Reflect is a Portal-clone that is created by students of the IGAD program, a game development course of the NHTV University of Applied Sciences in Breda, The Netherlands. And it’s funny because this indie game, showcases the future of PC graphics. We have known for some time that ray tracing and global illumination would be the two ground-breaking ‘features’ in future graphics and we are excited to finally see ray-tracing in real-time. The game uses an in-house engine called, Brigade Engine, and comes with a path tracer for rendering. Make no mistake though, Reflect is quite demanding but damn does it look sexy. Ray-tracing is as ground-breaking as iD Software’s real-time dynamic lighting that was showcased in Doom 3. Yeah, we are talking about great stuff here guys, though some of you might not like the noise that is introduced in Reflect!
According to the development team, path tracing is a process that constructs a large number of paths between the camera and light sources (typically via scene surfaces) to estimate the color of each pixel. This is a stochastic process, which causes the noise in the images.
The Brigade platform uses one or more GPUs to render images. A flexible plug-in system allows the use of CUDA and OpenCL GPUs, as well as networked rendering and CPU-based path tracing. The architecture supports in-core rendering of scenes up to 2 million triangles, with support for static and dynamic objects. Scenes can be illuminated by a directional light source as well as arbitrary dynamic area lights (including meshes). Brigade estimates a full illumination solution, including multiple diffuse bounces. Material support includes Lambert, Blinn, specular and dielectric materials, with textures and normal maps.
Reflect has been released and can be downloaded from its official website.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email