🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <01bbd5de$e8e68ca0$0300...@caladium.lw.net>,
Ryan Alyn Porter <r...@endymion.com> wrote:
>
>S.A. Janczewski <fa...@faza.win.net> wrote in article
><328FCA...@faza.win.net>...
>> For a long time, I have felt that the existing 3D rendering methods are
>> inefficient (especially for interactive games) and that a better,
>> degrees of magnitude faster, universal rendering method could be found.
>
>>From your documentation, I think that I see a problem: I don't think
>that most people will consider five frames per second on a 200MHz 
>Pentium Pro to be anywhere near "fast".
>
>You seem to be describing raycasting. BTW, which is not really that
>revolutionary.  Pretty screenshots, though.


Yes, I downloaded and ran the software.  It looks to me exactly
like a raycasting voxel engine, so I assume that Mr. Janczewski
has independently "discovered" this technique.  (He mentions on
his web page "the two main types of graphics techniques" and doesn't
at all mention voxels, so I assume he'd never heard of them.)

Since there are no controls for tilting the viewplane, it looks like
he's figuring out which plane of Z a given pixel's projector casts
into (orthographically), and doing a 2D raycast in that voxel
slice.  This might explain why the perspective seems fairly weird
(at first I thought it seemed entirely orthographic, but upon 
examination I saw that there was indeed some perspective; perhaps
there is perspective only in the horizontal direction.)

It also looks like he combines voxels into lower-resolution models
8-to-1 (analagous to mipmapping), though he does it early, so the
results are visible (you can see the voxels blur together pretty
distinctly.


Senor Janczewski:

Anyway, the lesson is: do your homework before you go shouting
about something revolutionary and new that will change the world,
because otherwise you'll find that it already exists (see the
current thread about "A NEW SORTING ALGORITHM!!!" in c.g.algorithms.)

If you've got enough clue to implement your own voxel engine (and
even come up with the fundamentals on your own) then you should have
no problem getting a decent job; but be aware that people
have done voxel engines that are much faster and work on much bigger
data sets than the one you put up on the net, so before you
go showing it to people as something that's supposed to be blazing
fast, you may want to do some homework.

Also, you should tone down the rhetoric on your web page about
what polygons can and cannot do.  I have seen many typical
_Quake_ scenes that exceed your demo model in complexity, and
yet run at 20fps on my Pentium 133.  Quake uses polygons.
My game, _Standoff_, does outdoor scenes of equivalent complexity,
and it also runs at a resonable frame rate (though it's not quite
done yet, so feel free to take that with a grain of epsom).  It
also uses polygons.

    -J.