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Gaming Beauty Is Only Pixel Deep

Posted by simoniker on from the my-beautiful-face dept.

Thanks to NTSC-uk for its feature discussing what the new pixel and vertex shaders mean to this generation of videogames. The piece laments: "Looking back at the past few years, games have looked incredibly similar. And this is the main reason why: they all used the same tools", before going on to explain: "The hardware previously contained logic circuits to simply perform the operations needed by Gouraud and Flat shading, but now the fully Programmable Pipeline has introduced a whole new world of graphical effects for us all, limited only by the programmers' time and creativity", referencing "the water effects used in Super Mario Sunshine, cel shading effects used in Zelda, or the rippling water effects on Dead or Alive 3."

2 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Pretentious shithead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    Complex representations of three dimentional objects are not split into triangles for simpler rendering, they are split into triangles because it allowed for faster rendering.
    simpler is faster. Fucking stupid idiot.
    There is no statement in mathematics that claims any polygon can be formed by multiple triangles. Furthmore, this claim is false.
    Fuckwit.
    "I, Robot" was one of the first games to use 3D polygonal representations. It was not one of the first games to use flat shading,
    Yes it was.
    (given that it does not use cell shading).
    They didn't say it did.
    Gouraud shading was first presented by Henri Gouraud in 1971 and has been common in games well before PlayStation.
    No it wasn't. You (idiot) do realize that the Playstation came out in 1994, right? While there were many, many games prior to that date using flat shading, I can think of maybe one (forgettable) game that featured gourad shading. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, though - perhaps when you typed "common" you meant to type "incredibly rare."
    Gouraud shading takes the averaged surface normals at each vertex and performs a lighting computation (originally a Lambertian diffuse calculation) upon them. The resulting vertex colours are then interpolated along the edges of triangle, then the triangle is filled by interpolating between each set of edge pixels per a scanline.
    What the fuck is your point?! This is just a less-concise version of what the original article said. The main difference is that your version is likely to be understood ONLY by people who already know it. GOOD FUCKING JOB.

    You, sir, are a terrible writer.
    The production of shadows has nothing to do with Gouraud shading, or shading at all.
    This is quite true, but only if you misunderstand what they meant by shadows. NICE READING COMPREHENSION, FUCKFACE.
    The problem with Gouraud shading
    [snip]
    Another issue is the Gouraud shading is not perspective correct.
    Nobody fucking asked you. Seriously.
    Furthermore, the comment that "light tends not to spread slowly across the triangles" is non-sensical at best.
    To someone with poor reading comprehension.
    It has nothing to do with how smooth the shading is.
    Yes it does.
    1. Re:Pretentious shithead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
      On the reiteration of subsequent incorporation of failure subject cases in question, YOU ARE A FUCKING TERRIBLE WRITER. STOP TRYING TO USE BIG WORDS, YOU FAIL MISERABLY AT IT.

      Back to the subject at hand, you were totally wrong about the triangulation shit. Just admit it. As an elite graphics programmer, you surely know that a line can be represented as a degenerate triangle (not that it matters much, since game designers rarely want a big menu of shading algorithms for lines and points). Also, the entities (I bet you love that word) you're talking about aren't even fucking polygons, they're surfaces, for fuck's sake. Not that ANY of this has ANYTHING to do with RENDERING, since it's pretty obvious to any non-asshole that video game rendering engines work with surfaces that have ALREADY been decomposed into meshes of simple polygons. Or, to put it in your words, "subsequently on the subject of in question a minimal degree of do expect fairly precise HI I'M CEBU AND I'M EXTREMELY FUCKING PRETENTIOUS AND VERBOSE. "

      I hope that FINALLY makes sense now that I've put it in terms you can understand. You repeatedly demonstrated above that you have major problems with reading comprehension.

      On the subject of triangulation, there are many finite polygons who's
      whose
      triangulation requires an infinite number of triangles to construct. Subsequently,
      Do you even know what "subsequently" fucking means? How about "malapropism?" Prick.

      Anyway, it's pretty obvious that you deliberately went to the nth degree of pedantic on this one, besides your trick of using the word "polygon" to mean "polygons and surfaces" -- a trick you pulled purely to make your disgustingly long, annoying post even more disgustingly long and annoying. That makes you both annoying and wrong, by the way.

      The point is that treatments of mathematical subjects, including computer graphics and the article in question, should be presented with at least a minimal degree of rigor.
      No they fucking shouldn't. It's an article about gaming. By the way, this article was posted in the GAMES section of slashdot. Not the pedantic-ass, pretentious-fucker, malapropism-loving section. Hope that clears things up.