VB6 Ray Tracing?

Call me crazy, but after not using vb6 for quite sometime, I decided to go back to my roots and build a ray tracer from scratch. It's still in the works, however, as I have to build a 3d engine from the ground up. At the moment, it loads obj files built from Autodesk 3ds max, and texture maps everything per pixel. Its slow, but with some optimizations I should be able to speed things up. I believe the skysphere I am using is a 12k ultra HD texture. Once I have everything I need, such as lighting, is when I will implement the ray traced reflections and shadows. I just wanna hear your thoughts as none exists on the internet.

You're crazy.

Actually, I seem to remember the first ray tracing examples coming out back around the heyday of VB6. So, what are you looking for, exactly? I believe it can be done, and I believe you have the skill to do it, considering some of the other goofy (and awesome) graphics things you've done in the past. I guess I'm a bit curious as to why you are doing it? Hardware has advanced to the point that ray tracing is best done on the GPU, these days. I would think you could hand that off to the GPU using VB6, but it doesn't sound like that's what you are trying to do. It sounds like you are trying to write a CPU based ray tracing engine, which will perform far better than any in the 90s, but still won't measure up to a GPU based system, so what is the underlying objective?

My objective is to use a slow language such as VB6 and render ray tracing in almost pure vb (some API's were needed) with as much optimization as possible. And although you may have seen ray tracers on vb6 in the past, it is nearly impossible now to find them on the internet! But like I said earlier, I'm building the engine from the ground up before I implement the ray tracing parts. I just got done implementing z-buffering today. Just sort of an experiment to see if I can really pull it off on vb6 knowing full well I can build a mega fast one in C++ using DirectX12 through RTX cards.

Path tracing would be interesting too if I can figure out how to denoise the graphics.

I don't remember ray tracing being anything more than a one-off oddity back in the 90s. It wasn't practical, so people would only do it to show that it could be done...as long as you were willing to wait.

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Originally Posted by Jacob Roman

My objective is to use a slow language such as VB6 and render ray tracing in almost pure vb (some API's were needed) with as much optimization as possible. And although you may have seen ray tracers on vb6 in the past, it is nearly impossible now to find them on the internet! But like I said earlier, I'm building the engine from the ground up before I implement the ray tracing parts. I just got done implementing z-buffering today. Just sort of an experiment to see if I can really pull it off on vb6 knowing full well I can build a mega fast one in C++ using DirectX12 through RTX cards. Path tracing would be interesting too if I can figure out how to denoise the graphics.

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VB6 is slow? haha, you might get beat for saying stuff like that around here!
Here is all I could find from PSC...Attachment 191015

Love to see your code after you add ray tracing, Jacob.

Just for fun, I would like try to rewrite for VB.NET.

I don't understand why OP doesn't use Godot instead.

Moti, If you would've read Jacob's posts instead of skimming through them, you'll know why.

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Originally Posted by Peter Porter

Love to see your code after you add ray tracing, Jacob.

Just for fun, I would like try to rewrite for VB.NET.

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Not VB.Net but https://github.com/lukehoban/LINQ-raytracer is a C# example written mainly in LinQ :D

I'll probably hop back to it once I graduate at the end of this month...again. Bout to get my bachelors in CSBS.