pouët.net

trixter information 147 glöps

• general:
• level: user
• personal:
• first name: Jim
• last name: Leonard
• portals:
• slengpung: pictures
• demozoo: profile

• demo Dreamcast Wobble by CRTC
• I had no idea that the dreamcast had so many cool features in hardware. I knew it was a tile renderer, but some of this is very interesting:
  
  (from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms834190.aspx
  
  
  Quote:

  As triangles are sent to it, the Dreamcast hardware 3-D chip does not render the triangles scan line by scan line. Instead, it stores the triangles in video memory as they are sent. Once the entire scene has been collected, the hardware sends all triangles to the screen tile by tile, not triangle by triangle.
  
  Every tile is 32 x 32 pixels. For each tile, the hardware selects the pixels that intersect the tile and retrieves for each pixel the closest triangle to the camera (viewport). Then this pixel is rendered to the screen by following the process of completing the interpolations, reading the texel, and so on. Thus, every pixel on the screen is actually rendered to the screen buffer only once. Other 3-D hardware systems render every pixel as often as that pixel is recovered by a triangle, but not the Dreamcast hardware.
  
  By using this method, the hardware is not limited by the fill rate. No matter how many triangles recover a single pixel, that single pixel is rendered only once. Therefore, with the Dreamcast hardware, you don't need a Z-Buffer, because only the closest triangle is rendered.
  
  In addition, with the Dreamcast hardware, you don't need to clip the triangles to the screen viewport, so there is no need for clipping tests and calculations. This is because the hardware renders graphics tile by tile. As a result, you don't need to test primitives, nor do you need to break up primitives into smaller primitives that fit on the screen.
  
  The Dreamcast hardware does have to do several passes to render transparency, which slows down the rendering process a little. However, during that process, the hardware sorts the transparent triangles automatically, so your game engine does not need to sort them. Because your game engine doesn't have to do the memory manipulations that come with sorting, it avoids disturbing (slowing down) your 3-D pipeline. Even if the polygons intersect, there won't be any artifacts because the translucency sorting is done for each pixel by the hardware.
  
  Not all transparent modes need several passes. The 5551 (Punch Through) mode does not need to combine the most recently rendered pixel with the pixel previously rendered to the screen buffer because 1 bit of alpha channel does not allow any degree of translucency. Such triangles are rendered with the same speed as opaque triangles—in a single pass.
  
  Another feature of the Dreamcast hardware is that it has SH4 native operations that are fully supported by a set of intrinsics. The ones that we use the most are the dot product and the reciprocal square root. One special function that computes the sine and cosine of an angle is also very useful for character animation and camera movement calculations.
  
  You can also apply the following Dreamcast hardware features to each pixel the hardware renders to the screen:
  
  * Use a special surface mode to perform realistic bump mapping.
  * Use a special texture mode (VQ compression) to complete texture compression with an 8:1 compression ratio plus 2 KB of overhead for the codebook.
  * Test the on-screen pixel with a set of volumes, and apply a specific operation to the pixels inside or outside of the volume (color modification, transparency, or the texture ID). This makes shadows, lighting, and other special effects easy, and it doesn't break up the 3-D geometry pipeline.

  
  
  Sounds like a lot of untapped potential for a demo.
• isokadded on the 2010-04-10 19:15:36
• diskmag musicdisk Windows Amiga PPC/RTG Hugi #36 - Jukebox Delight by Hugi [web]
• Good articles, great music and art, engine needs work. Rules.
• rulezadded on the 2010-04-04 02:53:17
• 256b MS-Dos Puls by Řrřola [web]
• Sweet geezus.
• rulezadded on the 2010-04-03 04:31:12
• 64k MS-Dos Teddybear's Revenge by Eclipse [web]
• POWA
• rulezadded on the 2010-03-16 02:38:43
• invitation Flash Blockparty 2010 Invitation by Evoflash [web]
• And of course by only mentioning the music, I completely belittle the code. Whoops!
  
  That's flash, people!
• isokadded on the 2010-02-24 04:01:49
• invitation Flash Blockparty 2010 Invitation by Evoflash [web]
• godDAMN that music thumps. It makes me want to try to transcribe it to real chip.
• rulezadded on the 2010-02-24 04:00:34
• demo Windows fr-062: the cube by Farbrausch [web]
• oh HELL yeah. And no surprise that this is coming from an 18+ year veteran. Major thumbs.
• rulezadded on the 2010-01-02 07:16:58
• demo Windows Etch-A-Sketch by Candela
• Good point about capturing code.dll, but sadly I'm still not able to get it :-/
• isokadded on the 2009-11-02 05:03:32
• demo Windows Etch-A-Sketch by Candela
• And if anyone knows why it won't kkapture and how to fix, it would be much appreciated!
• isokadded on the 2009-09-16 05:20:13
• demo Windows Etch-A-Sketch by Candela
• God I love this thing. Seen it 4 times tonight alone. I could try to explain why but 1) you know why and 2) I'd just fuck up the words.
• rulezadded on the 2009-09-16 04:18:06