thats what I said. "...3d interfaces aren't that fast. " Interface design revolves around the user getting from decision to execution in the least ammount of time ie: fewest clicks, shortest mouse moves and least time waiting. walking or flying in 3space would take some time that is far more easily and quickly done with a more detailed direction command (an URL for example) I think that the only reason people want this is cause it sounds cool. I actually wrote a 3d shell program for windows but it was damn tedious to use. I ended up having a command prompt to do all the navigating. The only 3d bit was that the windows were in a sphere all around you. The window is practical and there is almost no better way of presenting data.
The major goal of any 3d engine is to limit the the number of polygons drawn per frame in order to maintain a high framerate. As your world gets larger the potential number of visible polygons grows and grows until you are left with somthing that will take a long time to render. This of course, is unnaceptable. The solution is to develop algorithms that can effectively restrict the visible set allowing all the data to filtered depending on what is visible. The binary space partion tree (BSP) works by determing where in space the camera is and narrowing down the list of polygons to a manageable number. Of course this means that for each leaf in the tree (read: concave subspace) a list of all the polygons is kept with 1 bit per poly. 1 is visible, 0 is not.
This works great for mid sized data sets, but If you were to get a online virtual world ala snowcrash, the sheer size of the data set would be an encumberance, and a BSP tree would be even more ridiculous since it actually adds more polygons by splitting polygons that intersect the planes it uses to build subspaces. A bsp won't stream either, since you need the entire data set to render something.
Portals on the other hand are much better for this lofty goal. The way a portal works is rather simple. Take to concave subspaces (say two cubes) that share a face. That shared face is a portal from one subspace to the other. Now from within one cube, all you have to draw are the 6 faces. if you notice that the portal face is visible then you know you have to draw the subspace that the portal is connected too. This is great because you don't need a full data set to start drawing. you only need to know which cell you are in to begin with. moving from one cell to the next is simply a matter of going through the portal. To stream this, you start in your home cell and every time you hit a portal that you don't have a cell for, your computer can download the geometry of the new cell as well as the web addresses of any portals that it points to.
The only problem I can see with portals right now is how to build the cells properly. Right now lots of games use BSP trees to build a whole bunch of concave subspaces (the cells) and use the tree to determine what face of each cell is touching another. Another problem is that as your data set gets bigger, your cell's volume drops to the point where you have more cells than polys to begin with and you're stuck with large data set again.
You can't use an infite data set to build a bsp and it would take several ages of the universe to build an optimized one. If someone can come up with a method of building cells easily while making them contain a decent amount of detail(ie make them large and just ignore detail geometry inside of them), we'd have snowcrash in no time. That and 3d interfaces aren't that fast. Imagine walking from slashdot to google!
I don't think anybody would pay to have these games recorded on DVD. Releasing the demos is good enough and if people edited in extra cammera angles it'd be great. These events are too infrequent to be a regular thing on television. It'd be a special rather than an ongoing affair. Besides the only people interested in it right now are the ones that follow the online converage or go to quakecon itselft. That kinda defeats the purpose of putting it on tv.
I can't seriously see this kind of thing as the newest type of sporting event. I think that baseball and football are really boring (too much waiting, unlike hockey or motorsports), but I'd still go to a game with my buddies simply to socialize and cheer on my city.
This kind of event is so out of touch and inacessable in the 'real world'. There are one or two annual tournaments that are always held far away. Maybe I'm just a little conservative, but I think that the geographical and club style is good for sports. Something for a local to be proud of and it gets the spectator more involved, "That's MY team that just won!" etc.
These tourneys are fun, but it's just a really good bunch of players battling it out amongst themselves. When I watch the olympics, I cheer for team Canada, when I watch quake matches I can't really make a decision who I'd root for, only that one person's skill is madder than the others. Anyway, just a thought.
The light pollution map
on
Meteor Showers
·
· Score: 4, Informative
This is a great oppurtunity to make use of that light pollution map that was just posted a couple articles ago It's a damn shame that my part o' the map is a big bright white spot. I guess I won't be seeing to many meteors. However, the beautiful colours of all the light bouncing off the pollution in my highly developed area might just make up for it!
I remember that demos were the reason I started coding and the reason I still code is cause I litteraly get a buzz out of it. There is nothing more satisfying than having your own creation spinning and pulsing on the screen in realtime, pushing your hardware to the limit and knowing that the 3d object on your screen is something inifitely more substantial and real than a database. It's instant gratification, and when others see it and marvel, it is something to be proud of.
I can't imagine getting excited about some sort of finance package, but I vividly remember that the first time I got output from my raytracer it was 5 am after a long night coding and I was shouting w00t! for about an hour, jumping up and down and bouncing off of walls. Man I wish I still had as much time as I did back then.
Re:Why aren't there more demos for Linux?
on
The Assembly In Review
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
Back in the day, demos were attached to cracked games advertising the cracker/coder's skill. Eventually they got so big that they split from the cracking scene and were made just for the heck of it. Since all of the games were made mostly for pc and amiga, thats where the demos were. During any competition, like assembly, there is always a presentation machine with set specs that are told to all the groups. As is traditional, the box was usually a dos one. More recently a windows box with a certain 3d card. If the game industry were to suddenly switch to linux, thats were most of the newer demos would start popping up.
If I recall correctly, mad onion's 3dmark 2000 payed a large tribute to this demo with the final bit. I think it was called "Final Reality" a google search will find it. The music was the same and it had a large 3d sequence from the original. It's not the whole thing, but it's still good stuff.
assembly refers to a gathering of people, not the language. Most of the regular demos are c/c++ with bits of assembler for optimization, the 4k and 64k compos are almost all 100% pure hand written assembly. There's also java and a couple other languages. Maybe there ought to be a perl compo, I code for windoze, so I don't really know.
It's a real shame that hornet shutdown 3 years ago. Shure the sites still up, but they don't have any of the new stuff. Any time I ever start reminiscing about Robotnik by Rage, I fire it up and go download it. However,
www.scene.org has pretty much taken over.
I'm not saying they won't become lard asses. Just that they'll be lardasses with some basic computer skills. I never saw "skilled in the use of infra red remote controls" on anyone's resume.
I remember way back when in the late eighties when all the experts were afraid of the blue screened babysitter, the television. All youth is suffering from mindrot! They don't do anything!! They are all gonna become overwhieght commie hippies and die young!
At least this way, you might just pick up some tcp on the way, maybe learn how to set a massive pr0n ftp.
you don't want to move to Canada for the television since most of what we have is piped up from the U.S. The actual Canadian content really sucks too. I suggest looking for those gems on tv and ignoring the rest. Television producers need money too and they'll get rid of the shows we love to hate.
Also, I can also proudly say I've never even seen a realyity show.
The guy didn't know. He wanted to be a comedian, and he was desperate. If I recall the story, he went to an "interview" hosted by some television producers, and out of many applicants, he was chosen. They stuck him in the appartment, told him to strip, locked him in, told him the rules and never said anything else.
Re:Ha! Metric unit of mass is still a chunk of met
on
Uncle Sam's Funhouse
·
· Score: 1
Slightly off topic but still relevant, I remember back in highschool my physics teacher explaining that up here in Canada we used to use something other than 60hz for our AC electricty mains. After the system was established, it was realized that the system was giving people headaches because of the flicker on lights etc.
This prompted a need to change it, of course everyone already had clocks designed for whatever sort of current there was. In order to alleviate any problems with faster clocks, the government ordered a whole bunch of trucks full of clocks to go out and have people trade in their old ones.
If you think that this is off topic, youd be right, except for the fact that it shows what a headache changing an entrenched system can be. And this is only for clocks!!!
Re:Ha! Metric unit of mass is still a chunk of met
on
Uncle Sam's Funhouse
·
· Score: 1
Slightly off topic but still relevant, I remember back in highschool my physics teacher explaining that up here in Canada we used to use something other than 60hz for our AC electricty mains. After the system was established, it was realized that the system was giving people headaches because of the flicker on lights etc.
This prompted a need to change it, of course everyone already had clocks designed for whatever sort of current there was. In order to alleviate any problems with faster clocks, the government ordered a whole bunch of trucks full of clocks to go out and have people trade in their old ones.
If you think that this is off topic, youd be right, except for the fact that it shows what a headache changing an entrenched system can be. And this is only for clocks!!!
If the press is truly free, then it can present content and news in any fashion it sees fit. If humourous news reaches a larger audience, more power to them. They profit and people are better informed. A win on both sides.
Remember back in the days of Second Reality by Future Crew and groups like Orange et all.
If you can find the source to a demo, you can witness some truely awe inspiring code. www.scene.org
These people squeezed every last clock cycle out of those old 386's. Most people didn't think it was possible. I know I didn't back then.
From what I gathered, the HD takes incoming data and XOR's it with a key built into that drive. When data is copied from one drive to another, things go wrong because when the time comes to decrypt the data, and you have the wrong key, (its a different drive now) things go all haywire and you're left with the digital equivalent of static.
At least that's what I made of that 'interesting'
interview
This is not Motion blur. I don't see any streaking or smearing effect that you'd get from a true motion blur. I've coded it once before and it damn expensive computationaly, that was for a raytracer too. What we have here is a cheap hack where previous frames are given a low alpha and a redrawn over new ones. I think that's where the ghosts come from. I challenge them to produce high fps screenshots involving snap turn of 180 degress in a fraction of a second. Seeing 4 ghosts of the character is what I bet will show up, Of course if a smear of color shows up, well then, lets talk. But until then, insane framerates will do for us what 3dfx cannot. Motion blur.
How do they plan to diferentiate between voice and data? I use stuff like roger wilco and battlefield communicator to talk to my friends who are outside the local telephone area. Point is that what real difference is there between a packet of data containing voice and say, chunks of a random bitmap? I don't think there's much. Let them try. All they could do is write their own client and charge for that. Of course no one is stupid enough to pay for that....
Slashdot Mirror
thats what I said. "...3d interfaces aren't that fast. " Interface design revolves around the user getting from decision to execution in the least ammount of time ie: fewest clicks, shortest mouse moves and least time waiting. walking or flying in 3space would take some time that is far more easily and quickly done with a more detailed direction command (an URL for example) I think that the only reason people want this is cause it sounds cool. I actually wrote a 3d shell program for windows but it was damn tedious to use. I ended up having a command prompt to do all the navigating. The only 3d bit was that the windows were in a sphere all around you. The window is practical and there is almost no better way of presenting data.
Portals on the other hand are much better for this lofty goal. The way a portal works is rather simple. Take to concave subspaces (say two cubes) that share a face. That shared face is a portal from one subspace to the other. Now from within one cube, all you have to draw are the 6 faces. if you notice that the portal face is visible then you know you have to draw the subspace that the portal is connected too. This is great because you don't need a full data set to start drawing. you only need to know which cell you are in to begin with. moving from one cell to the next is simply a matter of going through the portal. To stream this, you start in your home cell and every time you hit a portal that you don't have a cell for, your computer can download the geometry of the new cell as well as the web addresses of any portals that it points to.
The only problem I can see with portals right now is how to build the cells properly. Right now lots of games use BSP trees to build a whole bunch of concave subspaces (the cells) and use the tree to determine what face of each cell is touching another. Another problem is that as your data set gets bigger, your cell's volume drops to the point where you have more cells than polys to begin with and you're stuck with large data set again.
You can't use an infite data set to build a bsp and it would take several ages of the universe to build an optimized one. If someone can come up with a method of building cells easily while making them contain a decent amount of detail(ie make them large and just ignore detail geometry inside of them), we'd have snowcrash in no time. That and 3d interfaces aren't that fast. Imagine walking from slashdot to google!
I don't think anybody would pay to have these games recorded on DVD. Releasing the demos is good enough and if people edited in extra cammera angles it'd be great. These events are too infrequent to be a regular thing on television. It'd be a special rather than an ongoing affair. Besides the only people interested in it right now are the ones that follow the online converage or go to quakecon itselft. That kinda defeats the purpose of putting it on tv.
I can't seriously see this kind of thing as the newest type of sporting event. I think that baseball and football are really boring (too much waiting, unlike hockey or motorsports), but I'd still go to a game with my buddies simply to socialize and cheer on my city. This kind of event is so out of touch and inacessable in the 'real world'. There are one or two annual tournaments that are always held far away. Maybe I'm just a little conservative, but I think that the geographical and club style is good for sports. Something for a local to be proud of and it gets the spectator more involved, "That's MY team that just won!" etc. These tourneys are fun, but it's just a really good bunch of players battling it out amongst themselves. When I watch the olympics, I cheer for team Canada, when I watch quake matches I can't really make a decision who I'd root for, only that one person's skill is madder than the others. Anyway, just a thought.
This is a great oppurtunity to make use of that light pollution map that was just posted a couple articles ago It's a damn shame that my part o' the map is a big bright white spot. I guess I won't be seeing to many meteors. However, the beautiful colours of all the light bouncing off the pollution in my highly developed area might just make up for it!
I remember that demos were the reason I started coding and the reason I still code is cause I litteraly get a buzz out of it. There is nothing more satisfying than having your own creation spinning and pulsing on the screen in realtime, pushing your hardware to the limit and knowing that the 3d object on your screen is something inifitely more substantial and real than a database. It's instant gratification, and when others see it and marvel, it is something to be proud of. I can't imagine getting excited about some sort of finance package, but I vividly remember that the first time I got output from my raytracer it was 5 am after a long night coding and I was shouting w00t! for about an hour, jumping up and down and bouncing off of walls. Man I wish I still had as much time as I did back then.
Back in the day, demos were attached to cracked games advertising the cracker/coder's skill. Eventually they got so big that they split from the cracking scene and were made just for the heck of it. Since all of the games were made mostly for pc and amiga, thats where the demos were. During any competition, like assembly, there is always a presentation machine with set specs that are told to all the groups. As is traditional, the box was usually a dos one. More recently a windows box with a certain 3d card. If the game industry were to suddenly switch to linux, thats were most of the newer demos would start popping up.
If I recall correctly, mad onion's 3dmark 2000 payed a large tribute to this demo with the final bit. I think it was called "Final Reality" a google search will find it. The music was the same and it had a large 3d sequence from the original. It's not the whole thing, but it's still good stuff.
assembly refers to a gathering of people, not the language. Most of the regular demos are c/c++ with bits of assembler for optimization, the 4k and 64k compos are almost all 100% pure hand written assembly. There's also java and a couple other languages. Maybe there ought to be a perl compo, I code for windoze, so I don't really know.
A whole lot of the competition is mp3s and images. A couple of the demos are also in video format, so you won't be left out completely.
It's a real shame that hornet shutdown 3 years ago. Shure the sites still up, but they don't have any of the new stuff. Any time I ever start reminiscing about Robotnik by Rage, I fire it up and go download it. However, www.scene.org has pretty much taken over.
I'm not saying they won't become lard asses. Just that they'll be lardasses with some basic computer skills. I never saw "skilled in the use of infra red remote controls" on anyone's resume.
I remember way back when in the late eighties when all the experts were afraid of the blue screened babysitter, the television. All youth is suffering from mindrot! They don't do anything!! They are all gonna become overwhieght commie hippies and die young! At least this way, you might just pick up some tcp on the way, maybe learn how to set a massive pr0n ftp.
you don't want to move to Canada for the television since most of what we have is piped up from the U.S. The actual Canadian content really sucks too. I suggest looking for those gems on tv and ignoring the rest. Television producers need money too and they'll get rid of the shows we love to hate. Also, I can also proudly say I've never even seen a realyity show.
The guy didn't know. He wanted to be a comedian, and he was desperate. If I recall the story, he went to an "interview" hosted by some television producers, and out of many applicants, he was chosen. They stuck him in the appartment, told him to strip, locked him in, told him the rules and never said anything else.
Slightly off topic but still relevant, I remember back in highschool my physics teacher explaining that up here in Canada we used to use something other than 60hz for our AC electricty mains. After the system was established, it was realized that the system was giving people headaches because of the flicker on lights etc. This prompted a need to change it, of course everyone already had clocks designed for whatever sort of current there was. In order to alleviate any problems with faster clocks, the government ordered a whole bunch of trucks full of clocks to go out and have people trade in their old ones. If you think that this is off topic, youd be right, except for the fact that it shows what a headache changing an entrenched system can be. And this is only for clocks!!!
Slightly off topic but still relevant, I remember back in highschool my physics teacher explaining that up here in Canada we used to use something other than 60hz for our AC electricty mains. After the system was established, it was realized that the system was giving people headaches because of the flicker on lights etc. This prompted a need to change it, of course everyone already had clocks designed for whatever sort of current there was. In order to alleviate any problems with faster clocks, the government ordered a whole bunch of trucks full of clocks to go out and have people trade in their old ones. If you think that this is off topic, youd be right, except for the fact that it shows what a headache changing an entrenched system can be. And this is only for clocks!!!
If the press is truly free, then it can present content and news in any fashion it sees fit. If humourous news reaches a larger audience, more power to them. They profit and people are better informed. A win on both sides.
Remember back in the days of Second Reality by Future Crew and groups like Orange et all. If you can find the source to a demo, you can witness some truely awe inspiring code. www.scene.org These people squeezed every last clock cycle out of those old 386's. Most people didn't think it was possible. I know I didn't back then.
The Tao of Programming Read this to understand what makes good code.
From what I gathered, the HD takes incoming data and XOR's it with a key built into that drive. When data is copied from one drive to another, things go wrong because when the time comes to decrypt the data, and you have the wrong key, (its a different drive now) things go all haywire and you're left with the digital equivalent of static. At least that's what I made of that 'interesting' interview
This is not Motion blur. I don't see any streaking or smearing effect that you'd get from a true motion blur. I've coded it once before and it damn expensive computationaly, that was for a raytracer too. What we have here is a cheap hack where previous frames are given a low alpha and a redrawn over new ones. I think that's where the ghosts come from. I challenge them to produce high fps screenshots involving snap turn of 180 degress in a fraction of a second. Seeing 4 ghosts of the character is what I bet will show up, Of course if a smear of color shows up, well then, lets talk. But until then, insane framerates will do for us what 3dfx cannot. Motion blur.
How do they plan to diferentiate between voice and data? I use stuff like roger wilco and battlefield communicator to talk to my friends who are outside the local telephone area. Point is that what real difference is there between a packet of data containing voice and say, chunks of a random bitmap? I don't think there's much. Let them try. All they could do is write their own client and charge for that. Of course no one is stupid enough to pay for that....