Unbiased Stunt Racer!

For the last couple of days, I've been busy creating "Unbiased Stunt Racer", a new real-time path traced demo involving physics, a vehicle and a shooting robot. It's actually a mix of a platformer and a stunt driving game. First you have to reach a platform by driving the vehicle over a ramp, then you have to reach another platform with a robot which is shooting at you, by driving over two rails where a nasty chrome sphere hinders the passage. The final goal is to push the robot off of his cosy place. The sunlight is constantly changing position and color, casting nice soft shadows over the scene. Below is a walkthrough video (rendered on GTS450) and some screenshots:

The number of samples per pixel can now be altered at runtime with the O and P keys. Pressing space resets the car. I've converted some of the stratified sampling in the original code back to purely random sampling, resulting in a slightly noisier but more realistic image.



An executable demo for Unbiased Stunt Racer is available at http://code.google.com/p/tokap-the-once-known-as-pong/downloads/list

The biggest advantage of using real-time ray tracing/path tracing for these "games" (besides having higher quality graphics) is that almost anyone can immediately start creating simple games without worrying about lighting, shadows, multiple reflections, refractions and all combinations of these effects. Everything just works as expected and without any effort on the artist side. It's like a "push button" game engine: just create the scene and the renderer takes care of everything else.