Originally Posted by nelg
dubert,
Do you think that something like Ati's Toy Shop Demo could be achieved in real time with in the context of a game? By that I mean with the addition of characters and physics etc..
In some level, yes. We already have parallax mapping in games. Not sure about the resolution of the textures, since they propably ran it with a card that has 512Mb of memory, and the biggest textures seemed to be concentrated on the are around the toy store. The surroundings seemed to be fairly basic around it.
Realtime reflections and refractions we also have on a single surface, including a fresnel effect, for example in Kameo. I'm not sure about the 300 shader programs just for the water though, seems to be very scene specific, and not that general.
Ambient occlusion can be baked into textures, or even vertices, depending on the usage, and vertex count, and the object in question.
So I would think, yes. Just not with as high resolution textures as Toy Shop had.
Of course the level of detail depends on the game engine. There are so many things that can affect the level of detail