Toby's a brilliant guy. Check out some of this other work here, some of which has been seen previously on HN. http://tobyschachman.com/
Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming
31–40 of 44 posts
Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming
#32I am a little confused, it seems like you are proposing an interactive CUDA guide, but there is no mention of CUDA at all. Having spent a lot of time in graphics, I feel like better test environments for GPU programming will go a long way towards higher market adoption, it's a nightmare debugging sometimes
What made you think it would be a CUDA guide?
Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming
#33Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming
#34This is very cool and I hope to see it when it's complete.
BTW, have you thought of making the values in the code samples scrubbable? (e.g. at 4:20 in this Bret Victor video http://vimeo.com/36579366). I think that that change would really aid in "feeling" the behavior of the algorithms.
Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
PTX is certainly more suitable as an intermediate representation than OpenCL's dialect of C, but PTX obviously doesn't and never will fulfill the requirements of being the low-level portable target for high-level languages. NVidia's early-mover advantage is significant, but software tied to only their hardware will never be able to achieve the kind of status that the netlib stuff has. The only question is whether the…
Funny I had the impression CUDA is winning hands down on HPC.
I never said they weren't. But they can't expect to automatically continue with that success while staying as closed and proprietary as CUDA has been so far. Their hardware is not drastically better than that of their competitors, and they are subject to serious competition (unlike Intel with their CPUs). OpenCL is here to stay with a market far broader than just AMD GPUs, so it's pretty much inevitable that it will take over as the dominant standard unless it's developed as badly as OpenGL was in the early 2000s. If Microsoft ever ships a CPU-backed OpenCL runtime as part of Windows, it'll be all over for CUDA.
Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming
#36I had concentrated on graphics when I studied computer science in college. That was 10 years ago and shaders weren't in common usage. To this day, I can still derive a rotation matrix from basic principles.
Yet learning GLSL has been surprisingly difficult. Either the resources available are the Khronos Group's shitty documentation, or tutorials of a different yet equal shittiness that go no further than spinning cubes.
So this sounds freaking amazing. Sign me up.
Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming
#37Love this idea!
I think you should add an intro to procedural graphics chapter that goes over raymarching and other algorithms used to create meshes procedurally.
Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming
#38You should look at https://github.com/stackgl/shader-school - it is very similar.
Thank you very much. I've started working on some 3D and VR stuff on Android and this will help out a lot.
Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming
#39> New ways of programming If you wanna be sincere about this, I think you should have a section dedicated to Gezira, and not only the more traditional imperative styles of graphics programming. The style of GUI that came out of PARC is no longer "modern", and has problems with modern development styles (e.g, single-threaded global event loops makes writing concurrent programs difficult). If you're not familiar with i…
Wow that language is very concise and interesting. Such a beautiful demo too. I am impressed, thanks for sharing.
Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming
#40This is very cool and I hope to see it when it's complete. BTW, have you thought of making the values in the code samples scrubbable? (e.g. at 4:20 in this Bret Victor video http://vimeo.com/36579366 ). I think that that change would really aid in "feeling" the behavior of the algorithms.
Great idea for a book. I am all for interactive education. Well done. Also, what a brilliant video. A new way to interface with code and imagine algorithms, animations and data. All to be used for education! My favorite part of the video was at 30min, where Bret demos how to interactively make animations. Reading the comments on the video led me to purchasing Braid http://braid-game.com/, a game that was mentioned. HA.
EDIT: Exploring your link, I discovered Bret Victor. Anyone looking for some inspiration look at his show reel. http://worrydream.com/#!/Showreel2012