41–50 of 78 posts
1982 is calling but expects to be connected to some HN pedant "helpfully" pointing out that you can't actually shoot stuff. https://youtu.be/j4OLnrwLcJA
https://moegamer.net/2019/03/05/atari-a-to-z-capture-the-fla...
Having written realtime ray tracers in the classic demoscene style on e.g. 300 MHz Pentium 2 Celeron (the original one with no cache, that overclocked to 450-550 MHz), I sometimes wonder about how cool it would be to open source a modern rendering engine around the time of the first Pentium 3 with SSE, in 1999. You could completely revolutionise computer graphics on that era of hardware, with the view to increasing v…
What's the advantage over BSP/kD-trees/octrees?
And what do you mean by rasterization - we still have to deal with pixels in the end, so it has to happen somewhere? (..I'd love to play with a color vector monitor though!).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC (and I may not), I upgraded my 400 to 64k, and a "real" keyboard. But I think you could only address 48k of it at once or something hinky.
Where did you get a real keyboard for the 400. I searched and searched and could not find one. I was so envious of the Timex / Sinclair folks who had a nice replacement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC (and I may not), I upgraded my 400 to 64k, and a "real" keyboard. But I think you could only address 48k of it at once or something hinky.
Yeah, you had ROM space (and potentially cartridge ROM space) eating into your 64K on all the models and had to bank-switch for anything more than 48K IIRC. With a BASIC cartridge in place you'd lose another 8K. Also I don't recall any of the 400/800 3rd party upgrades being compatible - they used a different bank-switching mechanism - with the later XL/XE models.
Having written realtime ray tracers in the classic demoscene style on e.g. 300 MHz Pentium 2 Celeron (the original one with no cache, that overclocked to 450-550 MHz), I sometimes wonder about how cool it would be to open source a modern rendering engine around the time of the first Pentium 3 with SSE, in 1999. You could completely revolutionise computer graphics on that era of hardware, with the view to increasing v…
First time reading about BVH. Sounds like Kirkpatrick's hierarchy, but in arbitrary dimension. What's the advantage over BSP/kD-trees/octrees? And what do you mean by rasterization - we still have to deal with pixels in the end, so it has to happen somewhere? (..I'd love to play with a color vector monitor though!).
With BVH, the partitioning is fundamentally over lists of objects rather than space; if you split by space, you can/will have objects on both sides of the splitting plane, leading to duplicate references.
Doing it by lists means there are no duplicate references, however the combined bounding volumes can overlap, which is to be minimised, subject to the Surface Area Heuristic cost. It winds up being something like a quicksort, although for the highest quality acceleration structures you also want to do spatial clipping... this is an extremely deep field, and several people have spent considerable part of their professional career to it, for example the amazing Intel Embree guys :)
It also happens to work out best for GPU traversal algorithms, which was investigated by software simulation quite a few years ago by the now-legendary Finnish Nvidia team, and together with improvements on parallel BVH building methods and further refinements is basically what today's RTX technology is. (As far as I'm reading from the literature over the years.)
Here's a fundamental paper to get started: https://research.nvidia.com/publication/understanding-effici... (Note that these are the same Finnish geniuses behind so many things... Umbra PVS, modern alias-free GAN methods, stochastic sampling techniques, ...)
Having written realtime ray tracers in the classic demoscene style on e.g. 300 MHz Pentium 2 Celeron (the original one with no cache, that overclocked to 450-550 MHz), I sometimes wonder about how cool it would be to open source a modern rendering engine around the time of the first Pentium 3 with SSE, in 1999. You could completely revolutionise computer graphics on that era of hardware, with the view to increasing v…
First time reading about BVH. Sounds like Kirkpatrick's hierarchy, but in arbitrary dimension. What's the advantage over BSP/kD-trees/octrees? And what do you mean by rasterization - we still have to deal with pixels in the end, so it has to happen somewhere? (..I'd love to play with a color vector monitor though!).
Compared to octrees, BVHs deals well with data that’s unevenly distributed. At each level you split along the axis where you have the most extent. Finding the pivot is the interesting part. When I recently implemented a BVH from scratch, I ended up using Hoare partitioning and median-of-three and it worked really well. The resulting structure is well balanced, splitting the population of bodies roughly in half at each level, and that’s not even the state of the art, that’s just something my dumb ass coded in an afternoon.
Having written realtime ray tracers in the classic demoscene style on e.g. 300 MHz Pentium 2 Celeron (the original one with no cache, that overclocked to 450-550 MHz), I sometimes wonder about how cool it would be to open source a modern rendering engine around the time of the first Pentium 3 with SSE, in 1999. You could completely revolutionise computer graphics on that era of hardware, with the view to increasing v…
Here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92K9wnk_4Cw Pretty interesting but it's a little hard to make out what's going on sometimes.
Thank you. I can't help but feel the wall textures have screwed the whole thing. It might be that they've tried to just be too clever with this and a less complex solution (flat shading, gouraud shading) would have worked better.
This atari game might also look a lot better on a crt or something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comment a bit of a limitation of the ray casting: https://atariage.com/forums/topic/326709-final-assault-new-g... simply amazing what they did. could you imagine if this came out in the 80s?!?!
Yes this would have been mind-blowing. Ps there was a game that had a similar FPS view in those days. It was a maze game with polygon graphics but no textures. I forget the name. No shooting though!
I had Sultans Maze[1][2] and Articfox but plenty others existed too.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultan's_Maze
1982 is calling but expects to be connected to some HN pedant "helpfully" pointing out that you can't actually shoot stuff. https://youtu.be/j4OLnrwLcJA
I had their follow up game Capture the Flag on my Atari 800. Same engine, but slightly upgraded graphics. Fun game! https://moegamer.net/2019/03/05/atari-a-to-z-capture-the-fla...
Like him otherwise, but nope he didn't invent it...