From 4:05 to 6:30 is the discussion about ray tracing. All I can say, is "Oh, boy. Here we go again." This hits very close to home for me in more ways than one. It's not all that new by the way, part of the technology was described in the 1960's. In photo rendering, it's used a lot but that's a static scenes issue, where time to render doesn't quite matter that much. In dynamic scenes, like a game this is a lot more complex, and a little older the the discussion in that video indicates.
But the discussion is worth having - inside CIG. As users, we don't need to sway that one way or the other, they know what the requirement is.
Also NVidia has native support in their latest products, and AMD has announced support in upcoming products. And now you know why I don't take sides in that rat race.
And then some guy makes Minecraft with existing materials and what the gaming world wants and expects is changed forever.
I loved the Rescue Medics game that was put on site when the Apollo launched, it was just fun. Apparently there have been some others too that I have missed. Yeah, the cutting edge of technology is cool and all, but what ever happened to just making a game that was
fun to play?
SC was built to bring us a new game experience where there were no loading screens between you logging in and logging out, with maps that span entire solar systems and planets and moons you would literally walk a fill circle around if you had enough time and a stable enough server. Just like Minecraft it was a strong enough idea to carry it into Alpha, and just like minecraft it's a strong enough idea to carry it through Beta and into launch.
Yeah, a new technological breakthrough
could bring new mechanics for new game-play given imaginative enough devs... But I don't think ours is going to be one of those games, not yet at least... unless s42 is suddenly going to have a House Of Mirrors level. I don't think it would bring SC anything but e-peen right now. To be honest it's already waaaay too late for s42 ep1, that thing is only a year out. Put it on the list of "nice to haves" for s42 ep2.
That said I wouldn't blame them for implementing the foundations to support it in future in SC, but yes I would blame them if they delayed launch even by a month by fully implementing it.
EDIT - I've just seen the Quake II level demo. Yeah, I can see benefits from it. It's probbably one of the things, graphically, that people have been clamoring for for years. Is it worth delaying the whole game a year for? Even in the Quake II demo they had a feature right at the end they said "we've only just got this to work" so it's not like plugging in a new render package is going to get this working by magic... I'd hope they'd put it on the list of things to implement after release and as said, I expect this to be faaaar too late for s42.