If you are a decent well learned programmer, essentialy an expert in algorithmic complexity, then surely you understand the comparison O(n) vs O(log n) and why you cannot refute it with horseshit.
How about real world experience then?
We have approximately 120 rack units in our renderfarm, each with dual quad core xeons + Dual Quadros. Of the rendering jobs we submit, approximately 0.001% use raytracing exclusively, about 0.5% make use of raytracing extensions. The rest is rasterization because it's a hell of a lot more efficient. Period. (And I'm talking about the real world here - not Big O notation on paper)
The arguments for scene complexity go out of the window very quickly in all fairness, for quite a few reasons.
1. To double the complexity of a model, we typically expect to see the time spent authoring that asset to increase by a factor of 6. We currently employ in the region of 200 modellers. A doubling of scene complexity would take that number to 1200 (if you don't count the additional management overhead etc). There simply aren't enough skilled people to make that a reality, so there is an absolute cap on how complex a given scene can become.
2. We always have, and always will continue to seperate the rendering into seperate passes for the compositor to correctly light at a later stage in the pipeline. A highly skilled compositor can produce higher quality images quicker than a better rendering algorithm can. Because we always split the scene into smaller constituent parts, the scene's never get complex enough to see any ray tracing benefits (and those parts can be rendered seperately on different nodes in our RF).
3. We typically use 4k x 4k image sizes, rasterization is certainly fast enough for those image sizes. Our scene complexity is far higher than that of a any game now, or in the next 5 years.
4. Scene complexity is inherently limited by 1 other major factor that you've completely ignored. Memory speed. As your data set increases, rendering performance degrades to the speed at which you can feed the processors - i.e. the speed of the memory. Again, this is another reason why we seperate the scene into render layers.
CG has never, and will never, use accurate mathematical models to produce images. If a cheap trick is good enough, it's good enough. Raytracing never really made the in-roads into the FilmFX world that the early 80's/90's evangelists predicted - And i predict that it will never make the in-roads into Games that you seem to believe.
Thirdly, what the fuck do current video cards have to do with *anything* about this? This is called RESEARCH. Ever do any?
Wow! Ever done any research yourself? If you did, you'd know that the answer is an awful lot! The only computational resource available that can provide both the memory bandwidth, and the computational power required for raytracing is the GPU. Our rendering process has been using GPU's to accelerate raytracing (and rasterization) for a couple of years now, unfortunately all of the problems I raised above regarding ray-tracing still apply.
GH Queen would be awesome. Having said that, GH Metallica has got to be a lot better than GH Aerosmith..... 'One' is about the only tune i can be bothered with on GH3.
... relatively, this war has pretty light casualties.
Excluding the people who no longer have homes? Excluding the people who's businesses have been bombed? Excluding the effects on the Iraq economy? Excluding the effects on children who run the gauntlet on their way to school every morning (if it's still there)? Excluding the number of recently created orphans?
Whilst RTA deaths do account for more people than war, those deaths still occur during a time of war. The measurable death toll in Iraq & Afghanistan is higher now, than it would have been without a war going on. There is also substantially more fear, a collapsed economy, and far more hardships for the civilians to endure as a result.
Comparing deaths from a war to deaths from drink driving, is either extremely naive, or extremely callous.
A death from a drink driver may kill a childs mother or father. Bombs tend to be a bit more localised and kill both parents. The effect of War on an individual has the potential to be far more damaging than the effects of everyday life.
The type of plans necessary to create a functioning implosion device are state-held secrets and have only been seen by a select few with Top Secret clearance.
Correct, there's no law against a child seeing NC-17 or R movies, but there is a law prohibiting sale of those movies to minors. This proposed law will simply apply the same rules to the sale of games.
There are no government restrictions on the sale of Games to minors. Currently the age rating system on the boxes is an entirely voluntary system agreed to by the publishers, developers and retail outlets.
It is currently entirely legal for someone to sell GTA4 to a 3 year old child without any fear of prosecution. This law is intended to change that situation.
Can't wait to see what happens after the £20bn Trident update. I'm not sure I'd feel safe knowing Norton is a required install on the next generation of nuclear missiles...
GH2 actually felt remotely akin to playing the guitar.
GH3 is endless fret-wankery.
The thing that annoys me most about GH3, is that as a guitarist I've had to deal with tendonitis and carpel tunnel syndrome on a couple of occasions before now. Those were as a result of playing too fast, without properly warming up.
GH3 at the higher levels requires far too much finger work to be safe imho. There's no real directions given in the game that you should warm up; not play for too long; and seek medical attention if you experience pains in your hands.
I wonder how many 12 year old kids will end up getting codine shots in a couple of years time.... just seems a little irresponsible to me.
you can go as far as the UK and try to ban everything sharp and pointy that might hurt you.
In 1999, the Uk had 197 gun related deaths. In 1998 the US had 30419 gun related deaths. Whilst I'm sure most gun owners are sane sensible people who take proper precautions, it only takes one who is not sane or sensible, and then a life is needlessly lost. Unfortunately the gun crime stats for the US seem to indicate that there are enough people in the latter category to cause 30000+ deaths every year.
I disagree - as do the facts. PAL is 25fps, and NTSC is 30fps. In modern parlance, these formats are actually 576i and 480i respectively.
Both formats were designed in the era of early CRT's in the 50's and 60's, and were designed to be interlaced when displayed. These frame rates were not picked because humans can't notice the difference, they were picked to match the frequency of the AC power supply. (which was 60Hz in the US, 50Hz in the EU).
Now the ideal, would have been to use 576p and 480p instead of the interlaced formats - however we are talking about relatively primitive TV technology here - the signal bandwidth needed to send non interlaced signals simply wasn't available at the time. So, they compromised and went interlaced, which has led to this mis-information that 25fps is enough for many years now.
If you ever owned a dreamcast, you might remember that games would ask if you wanted to display the image at 50 or 60Hz....
You might also be aware that DVD's and BD's are 60Hz non-interlaced.
Incidentally, the 24fps figure also has historical reasons for being. 24fps is 'good enough' to convey fluid motion, whilst being 'cheap enough' to allow the film to go into actual production. (rolls of film cost quite a few $ back in the 1930's). When the final film was displayed, each frame would normally be displayed 3 times - giving the effect of 72fps.
The only place where 24fps still rules the roost, is traditional animation where the cost of in-betweening at 60fps will more than double the production budget - for relatively little effect. (Mind you most animation productions use CGI these days to provide automatic tweening).
So. anyhow, Not sure of the exact figure, but the 80fps figure quoted by the grand parent, is more or less correct.
though in reality, the number of programmers is far higher. Let's not forget the middleware aspect here - which is the sole reason why you can have 5 programmers on a commercial project.
I work as a developer for a games middleware company, and we have somewhere in the region of 20 full time devs working on just a single component on a game engine - which is being used in over a hundred titles currently in development. Now scale that up for the audio engine (fmod for example), the physics engine (eg havok), the AI engine (eg AI.implant), the animation engine (eg morpheme) etc etc.
There really aren't any viable open source middleware components available that are on a par with those commercial offerings, and those that do exist, generally won't have code paths for the current consoles due to licensing restrictions (unless sony or MS decide to back them - eg bullet).
I wonder though if one successful open source game - not just a quake3 mod, but an entire game including top-notch design and custom-made game art - would kickstart a wave of similar projects. At the very least, it would serve as an example how it can succeed.
That initial project would have to be extremely well managed to be able to turn out re-usable components (instead of hacked together game code). It would also need to be truly cross-platform (PS3/Xbox360/Wii/Windows) because games developers are realistically not going to target a game exclusively for linux (which is a small niche market in comparison to windows and consoles). It would need a dictator at the helm to stop the engine code getting crapified with redundant code (people thinking they are being helpful by extending the code to handle every file format under the sun - which is definitely not what you want).
Ogre looks like a fairly promising engine, and seems like it's currently the best all round solution for OSS. The problem, is that the pipeline tools are still sub-standard imho, and until you can persuade a bunch of developers to do mind numbing essential stuff like creating tools, not much is going to change.
not quite. physics calculations are very well suited to vector processing
Correction, *some* physics calculations are well suited to vector processing, but not all.
Simple particle physics is trivial to throw at a vector processor. This is pretty much limited to adding a bit of prettyness to a scene. HavokFX is a really good example, and a lot of the hardware accelerated parts of PhysX implements this stuff (eg fluids, cloth etc). Since these are mainly visual effects, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to put this stuff onto a GPU rather than a PPU.
Basic primitive collision gets a bit of a speed kick in PhysX. There are however two problems that i've seen with this though. Firstly, take a look at the ageia hanger of doom demo to see how adding lots more physical boxes to a game, doesn't translate to better gameplay.
The second problem is far more severe. Attempt any kind of feedback in your simulation (character control for example), and you'll find that disabling hardware acceleration gives you significantly better performance.
So, if particle physics is better suited to the GPU; simulating loads of boxes isn't needed for better gameplay; and the kinds of physics that people want to see in games, is better off without a PPU; One could fairly easily argue that the ageia physX card is the first and last PPU we'll ever see....
I think the OP meant, "If they could finally get around to ratifying an openGL 3.1 specification in 6 months (instead of being 2 or 3 years late as GL3.0 was); turn it into a useful standard that people actually want to use (which GL3.0 is not); and finally make good on all the things we were promised for 3.0, which they ended up ditching at the last minute. If that happens linux/mac openGL developers around the world will feel less dirty than they do right now"....
He wasn't implying anything about windows + GL as such, more making the observation that openGL is vital to Mac/linux - and as such those OS's are very much at the mercy of the Khronos group's actions (or more accurately - no action at all as was the case with GL3).
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If you are a decent well learned programmer, essentialy an expert in algorithmic complexity, then surely you understand the comparison O(n) vs O(log n) and why you cannot refute it with horseshit.
How about real world experience then?
We have approximately 120 rack units in our renderfarm, each with dual quad core xeons + Dual Quadros. Of the rendering jobs we submit, approximately 0.001% use raytracing exclusively, about 0.5% make use of raytracing extensions. The rest is rasterization because it's a hell of a lot more efficient. Period. (And I'm talking about the real world here - not Big O notation on paper)
The arguments for scene complexity go out of the window very quickly in all fairness, for quite a few reasons.
1. To double the complexity of a model, we typically expect to see the time spent authoring that asset to increase by a factor of 6. We currently employ in the region of 200 modellers. A doubling of scene complexity would take that number to 1200 (if you don't count the additional management overhead etc). There simply aren't enough skilled people to make that a reality, so there is an absolute cap on how complex a given scene can become.
2. We always have, and always will continue to seperate the rendering into seperate passes for the compositor to correctly light at a later stage in the pipeline. A highly skilled compositor can produce higher quality images quicker than a better rendering algorithm can. Because we always split the scene into smaller constituent parts, the scene's never get complex enough to see any ray tracing benefits (and those parts can be rendered seperately on different nodes in our RF).
3. We typically use 4k x 4k image sizes, rasterization is certainly fast enough for those image sizes. Our scene complexity is far higher than that of a any game now, or in the next 5 years.
4. Scene complexity is inherently limited by 1 other major factor that you've completely ignored. Memory speed. As your data set increases, rendering performance degrades to the speed at which you can feed the processors - i.e. the speed of the memory. Again, this is another reason why we seperate the scene into render layers.
CG has never, and will never, use accurate mathematical models to produce images. If a cheap trick is good enough, it's good enough. Raytracing never really made the in-roads into the FilmFX world that the early 80's/90's evangelists predicted - And i predict that it will never make the in-roads into Games that you seem to believe.
Thirdly, what the fuck do current video cards have to do with *anything* about this? This is called RESEARCH. Ever do any?
Wow! Ever done any research yourself? If you did, you'd know that the answer is an awful lot! The only computational resource available that can provide both the memory bandwidth, and the computational power required for raytracing is the GPU. Our rendering process has been using GPU's to accelerate raytracing (and rasterization) for a couple of years now, unfortunately all of the problems I raised above regarding ray-tracing still apply.
GH Queen would be awesome. Having said that, GH Metallica has got to be a lot better than GH Aerosmith..... 'One' is about the only tune i can be bothered with on GH3.
Physical Processors != CPU cores.
It would be for one of the 2 killed, and their families.
... relatively, this war has pretty light casualties.
Excluding the people who no longer have homes? Excluding the people who's businesses have been bombed? Excluding the effects on the Iraq economy? Excluding the effects on children who run the gauntlet on their way to school every morning (if it's still there)? Excluding the number of recently created orphans?
Whilst RTA deaths do account for more people than war, those deaths still occur during a time of war. The measurable death toll in Iraq & Afghanistan is higher now, than it would have been without a war going on. There is also substantially more fear, a collapsed economy, and far more hardships for the civilians to endure as a result.
Comparing deaths from a war to deaths from drink driving, is either extremely naive, or extremely callous.
A death from a drink driver may kill a childs mother or father. Bombs tend to be a bit more localised and kill both parents. The effect of War on an individual has the potential to be far more damaging than the effects of everyday life.
However there are always unknowns without testing. And generally testing will be detected.
Though i imagine conducting a 'test' in London or New York would probably be the ultimate goal?
The type of plans necessary to create a functioning implosion device are state-held secrets and have only been seen by a select few with Top Secret clearance.
That makes me feel safer then. The MOD are very good at data protection.
Those are tall orders for any engineer!
Or a totally awesome challenge....
eeffoc.
Correct, there's no law against a child seeing NC-17 or R movies, but there is a law prohibiting sale of those movies to minors. This proposed law will simply apply the same rules to the sale of games.
There are no government restrictions on the sale of Games to minors. Currently the age rating system on the boxes is an entirely voluntary system agreed to by the publishers, developers and retail outlets.
It is currently entirely legal for someone to sell GTA4 to a 3 year old child without any fear of prosecution. This law is intended to change that situation.
Games haven't made me a violent person, however i do spend quite a bit of time eating funny coloured pills and chasing ghosts....
Can't wait to see what happens after the £20bn Trident update. I'm not sure I'd feel safe knowing Norton is a required install on the next generation of nuclear missiles...
black you say?
Hans Reiser's going to be doing nothing twiddling his thumbs for the next few years as well....
It was 7 cups of coffee on the news this morning, mind you I might have hallucinated that.
GH2 actually felt remotely akin to playing the guitar.
GH3 is endless fret-wankery.
The thing that annoys me most about GH3, is that as a guitarist I've had to deal with tendonitis and carpel tunnel syndrome on a couple of occasions before now. Those were as a result of playing too fast, without properly warming up.
GH3 at the higher levels requires far too much finger work to be safe imho. There's no real directions given in the game that you should warm up; not play for too long; and seek medical attention if you experience pains in your hands.
I wonder how many 12 year old kids will end up getting codine shots in a couple of years time.... just seems a little irresponsible to me.
you can go as far as the UK and try to ban everything sharp and pointy that might hurt you.
In 1999, the Uk had 197 gun related deaths. In 1998 the US had 30419 gun related deaths. Whilst I'm sure most gun owners are sane sensible people who take proper precautions, it only takes one who is not sane or sensible, and then a life is needlessly lost. Unfortunately the gun crime stats for the US seem to indicate that there are enough people in the latter category to cause 30000+ deaths every year.
.... and you can be sure that by the time the kid is 13, he'll probably have figured out where dad keeps the key.
In fact, I'm willing to bet that there's more hammer and tool related hospitalizations than gun hospitalizations...
true, mainly due to guns being illegal in most developed countries.
Additionally, you have to look at accidental injuries with hammers vs accidental injuries with guns.
Argh, my thumb hurts v.s.
Argh, I'm bleeding from a hole in my leg.
I'll give you a choice. If you were going to be attacked by someone at a distance of 10 yards, which weapon would you prefer they were holding?
a) 1 hammer or
b) 1 gun + 50 rounds
I'd prefer my attacker to have 1 opportunity to kill me, not 50....
I disagree - as do the facts. PAL is 25fps, and NTSC is 30fps. In modern parlance, these formats are actually 576i and 480i respectively.
Both formats were designed in the era of early CRT's in the 50's and 60's, and were designed to be interlaced when displayed. These frame rates were not picked because humans can't notice the difference, they were picked to match the frequency of the AC power supply. (which was 60Hz in the US, 50Hz in the EU).
Now the ideal, would have been to use 576p and 480p instead of the interlaced formats - however we are talking about relatively primitive TV technology here - the signal bandwidth needed to send non interlaced signals simply wasn't available at the time. So, they compromised and went interlaced, which has led to this mis-information that 25fps is enough for many years now.
If you ever owned a dreamcast, you might remember that games would ask if you wanted to display the image at 50 or 60Hz....
You might also be aware that DVD's and BD's are 60Hz non-interlaced.
Incidentally, the 24fps figure also has historical reasons for being. 24fps is 'good enough' to convey fluid motion, whilst being 'cheap enough' to allow the film to go into actual production. (rolls of film cost quite a few $ back in the 1930's). When the final film was displayed, each frame would normally be displayed 3 times - giving the effect of 72fps.
The only place where 24fps still rules the roost, is traditional animation where the cost of in-betweening at 60fps will more than double the production budget - for relatively little effect. (Mind you most animation productions use CGI these days to provide automatic tweening).
So. anyhow, Not sure of the exact figure, but the 80fps figure quoted by the grand parent, is more or less correct.
I work as a developer for a games middleware company, and we have somewhere in the region of 20 full time devs working on just a single component on a game engine - which is being used in over a hundred titles currently in development. Now scale that up for the audio engine (fmod for example), the physics engine (eg havok), the AI engine (eg AI.implant), the animation engine (eg morpheme) etc etc.
There really aren't any viable open source middleware components available that are on a par with those commercial offerings, and those that do exist, generally won't have code paths for the current consoles due to licensing restrictions (unless sony or MS decide to back them - eg bullet).
I wonder though if one successful open source game - not just a quake3 mod, but an entire game including top-notch design and custom-made game art - would kickstart a wave of similar projects. At the very least, it would serve as an example how it can succeed.
That initial project would have to be extremely well managed to be able to turn out re-usable components (instead of hacked together game code). It would also need to be truly cross-platform (PS3/Xbox360/Wii/Windows) because games developers are realistically not going to target a game exclusively for linux (which is a small niche market in comparison to windows and consoles). It would need a dictator at the helm to stop the engine code getting crapified with redundant code (people thinking they are being helpful by extending the code to handle every file format under the sun - which is definitely not what you want).
Ogre looks like a fairly promising engine, and seems like it's currently the best all round solution for OSS. The problem, is that the pipeline tools are still sub-standard imho, and until you can persuade a bunch of developers to do mind numbing essential stuff like creating tools, not much is going to change.
not quite. physics calculations are very well suited to vector processing
Correction, *some* physics calculations are well suited to vector processing, but not all.
Simple particle physics is trivial to throw at a vector processor. This is pretty much limited to adding a bit of prettyness to a scene. HavokFX is a really good example, and a lot of the hardware accelerated parts of PhysX implements this stuff (eg fluids, cloth etc). Since these are mainly visual effects, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to put this stuff onto a GPU rather than a PPU.
Basic primitive collision gets a bit of a speed kick in PhysX. There are however two problems that i've seen with this though. Firstly, take a look at the ageia hanger of doom demo to see how adding lots more physical boxes to a game, doesn't translate to better gameplay.
The second problem is far more severe. Attempt any kind of feedback in your simulation (character control for example), and you'll find that disabling hardware acceleration gives you significantly better performance.
So, if particle physics is better suited to the GPU; simulating loads of boxes isn't needed for better gameplay; and the kinds of physics that people want to see in games, is better off without a PPU; One could fairly easily argue that the ageia physX card is the first and last PPU we'll ever see....
I think the OP meant, "If they could finally get around to ratifying an openGL 3.1 specification in 6 months (instead of being 2 or 3 years late as GL3.0 was); turn it into a useful standard that people actually want to use (which GL3.0 is not); and finally make good on all the things we were promised for 3.0, which they ended up ditching at the last minute. If that happens linux/mac openGL developers around the world will feel less dirty than they do right now"....
He wasn't implying anything about windows + GL as such, more making the observation that openGL is vital to Mac/linux - and as such those OS's are very much at the mercy of the Khronos group's actions (or more accurately - no action at all as was the case with GL3).
No, they used to until EA bought out criterion. They used their new RAGE engine (R* advanced game engine) for GTA4.