Same disclaimer as last time : The ambient is set to 0,0,0 and diffuse is disabled. Only specular is enabled. TPGI is handling all of the ambient light.
Where can I get it?
TPGI Is live on itch Go check it out for more info.
What does it do?
TPGI is a realtime global illumination system - Basically light bounces around so we can emulate that with a raytrace and some clever approximation. GI is specifically simulating that effect, it doesnt add things like reflections or better shadows.
Assorted Tests
So far RE4P2 (and RE4P3 coming shortly) have completed a memory test lasting 4 hours with no leaking.
Radian has been hacked successfully together with canvasdraw and some math to get the camera angles creating a software raytracer which you can find below.
More stuff coming soon.
For anyone curious about the other architectures, here is a rundown
TGI - Traci Global Illumination
i1, i2 and i3 fall under this architecture
TGI was/is the most rudimentary GI system I have ever made
In short ray bounces were hardcoded (bad) and wherever a ray
lands a traci is created (A light emitter, bad)
EGI + TEGI - Traced Enviornment Global Illumination
EGI fakes global illumination by using a bounds query for each probe. then calculating the lighting for that position.
TEGI switched out the bounds calculations for a simple hardcoded raytracer ripped from the TGI Family
APGI - Approximate Point Global Illumination
Used an early varient of the new raytracing library however it ran really badly and brought back traci. It was mainly used as a tech demo for the library since it was a TRUELY Physically accurate simulation.
APGI 2 is applied the traces to probes but suffered many of the same issues
TPGI
TPGI is a Fully rewrite of APGI 2 and the raytracing library, It introduces alot of optimization work, Fast Lighting Approximation and more.
RE2 optimized it further with new caching features and a partial rewrite
RE3 overhauls all the calculations for color, brightness and smoothing making it by far the most visually pleasing system yet. Aswell as a host of new creative config options for a greater amount of artistic control. (and even more optimization work)
Can you give some details on the backend of this? Iām assuming that TPGI RE4 is manipulating actual lighting instances (e.g., ColorCorrectionEffect, BloomEffect, etc.) and potential properties of Lighting itself based on what is calculating, etc. If that is how it works, can these effects and/or properties be manipulated at runtime in tandem with TPGI RE4 in action or is that incompatible? Do changes have to run through TPGI RE4 via an API if there is one? If change/properties settings are impossible, does this mean that TPGI RE4 makes determinations of what intended lighting should look like based only on initial lighting settings or is it configurable? If it is configurable, what configuration options are available? What are the performance impacts (especially given the price, I think this is definitely a question that should be asked)?
This looks cool, but thereās not a lot of details on the technical side, and since this is not open-sourced we canāt simply look at the code. Sorry for the barrage of questions, but these are all important for understanding what this actually is and assessing compatibility/viability with existing games (especially given the claim of being relatively drag and drop).
This is very cool but I already spent my 50 dollars on volumika so ill pass on purchasing it. that aside
I love how all the light kind of bounces and stuff, it makes it look way more realistic, from what Iām seeing this is very impressive, and if your claims about performance are true then this must be fire!
Oh Sorry, I kinda threw this post up ahead of when I was planning so its a little sparse. Basically TPGI uses a field of āprobesā which each emit light, The probes are tinted based on how much light they receive and the colors of objects they hit along the way. TPGI shoots a ray from each probe to get that information. Ideally you should set outdoor ambient, ambient and diffuse to 0/0,0,0 since TPGI is designed to do what those are approximating (realistically color shadows and diffuse lighting)
Short summary cause thats alot of words :
TPGI sends raytracers out for each probe in a feild of probes (each frame) that follows the player, the raytracing operation is streamlined down to the point it doesnt cause much of a performance dent.
The only caviat to using raycasts in the raytracer (this is getting replaced with a custom cast system in future versions) is meshes and unions will cause a performance hit.
Ideally you should use parts in your scenes (roofs, walls, floors, etc) with mesh props for the best balance of performance and quality with TPGI.
Very impressive work, but im gonna be real man Iām not sure who is going to spend $50 for a module/plugin that most of the player base wouldnāt even be able to run.
You also plan on charging $20 for an example place? Itās fair to know what youāre worth but you gotta factor in what the market is worth.
Eltobb broke down pricing for systems like this really well, but im going to try my best here.
In short, Roblox games are making real money now (60k usd or more for the top 1k devs), And tools like TPGI are becoming more sophisticated and advanced, At some point 1k robux ($3.50) is a problem.
As for the starter kit, it includes 3 example places with fully scripted mechanics, a debug plugin that lets you preview GI in studio + tweak its settings with reccomendations and an example script that automatically tunes your settings at runtime to keep the game running smooth.
Also the starterkit is not for sale yet since I had to release earlier than expected and the preview plugin might be free depending on how advanced the demo games are.
Fair but lets be real, the games making a lot of money are mostly low tier gacha games that prey on the stupidity of young children, a game like that would never use a plugin like this.
I do see your point about 1k Robux not being enough, personally I would be significantly more inclined to purchase this if the price was $15-20.
Im unsure what you mean by āfully scripted mechanicsā, are these places small mini games? Even so I dont really see the point for the places to be anything more than well constructed environments to showcase how good this module can look.
As for the debug plugin, that should be included with the initial $50 purchase.
If you want to continue talking id be glad too on the discord server, but id really prefer to not flood the thread.
basically, 1k robux = $3.50 after devex, that is basically pocket change to the bigger devs. Its a very predatory system. Simmilar platforms like unity have GI systems priced around 50-70$.
I meant they will be small scripted minigames, other GI systems dont respond fast enough (If at all) for example so there will most likely be a fast paced racing demo.
I apologise, is there a game where you can play and see this for yourself? Itās hard to criticise or evaluate a $50 product that you canāt see in person in the game, with your own eyes in a quality screen resolution, not a 720p video.
Colors are now normalized to prevent dull colored scenes from dimming GI, This wasnt an issue in RE3 and It slipped my mind since we switched to RGB (from HSL). When combined with the denoiser logic this actually helps reduce flicker and improve cohesion since brightness is no longer part of the color pipeline.
Extra clamps
Ideally since this system is hopefully going to get used in production we want to prevent edge cases from causing issues, One of the edge cases I caught during testing is RGB values that exeed 255 or are below 0 can cause a strange void effect in GI. I added extra clamps along the pipeline to prevent this from happening since this can happen in production if settings are out of bounds.
Minor performance improvements
Specifically I replaced as many division operations with multiplication operations as possible since computers kinda suck at division, this bumps performance a little bit and helps carve a little more performance out of roblox.
As always, TPGI is available on itch if you are interested.
Seems cool, but the demo videos are of low quality and very blurry. Maybe upload it to an actual game and record from there in a higher resolution so a big part of your screen is not lost to the Studio window? It could give people the wrong impression.
Starterkit Sneak peak #1 + RE4P3 Demo - Control Panel
Video
Features Planned
ā¢ The Control panel is a module that you can load and require for all allowed users,
ā¢ Atmosphere settings (Change clouds, atmosphere, lighting, etc
ā¢ Control panel settings (dark+light mode)
ā¢ realtime tweaking of TPGI settings
More info
The control panel UI will be ported to be used as a plugin, the plugin version will have basically all the same features but with some extra preview settings that can only be used in studio (like switching between lighting technologies)
As always, TPGI is available on itch if you are interested.
| Get it on itch 
Go check it out for more info.
