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Cool idea, too bad it's not free software. It's less free than any software I've seen (explicitly saying that you can't use it for "settings where security is critical" -- something that doesn't even make sense from a software license perspective). It's like the "Good not Evil" line in the JSON license.
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That's a real challenge. :) My comment to Kristine has some other details on how we might do something between that and a full GPU.
If we go that way, a real challenge would be designing your own computer then making a demo to run on it. Just because the tools are more capable doesn't mean the challenge is any less real or the result less impressive.
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If we go that way, a real challenge would be designing your own computer then making a demo to run on it. Just because the tools are more capable doesn't mean the challenge is any less real or the result less impressive.
http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/parallelogram/index.php Here is a demo from someone who has actually done just that. He's done a lot of other cool stuff too.
Back in the day demos were more impressive imo. A lot of them now use direct x or opengl. For the most part the stuff you see isn't written by hand anymore AFAIK, they just have programs to generate the actual demo. Basically they use modeling programs.
Models are just serialized polygon meshes. We've been using models for demos for way longer than DX/OGL have existed. They're just another tool in the box which you can use (if you want to).
Using DirectX or OpenGL nowadays is like using the CPU: it's just part of the stack. They are probably lower level than you think: using DX/OGL isn't just doing something like drawModel(model, x, y, z), it's way lower level than that.
This demo in particular is not very different from old school demos. Back in the day we had interruptions, now we have API calls, but in the end shaders are just code. Elevated uses D3D to execute them in the GPU but that's all. And the synthesizer is apparently coded in ASM.
Even if you really miss the old school platforms there are still demos produced for them, often pushing the limits of what can be done.
Check http://www.pouet.net/ for lots of impressive demos.
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You seem to think that GPU programming is somehow easy. You should try it and see what you think. Yes, there is massive amount of power available but it's not easy to use effectively. You need a different mental model how things work, there's very little shared state and all the algorithms used have to match the model of computation. Using the GPU almost exclusively, generating everything procedurally is a massive ac…
I used to do GPU programming. Brief foray into it for game programming plus a then-new field called "GPGPU" pushing its limits. Think I implemented some crypto or physics stuff on one. I've followed some of the recent efforts. My points of comparison are what they're doing vs what it's designed to do with what vs what other people do with that and other hardware. It looks great with lots of efficiency. I'll give them…
Release info: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938 Binary: https://files.scene.org/view/parties/2009/breakpoint09/in4k/... Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o Everything you see and hear is procedurally generated by the 4096 byte executable, in real time. It still blows my mind 7 years after release...
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>plus a regular core using 4KB on other end. The .exe is 4K (it has been compressed using Crinkler), not the application's RAM requirements. The game .kkrieger for example is a 96K .exe, but uses several hundred MB of RAM when run. Also, the strict size requirements can interfere with execution speed. From the .nfo again: believe it or not, this was running at 30 fps in a gefoce 7900 at some point, but size optimizat…
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. I wonder what this one's runtime in RAM is. Regarding GPU quote, that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. It's sort of a cheat where a massive amount of resources are used in one place to reduce a tiny amount in another. An impressive optimization requires little to no extra resources in B when optimizing A. There's some types that straight-up can't seem to have that tradeoff.…
I remember overhearing a conversation in the Sun cafeteria about how the Aviator flight simulator only had one-half of a 3d model of the airplane, and it just reflected it to get the other half. They complained that was cheating, but that's just how it is!
Cool idea, too bad it's not free software. It's less free than any software I've seen (explicitly saying that you can't use it for "settings where security is critical" -- something that doesn't even make sense from a software license perspective). It's like the "Good not Evil" line in the JSON license.
Check out how many of your commercial software licenses forbid running them in nuclear power plants.
Release info: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938 Binary: https://files.scene.org/view/parties/2009/breakpoint09/in4k/... Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o Everything you see and hear is procedurally generated by the 4096 byte executable, in real time. It still blows my mind 7 years after release...