Epic has since moved away from it, they're using pre-baked lightmaps and specular probes now

Do you know why they gave up on it ? Voxel cone tracing seemed very promising to me, even for the incoming "next gen".

I'm sure it was the performance. Per-pixel octree traversals + 3D texture lookups are not fast, even on high-end GPU's.

However I'm quite sure someone will end up shipping a game with something similar, perhaps tuned specifically to the needs of that title. In fact at E3 I noticed that Knack has dynamic reflections and soft shadows, which looked like they might be generated using voxelization.

In fact at E3 I noticed that Knack has dynamic reflections and soft shadows, which looked like they might be generated using voxelization.

If you look at the video you can see that it's screen space reflections because the reflection disappears when the reflected object goes out of screen, pay attention to the glowing lights on the wall on the right: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iG98LuaYj_g#t=267s.

IMO, soft shadows are probably done with a common shadow mapping technique.

In fact at E3 I noticed that Knack has dynamic reflections and soft shadows, which looked like they might be generated using voxelization.

If you look at the video you can see that it's screen space reflections because the reflection disappears when the reflected object goes out of screen, pay attention to the glowing lights on the wall on the right: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iG98LuaYj_g#t=267s.

IMO, soft shadows are probably done with a common shadow mapping technique.

Indeed, you can actually see where the reflections stop once the view angle is too oblique. I guess I wasn't paying close enough attention at the demo. :P

I like the way the shadows in Naughty Dog's "The Last of Us" are unified.

That is, the actors' and environment's shadows merge together like they're supposed to.

Most games just place lightmaps on the environment and then dynamic shadows from actors blend over them - that is, they further darken the lightmaps.

This is unrealistic, since both these shadow representations come from the same light source and should merge together instead of darkening one another.

Based on the "low-resolution" appearance of the environment shadows in this game, I can assert that they're not lightmaps but actual static shadow maps that are rendered in most likely the same pass as the actors' shadows so that they merge together.

There are most likely other lighting contributions involved in the sophisticated visuals for this game, but static shadow maps for the environment are participating.

I agree that this is the right effect to aim for, but I disagree that most games do it the "wrong" way -- the Unreal Engine 3, for instance, separates the "direct" component of dominant lights from the indirect component for exactly this reason (among others, such as doing different filtering on the sharp edges of direct lights* versus the smoother gradients of the indirect component); this makes it relatively efficient to combine lightmaps with dynamic shadow maps, as shadow maps only block out the direct component and leave the indirect light unchanged (which is of course an approximation itself, but one that generally is acceptable).

*in fact, this may be an alternative explanation for the "low-resolution" appearance of the shadows you're seeing, meaning that it might still be lightmaps rather than shadow maps - it seems weird to recalculate even just the direct light shadows for static lights/geometry every frame for no reason

Hmm, you're right. It looks like they're using cascaded shadow maps for both the static and dynamic geometry, which is interesting. I assume they bake only the indirect lighting and then just add in the direct lighting on the fly. If nothing else, it's probably easier to implement than storing the contribution of direct light onto static geometry.