nemesis wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> OOC... Clearly Crysis has some pretty serious graphics. But is it 
>> *fun* to play?
> 
> dodging the real-time rendering quality discussion by asking about 
> something so irrelevant as the game itself or if it is any fun? ;)

The demo wasn't, for me at least.

Much of the game seems based on the suit you're wearing, and you change 
functions with the suit by holding down the middle mouse button, and 
dragging the mouse.

Nine times out of ten, it simply wouldn't recognize my middle mouse 
button, so I was unable to change functions.  And of course, because 
it's such an advanced piece of software, you can't actually *remap* that 
one button to another key.

I love my keyboard / mouse combo (the MS Wireless Comfort, one of the 
few decent products Microsoft has made), and don't fancy buying a new 
one just to play one game (that won't even run well on my computer).

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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Bill Pragnell wrote:
> I've certainly heard people say they thought the effects were rubbish 
> when I thought they were exemplary... the Hulk, for one.

Still frames of "The Hulk" were, in my opinion, excellent.

What killed it for me was the movement (not that I could do any better, 
of course :) ).

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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Invisible wrote:
>> Basically yes. Although there are many ways to reduce the amount of
>>  rays needed to achieve certain noise level without affecting
>> "unbiasness". The point is that the rays keep on going without
>> stopping them artificially.
> 
> Right. Well presumably there must be *some* limit on the maximum 
> recursion depth though?


One unbiased way is to do it like this:

R = randomNumber(0...1)

if(R < diffuseProb)
   //Do diffuse stuff and return the traced value;
else
   return 0; //So it got absorbed.

So if diffuseProb is (say) 0.9. You have 10% probability that a ray
stops bouncing anymore. This methods let's you still trace to unlimited
depth without the need to specify max trace depth.

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Forgot to say that you then have to weight the non-absorb cases
properly. If absorption probability is 0.1 you have to weight the other
results by dividing them by 0.9. Otherwise the image will be dark.

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Invisible wrote:
> Being able to get a fast but grainy preview certainly sounds useful in 
> this respect. I guess it depends on just *how* grainy. (I.e., how long 
> it takes for the image to become clear enough to tell if it needs 
> tweaking. Presumably that depends on what the image is...)

I tried it, and in no way can I see the "fast but grainy preview" here 
being better than POV's Mosaic preview (which is comparably fast, but 
has accurate color and lighting immediately).

I do like the lighting in the "final" images, though.

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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Invisible wrote:
> POV-Ray, of course, gets round this problem by using more sophisticated 
> mathematical techniques than simply projecting flat polygons onto a 2D 
> framebuffer. I've yet to see any GPU attempt this.

Well, I wrote a vertex shader a while ago that would correctly position 
a point along a Bezier patch*.  Then, rendering the patch became a 
matter of passing a "net" of points in, and let the GPU handle the 
actual calculation of the points.

It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to extend this to other functions, 
and not just a Bezier calculator.

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

*It even varied the granularity of the net in real time based on the 
current FPS, so it would maintain a constant frame rate.  It ended up 
quite nice, and I was able to have about a dozen patches on screen, with 
no visible polygon edges, on my GeForce 5200.

Of course, on my 7600GT, I can render several dozen patches on screen at 
once, with no visible polygon edges.  Still a far cry from modern games 
(where an individual model might have 8-15 *thousand* polygons, and 
there are usually several characters on screen at once), but a neat 
effect anyway :)

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Invisible wrote:
> Also, how does it figure out which polygons to draw? It can't possibly 
> draw all 10 million polygons every frame - and yet, figuring out which 
> ones are visible would seem to take more effort than actually drawing 
> them all...

Something similar to bounding volumes (though they're really visibility 
volumes), to limit the areas that are drawn.

For instance, when you're inside a room, the engine knows that it 
doesn't need to draw the rest of the map - it only draws that room. 
Furthermore, it also knows precisely which areas are visible outside the 
window, and which ones aren't.

These volumes are usually computed ahead of time, as a large map can 
take up to several minutes to compute the volumes (depending on the 
game, the level, and the machine being used to build it).

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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Invisible wrote:
> I often look at a game like HL and wonder how it's even possible. I 
> mean, you walk through the map for, like, 20 minutes before you get to 
> the other end. The total polygon count must be spine-tinglingly huge. 

It doesn't draw 10 billion separate vertices - it only draws about 150M 
vertices, 60 times each.  Of course, most of those are instances of the 
same meshes, so it's really only about 1-3M unique vertices in a given 
scene.

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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nemesis wrote:
> BTW, is it just me or anyone else feel like it's easier to add new code and
> lighting models into povray rather than writing a povray SDL parser to other
> renderers? :P

Wasn't that one of the original design goals? ;)

-- 
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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Chambers wrote:
> Until it can parse SDL, I will consider it inferior to POV.
> 
> Long live hand written code! ;)

I think I just found the user requirements spec for my new raytracer...







;-)

No, but seriously, there are some things about SDL that I'd change. Like 
making it possible to inspect existing objects and edit their textures 
and stuff...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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