
Ray tracing in Excel - Impossible
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-latest-thing-to-support-ray-tracing-is-excel-apparently/
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BurnGpuBurn
I really really hate websites that hijack my back button. Come on pc-gamer, do
you really think that making me click two extra times on the back button to
return where I came from is going to make me spend more time on your site?

Crazy excel project though, well done.

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leibnitz27
I feel I should link a function mode excel ray tracer a friend wrote in 2004.

[https://github.com/simon-frankau/excel-ray-tracer](https://github.com/simon-
frankau/excel-ray-tracer)

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airstrike
Should probably change the URL to
[https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/ctf9f7/raytracing_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/ctf9f7/raytracing_in_excel_incl_excel_model_link_and/)

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melling
I added that to my list of ray tracing links:

[https://github.com/melling/ComputerGraphics/blob/master/ray_...](https://github.com/melling/ComputerGraphics/blob/master/ray_tracing.md)

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ggambetta
I have a couple of contributions to your list:
[https://gabrielgambetta.com/tiny-
raytracer.html](https://gabrielgambetta.com/tiny-raytracer.html) and
[https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-
scratch/r...](https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-
scratch/raytracing.html)

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pixelpoet
I feel like nobody understands what Turing completeness really means anymore,
i.e. why this is kinda amusing but also not really remarkable.

Back in the day people did ray tracing by hand on calculators, in PostScript
(yes, the document description language used by printers), ... ray tracing is
really simple, a basic exercise in vector maths, so we should expect to see it
everywhere.

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bloogsy
Very impressive, I wonder what PC spec is needed to crunch that much data in
excel?

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sipos
The question is, why do this?

Is it for fun? If so, great. Not my cup of tea personally, but I can imagine
how it could be someone's.

If not for fun, what is the point? It presumably isn't to create a usable ray-
tracing system. Perhaps a challenge to improve the author's Excel skills? If
so, I suggest they move on to a proper programming language and visualisation
system.

There seems to be this obsession, among some people, with using Excel for all
sorts of inappropriate things, and I have a sinking feeling that this might be
related to that. A system for generating contracts using Excel formulas, in
Excel, instead of using mail merge, or something else, with Word or something
else designed to format prose text, is a horrible example I have come across
at work.

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ihuman
I see what the author is doing as part of the demoscene. Many people enjoy
programming in limited environments, learning how to optimize, and pushing it
to the limit. No one is actually going to use this in a product; its just art.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene)

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pixelpoet
Not all constrained programming is demoscene related; IMO demoscene is chiefly
a social phenomenon, about competition at gatherings.

~~~
gmiller123456
Perhaps that's what it's about today, but when it actually started back in the
days of the C64 and 300 baud modems it was about pushing the tech to its
limits just to see what it could do. Generally the only people who would
actually see it would be people who downloaded a pirated game and had the demo
play before the game started.

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mirimir
What a trip.

I've never done anything that visually elaborate. But I have created data
visualizations, using conditionally colored cells in large arrays.

