Every year Santa comes down my chimney. There is no other excuse for the toys being there on Xmas morning. I speak here purely from the standpoint of a guy who likes toys and cannot be swayed by your technical crap disproving the existence of elves and flying deer.
I'd personally love to see the day when artists and developers stopped producing works based on the motivation of monetary reward. Imagine, people being creative just because they want to be. What a crazy unrealistic concept I've imagined here.
I would have to disagree on it being pointless. The point and aim is clearly to find objective truth, even though its highly unlikely that it will be attained. This does not make the aim useless, rather it serves a guide to a very interesting journey.
I hate studies like this as they do nothing but implant ridiculous generalized notions into people who want a simple answer to complex questions. What really matters in terms of intellectual ability is that all humans of all sexes and races possess an enormous capacity for learning, and conclusions on ability should be made at an individual level, not groups.
It appeared to me that he was blaming disuse on the fact that developers abandoned the project, not Open Source as a whole. The problem with Microsoft is that they keep releasing what appears to be entirely new but unnecessary and buggy products to make a profit.
If people paid a subscription fee to use the operating system that was continually updated and improved the whole model would work a lot better.
I recall Doom3 selling very well. How can you imply Doom3 "killed" the series? Doesn't someone at Slashdot have to approve these articles before they get posted?
I've been thinking about this stuff myself, about how I would go about creating my own voxel engine. I would imagine that for each particle that makes up the world, you could store x,y and z location, color, as well as other attributes, as much as memory and processor speed would allow.
In terms of different materials, one way would be to store additional information about the particles, like mass and how strongly bound it is to its neighbors (which could fluctuate based on collision points). We're talking serious math and physics here, tons of calculations and tons of information to store, but today's video cards perform a staggering amount of calculations and move information at amazing speeds. With time, programmers figure out shortcuts to use in different situations where it doesn't matter if everything is calculated (like culling for instance).
I'd love to see a manufacturer embrace this much in the way Ageia has created a physics chip, but I think more programmers need to develop voxel engines first, come up with standard implementation routines, and of course create a market for it.
There's been a handful of games to embrace it to a certain degree in the past. Most recently Crytek used voxel tech to create the terrain in Crysis. If you want to see a fairly interesting demo of a pure voxel engine check out Ken Silverman's Voxlap.
The most obvious is a easily destructable / manipulatable environment. In terms of a game you'd see things like walls you could break though, ground you could dig into or blow holes in at will, and not just in specific places that were setup beforehand. Polygon based engines do this sort of stuff sometimes but its not easy to implement because meshes are basically static. You design them in a modeling program and if you're going to make them break apart you have to create seperate models for the pieces. When the time comes you pull the original model out and add the pieces in, or sometimes the original model is built in seperate pieces from the start.
With a voxel engine things can be dynamically broken apart, holes can be opened in a solid mass, or mass can be added in, and it can all be done in real-time by the engine without having a modeler design the stuff beforehand. I think if a nice hardware accelerated sandbox could be created then designers could come up with some very interesting, fun ideas for games that are very different than what you normally see.
I'd love to see Nvidia or ATI work on hardware that accelerates a pure voxel engine. I personally think there's too much emphasis on reaching a goal of photo-realism. Current polygon-based rendering tends to dictate a lot in terms of gameplay, often without game designers even noticing it because they don't know what's possible with something like a voxel engine.
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If Joe listens to good advice he'll cough up the extra bucks and buy a Mac.
Every year Santa comes down my chimney. There is no other excuse for the toys being there on Xmas morning. I speak here purely from the standpoint of a guy who likes toys and cannot be swayed by your technical crap disproving the existence of elves and flying deer.
I'd personally love to see the day when artists and developers stopped producing works based on the motivation of monetary reward. Imagine, people being creative just because they want to be. What a crazy unrealistic concept I've imagined here.
I would have to disagree on it being pointless. The point and aim is clearly to find objective truth, even though its highly unlikely that it will be attained. This does not make the aim useless, rather it serves a guide to a very interesting journey.
I hate studies like this as they do nothing but implant ridiculous generalized notions into people who want a simple answer to complex questions. What really matters in terms of intellectual ability is that all humans of all sexes and races possess an enormous capacity for learning, and conclusions on ability should be made at an individual level, not groups.
It appeared to me that he was blaming disuse on the fact that developers abandoned the project, not Open Source as a whole. The problem with Microsoft is that they keep releasing what appears to be entirely new but unnecessary and buggy products to make a profit. If people paid a subscription fee to use the operating system that was continually updated and improved the whole model would work a lot better.
I recall Doom3 selling very well. How can you imply Doom3 "killed" the series? Doesn't someone at Slashdot have to approve these articles before they get posted?
I've been thinking about this stuff myself, about how I would go about creating my own voxel engine. I would imagine that for each particle that makes up the world, you could store x,y and z location, color, as well as other attributes, as much as memory and processor speed would allow. In terms of different materials, one way would be to store additional information about the particles, like mass and how strongly bound it is to its neighbors (which could fluctuate based on collision points). We're talking serious math and physics here, tons of calculations and tons of information to store, but today's video cards perform a staggering amount of calculations and move information at amazing speeds. With time, programmers figure out shortcuts to use in different situations where it doesn't matter if everything is calculated (like culling for instance). I'd love to see a manufacturer embrace this much in the way Ageia has created a physics chip, but I think more programmers need to develop voxel engines first, come up with standard implementation routines, and of course create a market for it. There's been a handful of games to embrace it to a certain degree in the past. Most recently Crytek used voxel tech to create the terrain in Crysis. If you want to see a fairly interesting demo of a pure voxel engine check out Ken Silverman's Voxlap.
The most obvious is a easily destructable / manipulatable environment. In terms of a game you'd see things like walls you could break though, ground you could dig into or blow holes in at will, and not just in specific places that were setup beforehand. Polygon based engines do this sort of stuff sometimes but its not easy to implement because meshes are basically static. You design them in a modeling program and if you're going to make them break apart you have to create seperate models for the pieces. When the time comes you pull the original model out and add the pieces in, or sometimes the original model is built in seperate pieces from the start. With a voxel engine things can be dynamically broken apart, holes can be opened in a solid mass, or mass can be added in, and it can all be done in real-time by the engine without having a modeler design the stuff beforehand. I think if a nice hardware accelerated sandbox could be created then designers could come up with some very interesting, fun ideas for games that are very different than what you normally see.
I'd love to see Nvidia or ATI work on hardware that accelerates a pure voxel engine. I personally think there's too much emphasis on reaching a goal of photo-realism. Current polygon-based rendering tends to dictate a lot in terms of gameplay, often without game designers even noticing it because they don't know what's possible with something like a voxel engine.