It depends on what kind of AI you are talking about. Path finding actually maps nicely to the GPU. AMD released a demo that showcases this by running a path finding simulation on the GPU for several tens of thousands of agents. Read all about it in Chapter 3 the Advanced Real-Time Rendering course notes from SIGGRAPH 2008.
Demo and screen shots here: Froblins Demo
I have to disagree. The lighting is by no means standard and is far more advanced than Quake1-Q3 lighting. Valve uses a directional radiosity basis for storing light on static scene surfaceses which makes it work very nicely with normal maps (standard light maps don't have this property). Valve also stores volumetric lighting using what they call an "ambient cube" basis, this is a lot like the irradiance volume which is used for accelerating offline rendering and has no equivalent in any Quake or Doom. You can read all about the interesting lighting techniques they're using in Gary McTaggart's 2004 GDC presentation.
This volume is static in the sense that it's precomputed but it's used for dynamic lighting in the sense that characters/objects can move through the volume and are lit dynamically. Doom3 on the other hand is using fairly vanilla real-time lighting techniques... per-pixel Phong lighting, while it works and looks just fine, has been used for interactive graphics for a few years now. Doom3's stencil shadow volumes were all the rage for a while but aren't so popular these days because they tend to have fairly nasty performance characteristics (and there really is no such thing as a hard shadow in the real world... light sources aren't infinitely small).
Anyway, both games look great, I'm certainly not trying to slam anyone here... I just wanted to point out that your statement:
...but its doing nothing new or revolutionary. The future has to be engines like Doom3 even though the computers of today are maybe not quite upto the point of realising that potential.
isn't true at all. HL2 *is* doing stuff that's new and revolutionary and in my opinion this is the direction many game developers will be going.
This technique (tie camera to kite, tie kite to hand) was used to do some interesting image based modeling work by Paul Debevec, he flew his kite around the UC Berkley campus then later used the images to reconstruct 3D models of various buildings. Check it out: Paul Debevec's Campanile Movie.
"the water effects used in Super Mario Sunshine, cel shading effects used in Zelda, or the rippling water effects on Dead or Alive 3."
The gamecube doesn't have shader hardware, it uses a fixed function approach with many texture stages. Granted, the flexibility afforded by a dozen or so texture stages is similar to simple pixel shader hardware but there are still fundamental differences (particularly in the ability to do texture indirection) that make real shaders far more flexible. The first two games mentioned above don't use shaders at all... this guy should do a bit more research.
Practically, ATI should just get out of the graphics market. Or at the very least, stop trying to push standards, and write decent drivers.
ATI's drivers are very good... when's the last time you gave an ATI product a try? I've been using a Radeon7500 and Radeon8500 and I never have any problems with the drivers. Also, what does "trying to push standards" mean? Isn't this what nVidia is doing with Cg?? How is ATI pushing standards?
but that it's from a company with a history of being OpenSource-friendly
And ATI is not open source friendly?? I'm running my Radeon8500 under linux with full 3d acceleration... sounds pretty friendly to me:)
Re:Not as great as it sounds for OpenGL 2.0
on
Doom3 and OpenGL2.0
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· Score: 1
Implementing a driver that only supports a subset of OpenGL2.0's functionality sounds just about as complex as implementing the entire API (this is particularly true for GL2.0 as it is currently spec'd). That being said, it would be a foolish move to develop a "DOOM3 GL" driver when it is inevitable that we'll be seeing a flood of new games using the Doom3 engine and these new games will probably extend and modify the GL2.0 rendering paths thus breaking any "just enough" drivers.
well, this is certainly a cool game and i'm glad to see it finally hit shelves but if you would like to see some bleeding edge rendering techniques in the field of real-time graphics then go check out the ATI launch demos. these demos were just posted today (a few hours ago i think). you will need a Radeon8500 to run the demos. personally i find the nature demo to be the most interesting, the water looks comparable to what you might see in a pre-rendered sequence. also, the skin in the rachel demo (rendering nice looking skin is a classic computer graphics problem) looks pretty close to what you might see in the final fantasy film... except at real-time frame rates. of course my opinion is more than a bit biased.:)
Check out this Tron constume! Now that is a cool thing to wear every day, not just Halloween;) Turns out that megarad.com is actually a pretty cool site.
so ati has put game specific optimizations into the driver... isn't this a good thing? isn't it better than no optimizations? this isn't the fist time this has happened, nVidia has a bunch of application specific optimizations in their drivers but no one complains about that. it just seems to me that people are so eager to critisize ATI that they are willing to accuse them of doing something evil when in fact this was done to give the users a better gaming experience. also, there are a lot of folks complaining about the drivers for the R8500 and comparing these drivers to nVidia's current drivers... this also confuses me. no one complained when the initial geforce3 drivers sucked but now that ati has a new product people expect the drivers to be perfect right out of the starting gate.
wow, the ati radeon7500 performs almost as well as a geforce3 in those performance reviews. pretty sweet considering the 7500 is basically free when compared to the price of a gf3!
$50,000 isn't so bad when you consider that you sell the kidneys and make that back almost immediatly... and then everything else that you chop off and put on ebay is strictly profit!
ofcourse if cloning is too upsetting for you, then you can always stick to the old fashioned way of making money:
I guess you're right, but then again what is real? Newtonian Mechanics may not be real, but it's a fairly decent model. Simulating water geometry with a spring lattice isn't "real" but as long as it achieves the desired effect, what's the difference?
no, the people with the money are the majority and this rarely has anything to do with the will of the masses. i still don't think this guy was right to use violence though. he'll now go to jail where he can accomplish nothing... one vandalized fast food restaurant does little to put multi-national corporations in check.
he wants to open source the project but is looking for helping coming up with a "good argument" for his boss?! man, open source is not the end all and be all... how could you decide that open sourcing would be a good idea if you can't even come up with one single reason on your own as to why it would be advantageous?
copyrighting a particular musiclal style doesn't make much sense in that a student often picks up on his/her teacher's style.
also, a style can be influenced by a particular artist, would this mean that songs would need to have a bibliography of sorts, citing the influential artists?
and besides, if style becomes protected under copyright, what's next?? artists will copyright the actual act of playing a particular instrument?
i've also experienced this problem. netscape will lock uness i use the edit/paste command. if i say highlight text on a webpage and then try and paste it to an email (using netscape mail) using the middle mouse button, netscape will often choke.
i think this is problem with netscape however as i have experienced the problem on several different unices and several different X servers.
I believe this was on slashdot alittle while ago... The technique involves using two lcd screens (one on tope of the other) and alternating scan lines on each (i believe). originally you needed to keep your head in the correct possition to make the effect work... it seems that they've just added a head tracker to allow users to move their head.
i'm not so sure that i would be comfortable with a laser "painting" anything directly onto my retina... low powered or not! i would hate to see what a power surge would do to a person:)
also, what if you had a pair of these glasses and you switched them with someone elses glasses. that person might be alittle suprised to find themself in the middle of a quake battle when they were only trying to read the morning paper... talk about a bad trip:)
but see this is how everyone used these two words (well, everyone that i knew) back in the day. back when all i had was an apple IIc, crackers were known only as "those people who defeated copy protection on games." so, go figure. from my point of view everyone here is screwy and i'm the only one that has it right:)
Slashdot Mirror
Do you want to use this to handle AI?
It depends on what kind of AI you are talking about. Path finding actually maps nicely to the GPU. AMD released a demo that showcases this by running a path finding simulation on the GPU for several tens of thousands of agents. Read all about it in Chapter 3 the Advanced Real-Time Rendering course notes from SIGGRAPH 2008. Demo and screen shots here: Froblins Demo
All of ATI's presenations are availble as streaming video if anyone is interested: http://www.ati.com/developer/gdc_video.html
Or you can just download the slides in PDF form:
http://www.ati.com/developer/techpapers.html
This technique (tie camera to kite, tie kite to hand) was used to do some interesting image based modeling work by Paul Debevec, he flew his kite around the UC Berkley campus then later used the images to reconstruct 3D models of various buildings. Check it out: Paul Debevec's Campanile Movie.
"the water effects used in Super Mario Sunshine, cel shading effects used in Zelda, or the rippling water effects on Dead or Alive 3."
The gamecube doesn't have shader hardware, it uses a fixed function approach with many texture stages. Granted, the flexibility afforded by a dozen or so texture stages is similar to simple pixel shader hardware but there are still fundamental differences (particularly in the ability to do texture indirection) that make real shaders far more flexible. The first two games mentioned above don't use shaders at all... this guy should do a bit more research.
yes, turn on your monitor and watch what is being drawn.
Practically, ATI should just get out of the graphics market. Or at the very least, stop trying to push standards, and write decent drivers.
:)
ATI's drivers are very good... when's the last time you gave an ATI product a try? I've been using a Radeon7500 and Radeon8500 and I never have any problems with the drivers. Also, what does "trying to push standards" mean? Isn't this what nVidia is doing with Cg?? How is ATI pushing standards?
but that it's from a company with a history of being OpenSource-friendly
And ATI is not open source friendly?? I'm running my Radeon8500 under linux with full 3d acceleration... sounds pretty friendly to me
Implementing a driver that only supports a subset of OpenGL2.0's functionality sounds just about as complex as implementing the entire API (this is particularly true for GL2.0 as it is currently spec'd). That being said, it would be a foolish move to develop a "DOOM3 GL" driver when it is inevitable that we'll be seeing a flood of new games using the Doom3 engine and these new games will probably extend and modify the GL2.0 rendering paths thus breaking any "just enough" drivers.
i you're willing to pay, then you can buy the firegl/radeon8800 card. this has all the features of the r8500 and comes with excellent linux drivers.
well, this is certainly a cool game and i'm glad to see it finally hit shelves but if you would like to see some bleeding edge rendering techniques in the field of real-time graphics then go check out the ATI launch demos. these demos were just posted today (a few hours ago i think). you will need a Radeon8500 to run the demos. personally i find the nature demo to be the most interesting, the water looks comparable to what you might see in a pre-rendered sequence. also, the skin in the rachel demo (rendering nice looking skin is a classic computer graphics problem) looks pretty close to what you might see in the final fantasy film... except at real-time frame rates. of course my opinion is more than a bit biased. :)
Check out this Tron constume! Now that is a cool thing to wear every day, not just Halloween ;) Turns out that megarad.com is actually a pretty cool site.
so ati has put game specific optimizations into the driver... isn't this a good thing? isn't it better than no optimizations? this isn't the fist time this has happened, nVidia has a bunch of application specific optimizations in their drivers but no one complains about that. it just seems to me that people are so eager to critisize ATI that they are willing to accuse them of doing something evil when in fact this was done to give the users a better gaming experience. also, there are a lot of folks complaining about the drivers for the R8500 and comparing these drivers to nVidia's current drivers... this also confuses me. no one complained when the initial geforce3 drivers sucked but now that ati has a new product people expect the drivers to be perfect right out of the starting gate.
wow, the ati radeon7500 performs almost as well as a geforce3 in those performance reviews. pretty sweet considering the 7500 is basically free when compared to the price of a gf3!
$50,000 isn't so bad when you consider that you sell the kidneys and make that back almost immediatly... and then everything else that you chop off and put on ebay is strictly profit!
ofcourse if cloning is too upsetting for you, then you can always stick to the old fashioned way of making money:
step 1: steal underpants
step 2: ????
step 3: profit!
I guess you're right, but then again what is real? Newtonian Mechanics may not be real, but it's a fairly decent model. Simulating water geometry with a spring lattice isn't "real" but as long as it achieves the desired effect, what's the difference?
no, the people with the money are the majority and this rarely has anything to do with the will of the masses. i still don't think this guy was right to use violence though. he'll now go to jail where he can accomplish nothing... one vandalized fast food restaurant does little to put multi-national corporations in check.
he wants to open source the project but is looking for helping coming up with a "good argument" for his boss?! man, open source is not the end all and be all... how could you decide that open sourcing would be a good idea if you can't even come up with one single reason on your own as to why it would be advantageous?
Do you predict the devopment and acceptance of a Unifying Theory in the next decade or two?
just some thoughts:
copyrighting a particular musiclal style doesn't make much sense in that a student often picks up on his/her teacher's style.
also, a style can be influenced by a particular artist, would this mean that songs would need to have a bibliography of sorts, citing the influential artists?
and besides, if style becomes protected under copyright, what's next?? artists will copyright the actual act of playing a particular instrument?
i've also experienced this problem. netscape will lock uness i use the edit/paste command. if i say highlight text on a webpage and then try and paste it to an email (using netscape mail) using the middle mouse button, netscape will often choke.
i think this is problem with netscape however as i have experienced the problem on several different unices and several different X servers.
hmmm... i wonder if someday sgi will buy va, that would be an interesting occurance....
I believe this was on slashdot alittle while ago... The technique involves using two lcd screens (one on tope of the other) and alternating scan lines on each (i believe). originally you needed to keep your head in the correct possition to make the effect work... it seems that they've just added a head tracker to allow users to move their head.
i'm not so sure that i would be comfortable with a laser "painting" anything directly onto my retina... low powered or not! i would hate to see what a power surge would do to a person :)
:)
also, what if you had a pair of these glasses and you switched them with someone elses glasses. that person might be alittle suprised to find themself in the middle of a quake battle when they were only trying to read the morning paper... talk about a bad trip
but see this is how everyone used these two words (well, everyone that i knew) back in the day. back when all i had was an apple IIc, crackers were known only as "those people who defeated copy protection on games." so, go figure. from my point of view everyone here is screwy and i'm the only one that has it right :)
i've always understood hacker/cracker in this same way. that's why you download a "crack" when you want to disable copyright protection.