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The Ray Reconstruction Update

Path tracing, as opposed to Ray tracing, is a term typically referring to a ground truth renderer. It does so by accumulating photons on the screen after bouncing them around in a stochastic way, meaning randomly sampled and integrated over time.

In other words, it's photorealistic.

The problem with real time path tracing is that it usually produces a very noisy image, since we can only afford a single photon sample per pixel.

Thanks to NVIDIA's new DLSS 4 Ray Reconstruction technology, we can fully denoise the rendered image in a relatively stable manner.

In Archean, we have implemented the path tracer (with ray reconstruction) as a separate renderer that can be toggled in the settings.
This option is only available on NVIDIA graphics cards.
It will work on RTX 2000 series, though it's recommended to use a 4000 series for better performance.



On the left is before this update, on the right is after enabling the Path Tracer and Ray Reconstruction.


Known issues:
  • Shadow ghosting and pixel smudging with fast movements
  • Blurry terrain when the sun is low
  • Very poor performance in vehicles made with unpainted metal blocks


We will keep improving it for sure, stay tuned for future updates.

Full changelog:
  • Implemented DLSS Ray Reconstruction and a Fully Path-Traced Renderer (stochastic Ray-Traced ambient lighting, rough metal reflections, and soft shadows from unlimited lights without affecting performance)
  • Added an option to rasterize screens of components/dashboard as full resolution overlays to make them clearer and easy to read (enabled by default)
  • Dashboards: moved emissive layer to front face instead of back face
  • Admin Panel: Fixed CTD when sorting by alias/owner in ascending order with multiple entities having an empty alias/owner
  • Increased the Sun's temperature (changes the color of the atmosphere and intensity)

Multithreading - Part 3

  • Added multithreading for entities
  • Fixed CTD when resizing game window while using certain HUD functions
  • Updated DLSS (not yet using ray-reconstruction or frame generation)

Patch notes Jan 30

  • Fixed Volume from blueprint giving free fuel in adventure
  • Fixed NavInstrument horizon pitch and pro/retrograde yaw to now be linearly normalized (it was using the sine of the angle instead, which was not consistent with other components)
  • Fixed NavInstrument horizon pitch angle visualization (was assuming a normalized angle but was given the sine value)
  • Fixed Volume composition runaway bug when two connected volumes get separated by blocks affecting their transfer
  • XenonCode: Fixed noop with "for 1,1"
  • XenonCode: Added second optional argument (default) to "sign" function for the case of 0

Patch notes Jan 23

  • Fixed gravity in space (regression from Jan 21 update)
  • Reduced potential visual artefacts with cables visible through blocks when far from origin