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.

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