Few days ago there was a really cool Raytracing Compo. Rules were simple: 3 spheres only and you need to use raytracing. To be honest, the rules were my idea -- or to be more precise, my IRC joke. Joke that got real.
I've already had some experiences with raytracing and other cool effects, so I was wondering what kind of game could I make. Sure, every possible material and effect was available -- but this time my main concern was gameplay. I decided that eye-catching materials wouldn't add anything to gameplay and didn't use them (well, Krzysiek K. proved me horribly wrong, however he used multi-layered sphere -- very, very sneaky! -- check out his game, its awesome). In the end the game was made in great hurry, so it's not as fun as I wanted it to be (in fact I use PhysX just to roll ball...), however requires few minutes of "what is it all about" to win.
Few technical issues: it's GL 3.1, and almost runs on ATI Radeon. After lot of bugfixes executable starts but visuals are incorrect. I would be more than happy if a brave-enough Radeon-owner would spend some time and fix the code. With such knowledge I would probably also be able to fix deferred shading code. Other valuable points in code are "procedural" mip-mapping (because of bad aliasing with no AA or AA with uniform grid) and per-object texturing. In fact, please, do not post "The Orb Game Sources Reaction" on YouTube.
