> The interior of the car is lit, so the interior doesn't really pass through shadow.
That's true, if the car's window is completely transparent, but for a translucent surface, it reflects/scatters part of the light itself. So, while the car's interior shining through the window remains unchanged (since it's seperately lit), the windows own reflection/scattering of the light changes when it moves through the shadow. The less transparent (think dirty glass) the material, the more noticable the effect will be.
Translucent surfaces are usually rendered src * alpha + dst * (1-alpha), where dst is the part behind the window, and src is the windows own color. alpha specifies the degree of transparency, i.e. an alpha of 1.0 is completely opaque.
Since translucent surfaces usually are rendered *after* all the opaque geometry has been drawn, I can only guess that the doom3 engine doesn't bother with shadows at that stage anymore.
Has anybody noticed the graphics glitch after about 47 seconds, where you have an outside view of the facility and a mono-rail? It seems to me that even though the mono-rail car passes through shadows, the translucent window isn't shadowed at all! I think it should at least darken a bit...
Any graphics guys care to comment?
- Andreas
Re:How far back are we talking?
on
An IMDb for Books
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
> But books have been printed for thousands of years.
Written, perhaps. But most are lost, because they were only available as hand-made copies, limiting distribution severly. Wide distribution of books was only made possible by Gutenberg's press, first used in 1452, to print a couple of bible extracts in larger (> 100) numbers.
Once a router is compromised, identification is of no use. Identification only prohibits 'spoofing', e.g. sending a router invalid data from a third host, masquerading as a neighboring router, which is pretty difficult to pull off.
There's a reason for this. Writing games is abismally hard. You need a whole team of people (programmer, game designer, texture artist, modeller, sound artist, musician) *from the beginning*. Otherwise your game won't catch any interest.
Also, don't expect your users to provide any support from the programming side. You'll have to be very lucky to get any usable patches.
I know a bit about what I'm talking, I've written a fairly successful game (though it's rather limited in gameplay). I was lucky in a way that the art I use in the game was either easy to replace by users (textures) or was already lying around (people had already built 3d models of tron vehicles) so that was only a matter of integration. However, obtaining decent sound effects has proven to be much much harder, and I'm still not happy with the currect state of affairs.
Nonetheless, writing games can be very rewarding (I get a lot of fan mail), so don't let that stop you.
- Andreas
I wish they linked the printable article
on
Pacebook Tablet PC
·
· Score: 1
I build the win32 binaries for my (GPL'd 3D tron style lightcycle) game on linux. It's really just a matter of running the 'cross-configure.sh' and 'cross-make.sh' script. Ray Kelm has an excellent page on cross-compiling.
Thanks to SDL & OpenGL the same source code is used for all four supported platforms (Linux, Win32, MacOS9, MacOSX). There's still the odd #ifdef for things like reading directories, but that's about it.
*
This proposal will eventually be burried, like so many other proposals from our ministers. A green party minister once suggested to close our national airport at night because of noise-problems. It's like all ministers agreed to each get a week in which they can try to step into the light by making the silliest possible suggestions. I'd suggest not paying too much attention to it.
Funny, our national airport (Zurich, Switzerland)
is actually closed at night, so people can sleep.
And, since Swissair is actually bankrupt (so is Sabena, Belgiums airline), the no-flights period has even been lengthened by an hour.
Maybe the idea isn't that stupid (note: the bankruptcy has nothing to do with the no-night-time flight policy).
Language barrier? Learn mandarin (the standard
chinese, already a second language to many many chinese. There's dozens of dialoects/languages spoken
in China (cantonese, hakka, wu, min etc.).
And since kanji is a language independent alphabet, you can communicate with people that
don't even speak the same language as you.
In 2016, as part of the new anti-terror bills flying through congress, every American must have a gps tracking device implanted "for security purposes".
Shouldn't that be every terrorist must hast a gps tracking device implanted.
These could be delivered to them along with the new backdoored encryption softare
The thing that's most dangerous to any system,
is lack of diversity. If every router runs cisco IOS, if every webserver runs IIS (or apache), if every mail server runs sendmail, the potential
for disaster is HUGE.
What is a problem for IT is an even greater problem for agriculture. Rice and corn diversity have greatly decreased, which leads to serious risks, putting especially developing coutries in danger. One parasite/desease could destroy the entire harvest.
Of course, large companies like Monsanto deny this and keep pushing their products and binding customers with highly dubious tactics, like their terminator technology (sounds familiar?).
The keystrokes optained where used to recover
the passwords that protected the valuable data.
So the password doesn't need to count as evidence,
only the data that was recovered. Their keystroke
logger could have been a hidden camera, for all
we know, or they simply guessed the pass phrase
and got lucky.
Revealing that they guessed the password (Don Corleone's daughter's birthday) could put further
use in jeopardy, since criminals would actually
start to use *clever* passwords!
You can get GCC for windows (and it works well). THere is no law against developing free software for windows. Poeple just *aren't doing it*
It's even easier than that. You don't even need windows to build an app for it. Just cross-compile for it. The SDL homepage provides an excellent
setup script, and after that it's just cross-configure.sh && cross-make.sh.
I'm building my windows binaries for GLtron for over a year now, without having to mess with VC++
- Andreas
we don't need 'special' features
on
ATi Radeon 8500
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
From the article at tomshardware.com:
Let me not forget that the multi-sampling support of Radeon 8500 also allows so extremely important stuff as depth-of-field or motion blur.
Yeah sure, but does anyone remember the t-buffer?
The voodoo5 had those, and I don't think any major
developer used it.
Developers will always keep per-card-programming to a minimum and simple *ignore* those special FX features. It's not 'this effect, and that effect' that is important, but stuff that leads generally improved image quality (think Doom3, which does the lighting identical for every element in the scene)
But window, input, thread and audio management are the least of my problems when moving to X-Box or PS2... I have to rewrite my whole graphics pipeline!
I'm currently preparing to port my game GLtron to the SEGA dreamcast, and believe me, dealing with windowing, input, i/o and audio is the hardest
part. Without libraries, it requires in-debt knowledge of the system you're porting to.
Compared to that, keeping your graphics stuff somewhat API independent is fairly easy. In my (simple) case, it's just setting up some blending modes & texture states, and then send the vertices to the card.
I think I can answer that:
SDL was written long before the PSX2 came into
existance. It has *nothing* to do with circumventing any fees *or linux*. It's all about
*cross-platform* multi-media. Also, SDL doesn't focus on games. Many media players and emulators
use SDL and it's helper libraries.
- Andreas
GLtron: cross-platform gaming on Linux, Win32, MacOS, MacOS X. Soon with networking
Maybe I'm an idiot, but precisely how does DeCSS support these illegal acts?
Sorry to interrupt with a fact: You need DeCSS (or any other 'unauthorized' DVD decription scheme) to convert DVD movies to more easily distributable formats (like DiVX, the hacked Microsoft MPEG4 codec). DVD burners are still $$$ (at least the media is), but blank CD's are cheap.
DiVX movies ripped from DVDs are pirated by the
truckload, check with any media sharing P2P program
(e.g. WinMX).
Computers play Chess quite well, they're even
stronger at Checkers, and they rule at Connect 4
(a friend of mine has written the strongest
freeware checkers and c4 programs, check them
out).
However, they suck *badly* at GO. This is because the branching factor (that is the average number of available moves) is about 30 at chess, 10 at checkers, and 7 at connect4. GO has an incredible branching factor of *over 200*. That means, the typical approach of 'alpha-beta' search breaks down.
If you're into researching new board game algorithms, try GO.
The article mentions that Sun employees have trouble reading word documents since they only use
StarOffice.
I don't see the need to send documents around
in Word format (which version do you have again?) if they don't have to be modified. PDF Files
are just as useful, and there's excellent readers
for every platform.
PDF files can easily be created using Adobe's tools
or GhostScript.
Does this make DX more popular? (Is it more popular/used?) Is/has opengl losing/lost all of its early momentum? Has DX fixed the problems so many people complained about in it's early incarnations?
OpenGL is certainly the cross-platform 3d graphics library number one. DX has fixed many problems of earlier versions, but the learning curve is still a bit steeper (a simple OpenGL/glut app drawing a lit & textured teapot is about 30-40 lines of code).
OpenGL would certainly still exist today without Quake, but it would most probably be much less popular among game developers. Most of the applications in the modelling / CAD / medicinal / simulation sector rely on OpenGL, and there is no DX for the big iron (read: SGI Infinite Reality),
only OpenGL
I have doubts that DX will work well with Wine, since the XFree86 / DRI drivers don't support the
required operations. The graphics card vendors
certainly won't ship direct X drivers for linux,
so you somehow have to stack all the DX functionality on top of OpenGL, resulting in crappy image quality and bad performance.
Since people HAVE brooms, they CAN SWEEP the sidewalk in front of their stores. Take a walk around New York City. Some stores are well swept, the vast majority, not.
No. it's more like this:
A black box in the plane won't stop the plane
from crashing. But when it crashes, you can
find out why it crashed afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
> The interior of the car is lit, so the interior doesn't really pass through shadow.
That's true, if the car's window is completely transparent, but for a translucent surface, it reflects/scatters part of the light itself. So, while the car's interior shining through the window remains unchanged (since it's seperately
lit), the windows own reflection/scattering of the light changes when it moves through the shadow. The less transparent (think dirty glass) the material, the more noticable the effect will be.
Translucent surfaces are usually rendered src * alpha + dst * (1-alpha), where dst is the part behind the window, and src is the windows own color. alpha specifies the degree of transparency, i.e. an alpha of 1.0 is completely opaque.
Since translucent surfaces usually are rendered *after* all the opaque geometry has been drawn, I can only guess that the doom3 engine doesn't bother with shadows at that stage anymore.
- Andreas
Has anybody noticed the graphics glitch after about 47 seconds, where you have an outside view of the facility and a mono-rail? It seems to me that even though the mono-rail car passes through shadows, the translucent window isn't shadowed at all! I think it should at least darken a bit...
Any graphics guys care to comment?
- Andreas
> But books have been printed for thousands of years.
Written, perhaps. But most are lost, because they were only available as hand-made copies, limiting distribution severly. Wide distribution of books was only made possible by Gutenberg's press, first used in 1452, to print a couple of bible extracts in larger (> 100) numbers.
- Andreas
Once a router is compromised, identification is of no use. Identification only prohibits 'spoofing', e.g. sending a router invalid data from a third host, masquerading as a neighboring router, which is pretty difficult to pull off.
- Andreas
Also, don't expect your users to provide any support from the programming side. You'll have to be very lucky to get any usable patches.
I know a bit about what I'm talking, I've written a fairly successful game (though it's rather limited in gameplay). I was lucky in a way that the art I use in the game was either easy to replace by users (textures) or was already lying around (people had already built 3d models of tron vehicles) so that was only a matter of integration. However, obtaining decent sound effects has proven to be much much harder, and I'm still not happy with the currect state of affairs.
Nonetheless, writing games can be very rewarding (I get a lot of fan mail), so don't let that stop you.
- Andreas
Signatures are a waste of bandwidth
- Andreas
Signatures are a waste of bandwith
Thanks to SDL & OpenGL the same source code is used for all four supported platforms (Linux, Win32, MacOS9, MacOSX). There's still the odd #ifdef for things like reading directories, but that's about it.
- Andreas
Funny, our national airport (Zurich, Switzerland) is actually closed at night, so people can sleep. And, since Swissair is actually bankrupt (so is Sabena, Belgiums airline), the no-flights period has even been lengthened by an hour.
Maybe the idea isn't that stupid (note: the bankruptcy has nothing to do with the no-night-time flight policy).
- Andreas
And since kanji is a language independent alphabet, you can communicate with people that don't even speak the same language as you.
- Andreas
Shouldn't that be every terrorist must hast a gps tracking device implanted.
These could be delivered to them along with the new backdoored encryption softare
What is a problem for IT is an even greater problem for agriculture. Rice and corn diversity have greatly decreased, which leads to serious risks, putting especially developing coutries in danger. One parasite/desease could destroy the entire harvest.
Of course, large companies like Monsanto deny this and keep pushing their products and binding customers with highly dubious tactics, like their terminator technology (sounds familiar?).
- Andreas
The keystrokes optained where used to recover the passwords that protected the valuable data. So the password doesn't need to count as evidence, only the data that was recovered. Their keystroke logger could have been a hidden camera, for all we know, or they simply guessed the pass phrase and got lucky.
Revealing that they guessed the password (Don Corleone's daughter's birthday) could put further use in jeopardy, since criminals would actually start to use *clever* passwords!
I sure don't trust slashdot for the correct spelling (english is not my mother tongue).
It's even easier than that. You don't even need windows to build an app for it. Just cross-compile for it. The SDL homepage provides an excellent setup script, and after that it's just cross-configure.sh && cross-make.sh.
I'm building my windows binaries for GLtron for over a year now, without having to mess with VC++
- Andreas
From the article at tomshardware.com:
Let me not forget that the multi-sampling support of Radeon 8500 also allows so extremely important stuff as depth-of-field or motion blur.
Yeah sure, but does anyone remember the t-buffer? The voodoo5 had those, and I don't think any major developer used it.
Developers will always keep per-card-programming to a minimum and simple *ignore* those special FX features. It's not 'this effect, and that effect' that is important, but stuff that leads generally improved image quality (think Doom3, which does the lighting identical for every element in the scene)
- Andreas
I'm currently preparing to port my game GLtron to the SEGA dreamcast, and believe me, dealing with windowing, input, i/o and audio is the hardest
part. Without libraries, it requires in-debt knowledge of the system you're porting to.
Compared to that, keeping your graphics stuff somewhat API independent is fairly easy. In my (simple) case, it's just setting up some blending modes & texture states, and then send the vertices to the card.
- Andreas
- Andreas
GLtron: cross-platform gaming on Linux, Win32, MacOS, MacOS X. Soon with networking
Sorry to interrupt with a fact: You need DeCSS (or any other 'unauthorized' DVD decription scheme) to convert DVD movies to more easily distributable formats (like DiVX, the hacked Microsoft MPEG4 codec). DVD burners are still $$$ (at least the media is), but blank CD's are cheap.
DiVX movies ripped from DVDs are pirated by the truckload, check with any media sharing P2P program (e.g. WinMX).
- Andreas
However, they suck *badly* at GO. This is because the branching factor (that is the average number of available moves) is about 30 at chess, 10 at checkers, and 7 at connect4. GO has an incredible branching factor of *over 200*. That means, the typical approach of 'alpha-beta' search breaks down.
If you're into researching new board game algorithms, try GO.
- Andreas
This game clearly shows how stupid computers really are. For your amusement:
White: L. Van Wely, Black: Fritz SSS; played in Rotterdamn 2000
1.c4 e5 2.g3 Nf6 3.Bg2 Nc6 4.Nc3 Bb4 5.a3 Bxc3 6.bxc3 0-0 7.e4 a6 8.a4 d6 9.d3 Bg4?! 10.f3 Bd7 11.Ne2 Qc8?! 12.h3 b6 13.f4 Be6? 14.f5 Bd7 15.g4 Ne8 16.Ng3 Qd8 17.g5 Bc8 18.h4 f6 19.Qh5 Na5 20.Ra3 Qe7 21.Nf1! Nc6 22.Ne3 Qd7 23.g6 h6 24.Ng4 Ra7 25.Rg1! 1-0
Can they? Tron games have been around for almost 20 years now, and one would think that Disney didn't try to enforce their trademark once.
But then, it's probably safer for me not to visit the united states for a while...
- Andreas (author of GLtron)
I don't see the need to send documents around in Word format (which version do you have again?) if they don't have to be modified. PDF Files are just as useful, and there's excellent readers for every platform.
PDF files can easily be created using Adobe's tools or GhostScript.
OpenGL is certainly the cross-platform 3d graphics library number one. DX has fixed many problems of earlier versions, but the learning curve is still a bit steeper (a simple OpenGL/glut app drawing a lit & textured teapot is about 30-40 lines of code).
OpenGL would certainly still exist today without Quake, but it would most probably be much less popular among game developers. Most of the applications in the modelling / CAD / medicinal / simulation sector rely on OpenGL, and there is no DX for the big iron (read: SGI Infinite Reality), only OpenGL
I have doubts that DX will work well with Wine, since the XFree86 / DRI drivers don't support the required operations. The graphics card vendors certainly won't ship direct X drivers for linux, so you somehow have to stack all the DX functionality on top of OpenGL, resulting in crappy image quality and bad performance.
No. it's more like this:
A black box in the plane won't stop the plane from crashing. But when it crashes, you can find out why it crashed afterwards.