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POLYTEX and GROUDRAW demos released!
- POLYTEX: The Build successor that never saw the light of day.
GROUDRAW: A collection of 7 old heightmap voxel demos.
Discuss : ) - Awesome, I like the Polytex one, are we going to see a Win32 port? It crashes to much for me when I try running it.
- Big Thx Ken!
Nice Christmas Present btw, although i know you don't celebrate it cause you are Jewish.
Gotta read the Sources as ASAP
I had no crashes yet.
Greetings, fanta Polytex one, are we going to see a Win32 port? It crashes to much for me when I try running it.
I released the source code for a reason. I'm done with Polytex.- Hah! Cool demos, ken. The heightmap-based voxel demos are especially fun to play with, Thanks for the upload! : )
- While the Q1 engine was more polished than the current Polytex version when it came out, I didn't see 3d objects stretch and spin like that! :shock: . It doesn't take genius to visualize some great stuff that could have been done with it, if you were given the chance to finish what was left.
If you ask me, I'd be happy to see Polytex developed further and made compatible with build games, but since I'm almost sure it won't happen, I'll reduce myself to only show interest in it, just as I do with Voxlap
I noticed POLYTEX.TXT says you have polygon objects disabled but they are in fact, enabled by default. I didn't see 3d objects stretch and spin like that!
The stretching is a bug. It looks like something bad is overwriting part of the sprite structure. These things happen when you have buggy code, upgrade the compiler, and then not test it well.I'd be happy to see Polytex developed further...
There would be no point. The one thing Polytex had going for it - the optimizations for the 486 - are long obsolete. If you want an enhanced Build engine, you already have your wish: Jonothan Fowler's Build port.I noticed POLYTEX.TXT says you have polygon objects disabled but they are in fact, enabled by default.
I know. I wanted to include POLYTEX.TXT unmodified to preserve its file date : )- cool demos Ken! :D
- The GROUDRAW 6DOF version is awesome, I have never before seen such fast 6DOF heightmap rendering! Though I'm familiar with ASM, reading heavily optimized machine code is hardly the best way to learn an algorithm as a concept, that's why i was wondering if some day You would like to post a short, simple, easy to read description of it, perhaps even illustrated with some schematics, as some people on this forum have done with their algorithm posts. Yeah, I know You don't really have the time nor motivation to do this, but I guess it doesn't hurt to humbly ask :)
Anyway, I also have some concrete ideas:
1) Have You ever thought about the possibility of adding linear interpolation to 6DOF version of GROUDRAW? Voxels will only ever compete with polygons if the visual quality will be better and I must say that no polygon-based terrain engine has ever come close to interpolated voxel rendering in quality, as seen in, for example, the famous MARS demo, though it is probably much harder to do interpolation in a 6DOF algorithm, such as Yours - so the question stands, do You or do You not think it can be done in realtime on current consumer CPUs?
2) I have this crazy idea of combining MARS-demo-like axis-confined interpolated voxel rendering with interpolated skybox rendering to achieve 6DOF. The idea is very simple, but of course has a large, though relatively constant, performance overhead. What needs to be done is to first render onto visible sides of a skybox cube which is always aligned to coordinate axes, making the voxel rendering simpler as well as faster and then render the skybox to screen according to camera's relative rotation. Any comments? Has it already been done by someone?
Thanks for a reply in advance :) i was wondering if some day You would like to post a short, simple, easy to read description of it, perhaps even illustrated with some schematics,
<todo: insert generic form reply here>1) Have You ever thought about the possibility of adding linear interpolation to 6DOF version of GROUDRAW?
Interpolation for any non-overlapping heightmap engine is very feasible. I would guess that bilinear interpolation results in about a 2x performance drop.combining MARS-demo-like axis-confined interpolated voxel rendering with interpolated skybox rendering to achieve 6DOF.
That kind of 2-pass rendering would work. It's similar to what I'm doing, but not quite.Has it already been done by someone?
I'm sure it has, but not by anybody who has written a completed engine.- Thanks for the reply, i will definitely study the source and try to understand Your 2-pass algorithm, though my last serious experience with ASM dates 10 years back and I've never dealt with FPU nor MMX nor SSE before, so it might prove to be rather challenging ;)