Texture compression and z-buffer compression are things I want to stay away from for a while, until we can be sure to come up with something that isn't covered by a patent. For the most part, anything we've decided to use so far is either patent-free or unpatentable, and while the patent system is crap for overturning crap patents, we at least have the moral high-ground. There just aren't that many ways of doing 3D graphics, and most of what we have is basically derrived from first-principles and then tweaked to make it OpenGL compatible.
On the other hand, finding a way to compress textures and z-buffers efficiently has room for some cleverness. I doubt that the whole concept of compressing them is patented; just the WAY they are compressed. So we just have to come up with a different way to do it. Also, in the future, I plan to pull an Intel and try to throw caching at it. For most rendering, caching is useless (and fast streaming is what we need to optimize), but for textures, there is some locality of reference. And we can also look ahead, fetch things out of order, and all sorts of cool stuff. -- Timothy Normand Miller http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti Favorite book: The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman, ISBN 0-465-06710-7 _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
