Hi Chris Hmm your post really sounds like a typical game programmer (no offence).
> that java3d is still a year behind the current technology arc. Lets face it, > we don't even have a robust bugfree cube-mapping solution yet, and no-one Well please tell me how many games which you can buy today use cube-mapping? I can tell you I don't no any. > has come up with any details on how exactly the dot3 combiners can work well > (the one demo I have seen is quite unimpressive). When you see these things That's because I can't get a good extra pass for ambient lighting which would be necessary. Multipass rendering is crap in Java3D I admit that, too less control over the rendering pipe. But still tell me how many games today use DOT3. I again can say NONE that I know (at least on PC-Platform might me different on PS2) > look-wise. As opposed to a c++ game that is started from the foundation of > the current technology, a 1 year development cycle is only 1 year behind the > times, and the large fact that you can update the engine as you go (since > you know exactly what is going on) is very important. Well I would say current games are even 2-3 years behind current hardware. Cubeenvmap was brought on consumer hardware 1999. Now it's 2002 and I still don't see a game using it. Which is extremly funny as of all the texturemapping methods cubemaps are the only one (besides 2D,3D,1D) which don't produce any performance drops on a Geforce3/4. Of course this is not very suprising as games want to sell big and so they have to run on a broad range of hardware and not only the latest one, this changes for console platforms of course. Whoever played Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty on the PS2 knows what impressive graphics can look like (I haven't seen anything coming even close to the visual quality of that game on PC platform) > not do. It's nice that we have support for cube mapping and dot3 combiners > (not to mention the 4x4 texture filters, which I think could do some nifty > stuff) but the fact is, no-one knows how to use them. Will there be Well 4x4 texture filters are supported on which hardware? I'm not sure if I saw them on Geforce3. > on the features are complete, and by that time it will be 5 months in the > future, and we'll have nvidia's/ati's latest and greatest to look at, but > not take advantage of for another year. This is nothing new. If you look at lot of the nice demos nvidia/ati produce they work in small scale but seldom in large scale, hence using already more than 2 textureshaders halfs your performance on a Geforce3/4 (what the hell is that?) and using more than 4 registercombiners again halfs your performance on a Geforce3/4. When you use more than 7 it's only a quarter. Vertexshader are half as fast as fixed T&L. (This will change on a Geforce4 where there are two units). > We need an be able to use gl's extensions mechanism. Unless people are > content with java3d permanently being a year behind the times, forever, > there needs to be a way to get new graphics features in easily. I agree on that. But we could also wait for OpenGL2 (whenever it comes) EOF, J.D. -- Explore SRT with the help of Java3D (http://wwwvis.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/relativity/minkowski) (http://www.antiflash.net/java3d/relativity (mirror) =========================================================================== 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".