Only 256^3 volume? Yuck. I had an idea for a program that I wanted to right for voxel modeling, but it definately required more resolution than that, and I don't even have a voxel accelator on hand. Time to learn more about optimization techniques.
Well, Voxels are a bit more realistic way to represent models, and they make volumetric effects easier (since volumetric effects like solids and voxels are solids). I mean, think about it. You don't consist of a bunch of surfaces, a skin surface, a heart surface, a lung surface. Rather you are made of solid materials.
I could be wrong, but I think the NV1 rendered quads instead of triangles. Not splines. Quads are often more difficult to work with, but often you only need half as many. The Saturn worked with quads also, so the NV1 was popular for Saturn ports.
An accelerated bezier patch just means that the hardware can draw bezier patches rather than just polygons. Currently, if you want bezier pathes (like the curved surfaces in Quake 3) you have to tesselate the patch into a set of polygons before the accelerator card can rendering it. The tesselation takes a lot of CPU power, so having a video card do it would be a great speed improvement. It would mean that the animated characters in games don't have to keep being so blocky.
Well, I don't know about everyone, but you pretty much listest the reasons that I haven't yet bought Quake 3 yet. I have a nice Voodoo3 card sitting at home waiting to be installed in my main computer. It isn't installed yet because XFree3 doesn't support it, and I haven't been able to get XFree4 working with the millenium card in the machine. Until I get that working I don't want to even think about putting in hardware that would break XFree3. And even when I get XFree4 working in 2D mode, I'm not looking forward to configuring stuff that requires a kernel recompile, because that always mean a week of lost time to me due to trying to get all my accesories working again.
And if I had all the hardware set up, no local stores sell the linux version, so I'd have to find a place to buy it over the internet that will take a Money Order.
Well, anytime you are dealing with 64bit numbers you'll see a speed increase. So, if you have a file system larger than can fit in a 32bit address space, you'll get some performance improvement. This is good news for file servers and database servers.
Also, the AMD 64bit CPU has twice as many registers as before, so that will help performance some. It would be a tremendous performance gain, but cache helps take some of the pain out of having to swap registers to memory.
>In response to your betamax I have a few words
>of my own. Words like Amiga, NeXT, and Apple.
Ah-ha. So the key to being sucessful in an Intel world is to produce your hot new computer using a Motorola 68k based chip. I new AMD must have been doing something wrong.
You know, like most sane people, I use C++. But I don't have any problem with GTK+ being only in C. I just go on writing my C++ code and using the C interface to GTK+. Who needs a C++ wrapper?
On a related note, using C for GTK+ was driven by more than just a love of C. It was also a practical decision because it makes it easier to use GTK with other non C programming languages, such as perl, or TCL. The only major criticism I'd have was that they didn't write a GTK-- style system simultaneously. However, I don't really care about that since I prefer my GTK+ straight anyway.
I've been through two sobriety check points. Are they covered by the same rulings as the above drug barriers? I must admit I didn't fully grill the officers on my rights, but then I wasn't the one driving either time, so I didn't want to make trouble for friends.
Just because he understood that getting arrested was a possibility doesn't mean that we should tolerate it. Your argument is like saying "you voluteer with some research group to possibly get mugged and your bitching about being mugged?" Just because a group does research on muggings, including sending people out to see if they are mugged doesn't mean that they shouldn't protest the muggings.
>By the way... Beatovens? That's a damned cool
>name for a band! I've got dibs on it!
Too late, by using it above I've claimed the rights to use it for my as of yet non existent neo-clasical group. Our second single will be Beatovens 9th, a techno reinterpretation of the popular classical song of a similar name.:)
(Ok, so I'm just bad about using spell checkers and Preview buttons.)
Why would a database be trying to keep the blobs in memory? Since blobs are already handled differently from every other type of data, why not just leave them on the disk while we're at it.
Also, if part of the client to the database you wrote an NFS server, then the path on the server could be the record idea, so imageserver.mynetwork.com/tblpictures/111113.jpg would be taken to mean to look in the tblpictures table for the record with 111113 in the key field, and return the blob field. I've never tried this with images, but I've seen it done with other file formats. Of course, this makes the assumption that we are talking about either a unix client, or a rare case where the NT machine has an NFS client on it.
If the file system is corrupted, you can kiss the data good by too sometimes. I'd think that it wouldn't be that difficult to make a databaase that can stand some corruption without losing everything. I know that access files can take some corruption and still be saved, so I always assumed that the same was true of the big boys like Oracle and Postgres.
Of course, I would think that an Object oriented database would be more appropriate here than a relational one. After all, for pictures, we are probably only talking about one table in a relational database (unless the keywords are stored in a seperate table), and an Object Oriented database might allow for more flexibility.
BLOBs don't affect the 8k row size. At least they don't on SQL server. That why we have a text field type in addition to a varchar field type. varchars must fit in the 8k limit, but text fields don't have to. The trade off is that you can't refer to text fields in the join or where or order by clauses of a SQL statement.
I'm told that Student members of the ACM (I keep meaning to send of my check) can go for free in exchange for volunteering 20 hours during the week, and that there is a discount for student members not volunteering. I really want to go one of these years, but between loss of income, school bills, and the expense of such a trip, it doesn't look like I'll be able to any time soon. Of course, it would only be worth going if I could attend the full conference.
I think it died under it's own bureucratic weight. It was a design by commitee project, and those seem to always fail. In my opinion, the best way to start an Open Source project is to put together an initial release by your self, design the architecture by yourself, and then accept code and suggestions from others, perhaps even putting together a steering commitee for the project.
Not nurbs, but other curved surfaces are increasingly useful to have. Quake3 has curved surfaces, and a game coming out this fall, Mesiah, uses curved surfaces on characters. Also, skeletal animation is helpful. That is the easy way to animate characters, and it is also increasingly used in games (it was placed briefly in Q3, but was taken back out).
From my understanding, gMax probably doesn't have anything Max doesn't, so everyone who uses Max would have no reason to switch.
Personally, I'm hoping that it will also come with significant animation tools so that I can finally make the penguin skin I've wanted to create for HalfLife. HalfLife requires Character Studio to do the job, and while my school had several copies of CS, they hadn't actually installed them anywhere.
I just read about gMax in the August issue Game Developer Magazine. Now, a magazine usually has a 2 month lead time (or Byte's editors claimed) from when it is finished to when it is shipped, so that means that gMax wasn't just pulled out of thin air. Making it free might be new though, since GDM didn't say anything about that.
Slashdot Mirror
Only 256^3 volume? Yuck. I had an idea for a program that I wanted to right for voxel modeling, but it definately required more resolution than that, and I don't even have a voxel accelator on hand. Time to learn more about optimization techniques.
BTW, the Blade Runner game released two or so years ago used Voxels for the characters and character animation.
Well, Voxels are a bit more realistic way to represent models, and they make volumetric effects easier (since volumetric effects like solids and voxels are solids). I mean, think about it. You don't consist of a bunch of surfaces, a skin surface, a heart surface, a lung surface. Rather you are made of solid materials.
I could be wrong, but I think the NV1 rendered quads instead of triangles. Not splines. Quads are often more difficult to work with, but often you only need half as many. The Saturn worked with quads also, so the NV1 was popular for Saturn ports.
An accelerated bezier patch just means that the hardware can draw bezier patches rather than just polygons. Currently, if you want bezier pathes (like the curved surfaces in Quake 3) you have to tesselate the patch into a set of polygons before the accelerator card can rendering it. The tesselation takes a lot of CPU power, so having a video card do it would be a great speed improvement. It would mean that the animated characters in games don't have to keep being so blocky.
Personally, I learned C++ from a Byte article and tearing through example code. I used C previously, and before that BASIC. I learned ASM after C++.
And when I said sane I was mostly being factious.
Well, I don't know about everyone, but you pretty much listest the reasons that I haven't yet bought Quake 3 yet. I have a nice Voodoo3 card sitting at home waiting to be installed in my main computer. It isn't installed yet because XFree3 doesn't support it, and I haven't been able to get XFree4 working with the millenium card in the machine. Until I get that working I don't want to even think about putting in hardware that would break XFree3. And even when I get XFree4 working in 2D mode, I'm not looking forward to configuring stuff that requires a kernel recompile, because that always mean a week of lost time to me due to trying to get all my accesories working again.
And if I had all the hardware set up, no local stores sell the linux version, so I'd have to find a place to buy it over the internet that will take a Money Order.
Well, anytime you are dealing with 64bit numbers you'll see a speed increase. So, if you have a file system larger than can fit in a 32bit address space, you'll get some performance improvement. This is good news for file servers and database servers.
Also, the AMD 64bit CPU has twice as many registers as before, so that will help performance some. It would be a tremendous performance gain, but cache helps take some of the pain out of having to swap registers to memory.
>In response to your betamax I have a few words
>of my own. Words like Amiga, NeXT, and Apple.
Ah-ha. So the key to being sucessful in an Intel world is to produce your hot new computer using a Motorola 68k based chip. I new AMD must have been doing something wrong.
You know, like most sane people, I use C++. But I don't have any problem with GTK+ being only in C. I just go on writing my C++ code and using the C interface to GTK+. Who needs a C++ wrapper?
On a related note, using C for GTK+ was driven by more than just a love of C. It was also a practical decision because it makes it easier to use GTK with other non C programming languages, such as perl, or TCL. The only major criticism I'd have was that they didn't write a GTK-- style system simultaneously. However, I don't really care about that since I prefer my GTK+ straight anyway.
I've been through two sobriety check points. Are they covered by the same rulings as the above drug barriers? I must admit I didn't fully grill the officers on my rights, but then I wasn't the one driving either time, so I didn't want to make trouble for friends.
Just because he understood that getting arrested was a possibility doesn't mean that we should tolerate it. Your argument is like saying "you voluteer with some research group to possibly get mugged and your bitching about being mugged?" Just because a group does research on muggings, including sending people out to see if they are mugged doesn't mean that they shouldn't protest the muggings.
>By the way... Beatovens? That's a damned cool
:)
>name for a band! I've got dibs on it!
Too late, by using it above I've claimed the rights to use it for my as of yet non existent neo-clasical group. Our second single will be Beatovens 9th, a techno reinterpretation of the popular classical song of a similar name.
(Ok, so I'm just bad about using spell checkers and Preview buttons.)
Why have 24 SCSI controllers for only 10 disks?
I'd be suprised if you couldn't change the FOV. I know you can in Quake2.
What happens if you feed that program disimilar styles of music, say Metalica, Portishead, and Beatovens 9th?
Also, if I feed the same songs in again do I get the same song out the system a second time, or is it just the same song as the first time?
Why would a database be trying to keep the blobs in memory? Since blobs are already handled differently from every other type of data, why not just leave them on the disk while we're at it.
Also, if part of the client to the database you wrote an NFS server, then the path on the server could be the record idea, so imageserver.mynetwork.com/tblpictures/111113.jpg would be taken to mean to look in the tblpictures table for the record with 111113 in the key field, and return the blob field. I've never tried this with images, but I've seen it done with other file formats. Of course, this makes the assumption that we are talking about either a unix client, or a rare case where the NT machine has an NFS client on it.
If the file system is corrupted, you can kiss the data good by too sometimes. I'd think that it wouldn't be that difficult to make a databaase that can stand some corruption without losing everything. I know that access files can take some corruption and still be saved, so I always assumed that the same was true of the big boys like Oracle and Postgres.
Of course, I would think that an Object oriented database would be more appropriate here than a relational one. After all, for pictures, we are probably only talking about one table in a relational database (unless the keywords are stored in a seperate table), and an Object Oriented database might allow for more flexibility.
BLOBs don't affect the 8k row size. At least they don't on SQL server. That why we have a text field type in addition to a varchar field type. varchars must fit in the 8k limit, but text fields don't have to. The trade off is that you can't refer to text fields in the join or where or order by clauses of a SQL statement.
But then he can't guarantee that he is using free software since about 10% of the server pool is running Windows 2000.
I'm told that Student members of the ACM (I keep meaning to send of my check) can go for free in exchange for volunteering 20 hours during the week, and that there is a discount for student members not volunteering. I really want to go one of these years, but between loss of income, school bills, and the expense of such a trip, it doesn't look like I'll be able to any time soon. Of course, it would only be worth going if I could attend the full conference.
You know, screw the mirror. I want to make a movie for the thing.
I think it died under it's own bureucratic weight. It was a design by commitee project, and those seem to always fail. In my opinion, the best way to start an Open Source project is to put together an initial release by your self, design the architecture by yourself, and then accept code and suggestions from others, perhaps even putting together a steering commitee for the project.
Not nurbs, but other curved surfaces are increasingly useful to have. Quake3 has curved surfaces, and a game coming out this fall, Mesiah, uses curved surfaces on characters. Also, skeletal animation is helpful. That is the easy way to animate characters, and it is also increasingly used in games (it was placed briefly in Q3, but was taken back out).
From my understanding, gMax probably doesn't have anything Max doesn't, so everyone who uses Max would have no reason to switch.
Personally, I'm hoping that it will also come with significant animation tools so that I can finally make the penguin skin I've wanted to create for HalfLife. HalfLife requires Character Studio to do the job, and while my school had several copies of CS, they hadn't actually installed them anywhere.
I just read about gMax in the August issue Game Developer Magazine. Now, a magazine usually has a 2 month lead time (or Byte's editors claimed) from when it is finished to when it is shipped, so that means that gMax wasn't just pulled out of thin air. Making it free might be new though, since GDM didn't say anything about that.