I recently found out by watching 'Sweet 16' on MTV that I hate people a lot.

ROFL, you sir have made my day!

Crono said:
No rebuttals of "well it would be nice if it worked this or that way", because it doesn't.
.

Contrary to what you may believe, I don't make it a habit of denying proof positive Adam.

If you say it cannot be done, AND I have never seen it done, then it it figures that you must be right. At least as right as it needs to be.

Personally, I'd rather save my making fun at you, when you post obviously biased comments like about books and their authors. No ones ever gonna agree on those. Reading is just way to personal. My old man reads only westerns. I hate westerns. But to hear him talk, they are just sooo fantastic. :razz:

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The best things in life, aren't things.

This is a very large gray area.

It isn't a matter of "can it be done or not" it's a matter of "should it be done".
There's a large difference.

To note, asking why your AV software can't show a countdown of files and expressing an OPINION on a book or author are completely unrelated. Trying to force a relation between them is ridiculous.

We're talking about facts in this thread. It has nothing to do with my opinion about an author or his poorly-written books ... from another thread.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

sighs heavily

Someday you'll understand my posts and not re-write them in your head. Someday.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

You do know that your posts are obscure and no one understands them besides you, right?

Your thoughts trail as you write them and you tend to make posts that are very incoherent.
You can't imply meaning in words through text. Even if you say things like this when you talk, I would imaging you get "what do you mean" a lot. You would from me.

If I respond to something you say, it's based on what you LITERALLY wrote, not what you meant.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Can't we all just get along?

Oh great. Because of this tension the freaking hippies are here. Nice work.

---

Ham and Jam Contributor
http://www.hamandjam.org

'Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!'

Through recent research and study I've been finding out a lot about programming graphics hardware.

So much so, that my Algorithms Instructor asked me to give a guest lecture in his Game AI course.
I'm focusing on programmable shader architectures and the new stuff.

I've got to say, the switch between SM3 and SM4 is astounding. It's the first gigantic leap in graphics hardware since the introduction of shaders in real time applications.
The new processors are Scalar processors, like the CPU, so technically they're slower. (current GPUs are vector processors)
The switch was to achieve a unified shader architecture as well as allowing sync-ability with the CPU to get a higher throughput.

Very interesting stuff!

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Havok physics with Nvidia:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ0HNHO5Uik
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuPN800KS6Q

sexy.

---

o

mmm... finally some true revolutions in the games technology sector.

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Why snark works.

Found this sick art video a while back, some dude drawing John Locke from Lost. Freakin insane, easily one of the best youtube videos I've seen: Link

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What the Snarkpitters listen to!

I must say I preferred the parodies.

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Why snark works.

Hehe :razz:

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What the Snarkpitters listen to!

And I want one of these...

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Why snark works.

OtZman said:
Found this sick art video a while back, some dude drawing John Locke from Lost. Freakin insane, easily one of the best youtube videos I've seen: Link

you think speedpainting in Photoshop is cool, try speedpainting in MS Paint !

Nice one, Blister.

Speaking of pixelart... do you guys know EBOY? They have an awesome book I considered buying once.

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Why snark works.

And I want one of these...

That'd be nice.

speedpainting in MS Paint !

I can do that I just don't wanna.

---

o

clip or it didnt happen

BlisTer said:
<DIV class=quote>
<DIV class=quotetitle>? quoting OtZman</DIV>
<DIV class=quotetext>Found this sick art video a while back, some dude drawing John Locke from Lost. Freakin insane, easily one of the best youtube videos I've seen: Link

you think speedpainting in Photoshop is cool, try speedpainting in MS Paint !</div></div>
That's so, so sick! Man, looks almost real :shocked: . Really inspiring, if this guy make make that in Paint, then I can do anything.

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What the Snarkpitters listen to!

me too!! i want one too!!

Crysis
Looks real nice.

amanderino said:
Crysis
Looks real nice.

Sweet, looks really cool. Crytek made FarCry as well, right?

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What the Snarkpitters listen to!

This is probably the best looking game of the coming generation. I wish their animations were as good as the shaderwork.

PS: One thing PC users can that Mac users can't

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Why snark works.

It's odd, something that's fairly impressive in Crysis is subsurface scattering and they're not mentioning it explicitly. (You can tell if you look at objects that have it applied. Also if you find a developer screenshot it shows all the types of texture maps you can apply. There's like 12 or something)

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Yes, it's absolutely stunning.


I'd say that there is no (and I don't mean little, I mean no) difference to Hollywood CGI work anymore. At least not at any reasonable viewing distance. I remember subsurface scattering being mentioned in a Pixar making of, thinking, "wow, would be cool if this could be done real-time". A week later I found these Crysis shots :wink:

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Why snark works.

I can point out a lot of stuff that makes it look very fake.

For starters, they're using polygon mesh's as opposed to nurbs or solids (though I don't think pixar ... or anyone ... uses solids).

So you have a higher edge detail. You can even see in that picture, the white guy's head has a pointy angle, it's less obvious because they're using depth of field and focusing on something in front of that.

Find the picture of the black guy of his full head. Look at the ear and the eyes, they don't look quite as nice as the rest of him.

Another blazing difference between off-line and real-time rendering is that, in real-time you're often trying to achieve off-line render algorithms to some estimation. Because of that, you generally get a lot of aliasing because of the shortcuts you're taking. Which can be seen on some of the eyes.

You can also see the lack of characters with hair. The reason why is that hair is incredibly complex. I've seen a close up of the girl in that image and everything looks amazing ... except where the hairline starts.

They may have fixed up a lot of this stuff since then, though.

I don't agree with the no difference thing, as is probably obvious. If the animators and modelers do their job well, you wont tell what's computer generated and what isn't. Also, most things rendered in movies can't be adequately used in real-time, they're too complex. I mean, that's why we use all sorts of mapping techniques to try to simulate it.

As for the point on Subsurface Scattering, I'm surprised more developers don't implement it ... I mean ... it's not like the newer graphics cards (GF7, for example) don't support it in hardware. Now with the unified shader architecture on the SM4 cards, it should be even less of an issue.

Crysis looks great. But, the more I delve into graphics the more I'm starting to think that a lot of developers short change us in the graphical department.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I think right now game character graphics are exactly in the uncanny valley. But they're climbing up fast.

I feel like for shaderwork there's little that could be done to make them more real. Of course the little is the most work, as always (don't think I underestimate you shader experts, you're my heroes :wink: )

Do you mean this screen? Considering that this pic wouldn't even fit on a normal monitor, it's pretty impressive. Scale it down to a resolution you'd normally see in game and it's near-perfect. If you zoom to the eye you might see that the reflection is too blurry as well as the general texture resolution. But it's a perfect compromise for anything except close-range zooms. Especially regarding polycount.

I think there's a lot more to be done in the animation department than for shaders. From what in-game footage I've seen they have near photo-realistic bodies that move like Disneyworld animatronics.

There are five things I wanted to see in real-time since the early DX9 hype: radiosity lighting, ray-tracing reflections/refractions, physics-based effects (hair sounds like something that'll be done with this new phyiscs hardware soon), motion blur and yes, NURBs.

Except for NURBs (I think) the coming generation seems to solve almost all of these - and they're fast. From what I've seen in videos, Crysis has good motion-blur effects and I could have sworn I've seen some sort of radiosity in one of the videos). Also the latest cards have better and better anti-aliasing. Sub-surface scattering came out of nowhere, it was a big surprise and bonus for me to see it coming. With all that you can integrate the characters really well in the environment. Everything that's left is animation (which is probably a physics problem, too, because anything else wouldn't be dynamic enough). Close-ups will always stay a problem but I'd like to see developers concentrate on the usual (2-5 meter) distances more which today is merely an animation job.

For some reason I can't resist posting this video, also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3Nt0iAu3qw

I can watch this all day

---

Why snark works.

Yeah, something that's missing from games is some sort of Global Illumination solution, so objects don't have inter-reflections. That's actually something I'm working on for a project I mentioned a little while back. I'm trying to get that to run well in real-time with an efficient occlusion algorithm.

I don't want to offend you, but you're mis-using some of your terms.
Radiosity is a measurement. Radiosity Methods, are the technique in which you model that measurement in the scene. There's plenty of ways to do it (most common techniques have you comparing energies, rather than light rays).

Of course, you should keep in mind that, even though graphics architectures are getting faster and more robust, they're not even close to being able to simulate reality yet.

I've also been curious about doing a sort of hybrid of keyframe animation, physics calculations and AI to do animation.

It sounds like you might be a tad confused or mis-informed on what a shader is. In terms of the program you write, it's simply a program that runs on the GPU in one of the shader processors. Now that General Purpose GPUs are being pushed, even languages like C++ and Java can be compiled and ran on the GPU.
Even SM3 cards can do some sort of physics calculations with the vertex processors.

They're very dynamic and aren't limited to pixel-to-pixel after effects. You can do all your collision detection, physics, particles, and many other things entirely on the GPU with this architecture.

Also, just to make a note, there are actually built in functions "reflect" and "refract" into the Cg shader language. You feed them an incoming angle and the normal of your surface and they'll give you the reflection or refraction angle. It's also pretty fast.

If you look hard enough online, you'll find real-time implementations of ray tracing, through, to be honest, ray tracing is a pretty poor technique for making things look realistic. It generally makes things shiny. But there are many alterations that have been done to make it look better.

Anyway, check out some stuff on global illumination techniques, I'm sure you'll find it amazingly interesting.

I think the two fields in games that need to begin expanding more are dynamic animation and AI in general. I mean, a mesh of paths just isn't cutting it anymore.

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Did you see this? That demo truly impressed me.

I'm sorry for mis-using the terms. I lack the mathematical and programming knowledge to truly grasp the problems at their core so I'm a bit vulnerable to generalizations. I'm very interested in the technological background, though. When I read sentences like "There's plenty of ways to do it (most common techniques have you comparing energies, rather than light rays)." it makes me want to learn more about programming, really. :wink:

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Why snark works.

I can't remember if they talked much about the AI of Crysis in that video I posted, but I know I saw that it's supposed to be pretty smart. Just look up 'Crysis' or 'DX10' stuff on youtube. A lot of the stuff was pretty cool.

---

Also, I just found this trailer for Crysis. Official Trailer 3. I noticed that some of the stuff doesn't look so great when you get up close to it, but the gameplay looks nuts.

Yeah, man, that's the exact stuff I'm talking about! You should check out some papers (though you probably wont understand much of what they're saying, there are pretty pictures) on real-time photon mapping. It's pretty crazy stuff.

Well wanting to learn is very good, but it's not particularly related, since it's more of a physics problem than anything else. The computer science aspect comes in when you try to design an algorithm that can run fast in real-time and look good enough to be worth using.

Anyway, check out this video. It's a real-time implementation of Photon Mapping as well as Ray Tracing to get some extra data needed. It looks really nice. The photon mapping part is slow (this is why caustics and specular effects take awhile to show up). The card they did this on, in 2003, was a GFFX 5900 Ultra. Obviously, our SM standards are higher now and we could blow it away!

I'm actually sort of sad that people don't like the shadowing technique in Doom 3. It's a great, accurate, technique. id just decided that they wanted hard shadows ... by no means do shadow volumes restrict you from doing soft shadows of any kind.

Anyway, this is really interesting stuff.

Here's some more information Though if he plans on implementing the thing in real-time he should look into shader languages.

If you want the "masterpiece", you should check out the off-line rendered animation by Henrik Wann Jensen

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I've also been curious about doing a sort of hybrid of keyframe animation, physics calculations and AI to do animation.

Like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bKphYfUk-M
The beginning is that kind of skeletal/physics/AI animation, the rest has some other cool physics thingies in it. The animation isn't perfect, it looks fairly stiff and clumsy, but I'm sure it'll become a lot better after some refinement. (one thing that bugs me about that video is how the guy keeps saying "These objects act exactly as they would in the real world")

I'm actually sort of sad that people don't like the shadowing technique in Doom 3. It's a great, accurate, technique. id just decided that they wanted hard shadows ... by no means do shadow volumes restrict you from doing soft shadows of any kind.

The hard shadows and extreme lighting contrast are what killed it for me. You don't get full illumination bordering zero illumination like that in the real world, and it just looks fake. Not to mention the over-shiny everything. I am by no means well-versed in virtual lighting tech, but I can tell, just by living in reality and knowing what reality looks like, that Source's static lightmaps with radiosity bounces look a lot more believable than Doom3's fully dynamic hard shadows.

I've recently been playing around with lighting in UE3 (with Roboblitz), and I really like the solution Epic has come up with. You can specify different channels for each light you place in the level, including BSP, static, and dynamic (static geometry can be flagged to cast dynamic shadows). No, it's not realtime radiosity, but just take a look at Gears of War, any of the UT3 videos, or those of any of the other games using UE3, and you can see a clear improvement from previous game engines in terms of lighting. Even though there's no radiosity, the baked lightmap + dynamic lights casting soft shadows takes another step forward in believability.

Also noteworthy; as I mentioned in the Realtime Radiosity thread, Geomerics has a commercial realtime radiosity product called Enlighten that has been integrated into UE3 and is available to licensees of both.
Geomerics' Enlighten page

---

o

though you probably wont understand much of what they're saying, there are pretty pictures

OUCH. You have a talent of making me feel like a 3-year old, here. :biggrin:
I'll check these out, though.

PS: Doom3 could have used true soft shadows as well? That's hard for me to believe. There must have been at least hardware limitations at the time of release. I heard Carmack talking about how excited he is about soft shadows in the coming generation, also, which makes me doubt using hard edges only was a stylistic decision.

I was quite impressed with Doom3's lighting, btw, I just like the warmth of HL(2)'s lighting which I think comes mainly from their pre-calculated radiosity lighting.

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Why snark works.

Sorry, but, really, go look at the paper (I didn't actually give a link to the paper, but it's at the same site with the video)
It's some complex stuff. It talks about how they can't use a classic algorithm on the graphics card because memory doesn't work the same way. So a so-so efficiency algorithm for sorting now runs very slow and is unsuitable for real-time use. The discuss an alternative and then lots of lighting calculations. So, don't be offended if I say you probably wont understand it. I know people that are in the same CS courses with me that don't understand what I'm saying when I talk to them. I get blank stares.

At the time it wouldn't have been a good idea since the hardware may or may not have been able to really perform well. Soft shadows aren't exactly fast. But I think I was talking about actually blurring.

What I was talking about (which I've now said in like three different places, I think) was if you combine techniques. Having hard edged shadows and very dramatic changes between light and shadow is not what you have to do if you use shadow volumes of any kind. You can change it so it implements some other algorithms too.

The thing that I'm noticing is the more I learn about this stuff the more I think that valve went down the wrong route. It just feels like they're holding on to ancient techniques because that's how it was done in quake. We've adapted. Crysis is really a step in the right direction. UE3 is good too. (which uses two shadows maps, one blurred and one hard and interpolates between them based on distance. You can think of interpolation as ... averaging or gradient.) The thing about UE3 is it's made to be very user friendly and they have a lot of good techniques in there.

That is something like what I had in mind, but, there's no "intelligence" there. I mean, all they're doing is calculating new frames with physics. I'm talking more along the lines of attempting to purge the scripted sequence besides things that you want to be cinematic and exact.

If the animation is dynamic, then it can be effected by real-time events. I'm also interested in pursuing some sort of injury system. I mean, if we're going to be able to do physics quickly on the GPU, we might as well use it!

Also, that video is a little mis-leading. There are no light bounces in a radiosity method, because they generally measure energy. Notice, it did diffuse lighting very well ... and nothing else.

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Worst CGI work ever

(unrelated to the global illumination discussion, for now, I'll officially give up on that)

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Why snark works.

A bite to eat.

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SourDough2.0 - With Strawberry Jam

Spyware infestation.

I recently found out that if you do something stupid like stay up until 6, then you wake up at 2 PM with the same amount of homework left to do.

Heh, I can relate to that...

---

Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

Soo... you've been spying on me. (dam it)

I recently found out that using you Procrastination Skillz to finish a presentation for the next day, not getting a minute of sleep, then staying up till 2 am, isn't good for your body. I feel like I never slept in my life. I couldn't even fall asleep if I wanted.

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Why snark works.

Amazingly enough, I found that I have over 30 gigs of audiobooks.

My library will be available as soon as I can get an additional hard drive and the software loaded for perusing them.

---

The best things in life, aren't things.

Recently Found: The very first Will Ferrell movie that was good.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Yeh, that guy's spitting movies out like crazy. You know he's doing too many movies when you go to see one of his films, and in the previews, you see him appear for another upcoming movie!

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

Recently found: XSI is a lot easier for me to grasp now that I have a better knowledge of 3D modeling; I'm actually beginning to like it quite a bit.

Also, some cool tips and tricks for low-poly game modeling. One that I think is really cool is using quads with an alphatest opacity for the ends of round objects and other small details. Another I found nifty in there is a technique for low-poly coils of barbed wire using quads + alpha opacity.

Last thing:
d'Artiste Character Modeling 2 book including several characters and creatures from Gears of War, detailing both hi-poly and low-poly mesh creation.

---

o

I found this interesting article about how artists look at pictures.

---

Why snark works.

There is an astonishing amount of quality documentaries on Google Video. I recently found this documentary of Arthur C. Clarke explaining the nature of fractal images.

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Why snark works.

I recently found, that if you tense the muscles in your neck while playing guitar, like most people, unknowingly do, you get tired of playing really really fast.
that's, physically tired.

When concentrating on relaxing every muscle in your body to the limits of staying upright, you can play for hours more, and not get all kinds of craps / exhausted.

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Hell, is an half-filled auditorium

I recently learnt that there is a wireless access point in my laptops range wich i am using right now :smile: . I also am learning how to do c++ programming for reddawn purposes (my kick ass mod) and still continue to find out somthing new about halo everyday. :cool:

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Aaron's Stuff

Have you found out yet that it isn't actually the best game ever made?