🚀 go-pugleaf

mike j. kulas (mku...@prairienet.org) wrote:
: I'd say I read this and found it very interesting, but everytime I see the
: word patent, I break out in a cold sweat.

: Of course, with a patent, it wouldn't matter if I read it...

: Mike Kulas
: Parallax Software

First, if I understood 'Zap' right, then all he's claiming is
COPYRIGHT and not PATENT, so you can use any algorithm as long as
you don't copy it's implementation from the post.

Second, all the stuff about free direction texture mapping is already
found in PCGPE (x2ftp.oulu.fi:/pub/msdos/programming/gpe/pcgpe*.*).

Third, the lightning algorithms are covered in some docs I have from
various sources (I can post /email them if requested).

Fourth, the bump-map stuff is really straight forward: this is just RLE
compression of the bump-map, so you calculate normals only once per run
and use your result if a similar run is encountered later.

Fifth, I'm no lawyer (just a Computer Science student) so I may be
wrong about the copyright/patent stuff. You can check in other news-
groups (*.patent(s).* ???).

Danny
--
Danny M. Ayzer (dma...@zoot.tau.ac.il)