDIA official website)
I first started with adding RTX shadows to Pumpkin Jack. This was the easiest part, and it took me only a few days. The work was mainly using commands to enable/disable features or tweak some others. I did not have to write any code myself. But the results were pretty nice:
Now that RTX shadows were working, I moved forward to RTX reflections - for water for example. And this one was hard! I mean VERY HARD! It actually took me a whole month, just for this alone. It was tricky as translucency was not very well supported at the moment. I tried my best, but finally I decided to make opaque water, which at least worked:
But it was looking strange, a bit flat. And I was simply not satisfied with the result. So, I emailed Nvidia and asked them how to fix that. They told me that they worked on something very, very new recently and it could make my translucent water work; called Hybrid-Translucency. A few emails later, I got the files and could start working... and... WOW! It was working just fine! And it is looking damn perfect:
So that's how I implemented Nvidia RTX to Pumpkin Jack in a nutshell. It was a lot of research work, lot of confusion and trying to make things that are not supposed to work. But with the help of the folks over at Nvidia, I was able to make it. Thank you very much for your support!
I'm very happy to have RTX working in Pumpkin Jack, especially since it's one of the first cartoon games that uses this technology! I guess it makes Pumpkin Jack a pioneer in some way. And me as a young developer (23 years is still young, right?) really very proud of my work.
At first, I was afraid and skeptical that the RTX features would not work with the style of Pumpkin Jack, but I think the result speaks for itself:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1186640