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Using Excel As a 3D Graphics Engine
simoniker writes "Obviously whimsical but slightly mind-blowing — an Eastern European coder has published video and the Excel tables to get full 3D wireframe running in Microsoft Excel. He even has solid polygonal graphics running. This isn't an Easter Egg by the Excel creators. Rather, he's using formulas to output the graphics, using two different methods, and showing all the variables on-screen in real time as the 3D is created."
...why?
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
The DNF team has been waiting for the excel rounding errors to be fixed before release.
Apparently he's using Excel as his web server too...
So that's it, Excel is actually a 3d programming environment. The Excel 97 flight simulator then was a demo. http://www.eeggs.com/items/718.html
Back when I took graphics in college, it was made abundantly clear that all modern graphics are just large math problems solved in realtime. We did all sorts of work messing with transformation matrices and doing the math (sadly, since this was done by the CS department we did a lot less of the useful stuff and a lot more of the theoretical underpinnings that you don't technically need to know when actually programming something).
Anyway, the point is that Excel is reasonably well set up for doing the kind of math you need to do when making computer graphics and has vector output capabilities. It's a neat trick and something that would likely be useful in teaching the underpinnings (watching what happens as you tweak variables in a transformation matrix in realtime would have been very nice when I was taking my class).
I read the internet for the articles.
I've long forgotten how I did it, but I used the database application in MS-Works for Windows 3.0 as Turing Machine.
Why? If you have to ask, get off Slashdot.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm sure someone has either already done this in emacs, or soon will.
:-P
Those guys have a mode for everything.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV6uiZj0FHM
and
http://www.youtube.com/user/GamasutraOfficial
I won't be impressed until Excel can pull of something as simple as a flight simulator.
Nice, but could it display a 2D rectangle whose dimensions are 850 & 77.1?
Hopefully, no formula outputs that value. Who knows what 3d image you'd get?!
Strange how much human accomplishment and progress comes from contemplation of the irrelevant. - Scott Kim.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
This was possible on a 7 MHz 68000 back in the day of the original mac. At 3 GHz he should be able to raytrace in Excel.
There's no such thing as "too much free time". My seventy six year old retired dad says he doesn't know how he ever found the time to work!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
This is the breakthrough we were waiting for. Duke Nukem Forever is right around the corner now!
I might be missing the joke and taking this way to seriously, but I really cannot stand that attitude. I guess it's easy to push my buttons.
In wich deranged moral system is there some sort of duty that forces smart guys to spend all their available time on things useful for society?
(And who decides what is beneficial for society anyway?)
If his hoby was playing chess or collecting stamps or climbing mountains, would you say that he should spend his time on more useful things? If he could afford to spend a lot of time on those hobbies, why shouldn't he?
So why is it that every time someone does something cool and strange and for all purposes harmless, someone else always has to say "THIS GUY HAS WAY TOO MUCH FREE TIME"? Someone who, I might add, spends his time on slashdot?
Envy?
(I know I am envious, I wish I had the time and the determination to do a lot of these things. Considering that I am wasting time on slasdot, determination is what I am lacking more of)
Relatively easy. Just create a vba and load some com components...
Its kinda fun to create a button in word which executes a vba app that creates an excel chart based on data in an access database and embeds it in a cad drawing then prints that to pdf and sends an email through outlook. Makes peoples heads explode even though it is very basic programming.
Demonstrations
ayottesoftware.com
nah, man - I think you missed something. I'm no programmer, but he makes the point that what he's doing here is a different type of programming. It allows him to lay out his program structure in two dimensions. Most (all?) code is laid out as a vertical thread of logical progressive statements, so this does seem different: Excel allows you to visually lay out the relationships between variable in a spatial way.
It not like he's claiming to have discovered this: this is the fundamental reason why spreadsheets have been used for well over a decade - they give you a logical map. You could lay out a spreadsheet as a single list of mathematical operations, but it would obviously suck in comparison to a a spreadsheet. He's just pointing out this is interesting to think of in terms of a programming paradigm.
(YAY! I used 'paradigm' and didn't sprout horns or anything!)
Cheers!
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
This has to have been accidentally published in the wrong month. It's clearly intended for April. What kind of Fools are running that magazine?
The answers are the same.
--
make install -not war
geek
0
FGD 135
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
All those hard workers are content to just do it the long way.
The article is written tongue-in-cheek, but it raises a good point about sequential programming. When a processor has 80 cores, multi-threaded programming is going to be a nightmare. In contrast, the algorithms in the article can be scheduled optimally, given enough cores. And you, the programmer, get that for free. I wouldn't be surprised if spreadsheets became the preferred way to implement concurrent algorithms.
Well, it's a little short to be a Stormtrooper.
what I really find interesting, is the claim, that sourcecode may be n-dimensional in the future. Actually, this is the most important aspect of the whole 3d excel show, and should have been mentioned in the article abstract, because it's a thought on programming itself.
While I don't really know if I would agree on this "breakthrough of programming style", it is interesting to read it on pages 4 and 5 of the article.
I wished some comments would have commented on that.
I myself find code to be standing on different positions on the screen not very unusual, since it will be executed "one after the other" anyway, and is common in GUI/java development to have more than one window open. But if the code is not just "displayed" next to each other, and it has some new sense to arrange it like excel does, it might be interesting in the future (especially now on the edge of leaping into mainstream multiprocessor development)
"Eastern Europe" is not some nebulous region with fuzzy borders on a map, with "Here there be coders" written in illuminated calligraphy in the very middle of a vast, blank area.
This guy's email address is in Hungary which means he's probably Hungarian. That's a country directly between Austria and Bulgaria, south of Poland and north of Greece (indirectly) which, depending on where you draw the Eastern boundary of Europe, may or may not be in "Eastern" Europe. It lies almost precisely between the western border of France and the Eastern border of Ukraine, the northern border of Poland and the southern border of Greece (excluding Cyprus), making this guy more of a Central European.
French coders are French, German coders are German. What makes a Hungarian coder "Eastern European"?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Check out Befunge. It's the only language I know of that explicitly uses the two-dimensional spatial structure of code for flow control.
That's ok; that's not a pencil sharpener, either.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
And it always shoots first :(((
3D graphics in Excel: http://vangelder.orcon.net.nz/excel/convex3d.html
Fractal Generated Landscpare Excel: http://vangelder.orcon.net.nz/excel/terrain.html
Aperture Science: We do what we must, because we can.
For the good of all of us, except the ones who are dead.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
What's the Excel formula for getting laid?
Gainful employment, a shower, a suit and a tie.
#REF!
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
A while ago I was very bored and coded a tetris clone in Excel.
The timer I used is too slow but it works... http://www.knitter.ch/src/snipplets/excel-tetris/
Cheers, Andy