Joachim Diepstraten wrote: > As I said depends. If you need special access to get it work. For example > stencil buffer things and you don't have them it's hard to get arround > these things.
I have rarely, if ever, seen an algorithm that comes from research papers that states "you must use stencil/whatever buffer to make this work". The math says to do certain things and sometimes the most efficient way to do this is to do access some of these features but it is not the same thing as requiring it as part of the implementation. From the simulation perspective, I actually don't know of _any_ commercial grade simulator that makes use of these hardware tricks (I thinking aircraft and ship sims. Haven't seen tanks sims). Admittedly I've been away from the front line for the past year and a half, but I'm pretty sure that would still hold true. These people make use of stuff that is known to work, and they have certain other restrictions like frame locking and constant frame rates. Most of the time they use stuff that is easy to use and easy to hack into Performer. > That's basically the reason why game developer seldom use a scenegraph API > but rather build their own loose one on top of low level APIs to gain > access to these things if they need them. I doubt that quite a lot. There are other more contributing factors - not trusting anything. Look how long it took for game developers to move from writing their own custom software renderers to using hardware accelarated APIs. Even then it took a massive kick up the butt by John Carmack to make them move. They simply fear to do anything outside what they currently know. As a good example - how many games are going to be produced using Geforce2 specific extensions. A card that has been out for almost 2 years now, so you should be seeing the first crop of games coming out even using those capabilities. Where are they? Instead, these programmers keep with their own knowledge and write everything themselves. Stencil buffers are a good example - game programmers generally don't use them because only one or two consumer cards support them with any decent capabilities. Because the game programmer can't guarantee that it will work on every card they could come across, that way of implementing stuff gets dropped and they revert back to their own custom images. Hell, game programmers still don't want to write multi-threaded code! > Well 7 years ago SGI told everyone what you should have and what not. If > you weren't satisified build your own software render. Yeah, right. How many simulators do you know that have used software based rendering in the last 10 years (or probably longer - try 15)? > it went. Mostly the interest of cheap 3d hardware in game markets > broke this domain. And nowadays unfortunately game manufacturing is the > driving force behind hardware improvements. Yes and no. For the high-end people, it isn't because there are still stuff that consumer cards can't do. OTOH, as last siggraph showed, a lot of interest is being shown in building some visualisation systems using commodity hardware in big render farms. However, the quality of rendering is still not available. The visualisation community still has features in 5 year old hardware that hasn't even begun to surface on consumer grade stuff. -- Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/ Freelance Java Consultant http://www.yumetech.com/ Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- "Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..." - Greg Bear, Slant ------------------------------------------------------------------- =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
