[MUD-Dev] 3D graphics (Was: The impact of the web on muds)

[coder at ibm.net]

On 13/02/98 at 04:24 PM, Mike Sellers <mike at online-alchemy.com> said: >At
03:16 PM 2/13/98 PST8PDT, coder at ibm.net wrote:

>>ie Just-In-Time graphics with strong acceptant for latency...  <<Me
>>smelleth an acronym under there>>  Not a bad idea at all.  You essentially
>>convert the client side into a partial and unverifiable DB repository of
>>the world as that client has seen it -- which contains nothing that client
>>has never seen.  it solves many of the update problems (not all alas),
>>removes the requirement for multi-hundred Meg mass D/L's etc.

>We originally planned to do this with M59, but dropped it due to
>programmer and artist constraints.  

I'd thought I'd find one you commercials who had at least started int his
direction.

>The idea works well with a class
>hierarchy: every chest is rendered first as a box, every throne as a
>chair, every monster as a vaguely threatening blob or a humanoid or
>quadruped, etc.  The higher up the class hierarchy you have to go to get
>a local model, the looser the correspondence will be between what the
>user sees at first and the actual item.  Then, if necessary, you can
>download the needed gfx during times of lower bandwidth usage (e.g.
>chatting) so they're around when/if the user sees that entity again.  

Precisely.


>>So y'all are going to be sporting 1GigHz DEC Alpha's in a year or two eh?

>I had a fascinating discussion with a guy from Intel recently.  Roughly,
>their plans (consider how much advance foundry planning alone they have
>to do) say that this Christmas the almost-highest-end consumer machine
>will be a 300MHz Pentium II (really high end is probably a 400 or 450 or
>so). Christmas 1999, probably a 450, with 800s mixed in at the very top
>end. End of the year 2000 you're looking at 800s, 2001 probably 1G to
>1.2GHz machines.  

I've been speaking to a nameless droid who doesn't work for Intel, but is
a thorn in their side (sorry, he said he'd have to kill me).  His basic
prediction was a linear extension from 500MHz for xmas 1998 to 1GigHz by
xmas 2000.  Admittedly he's talking about a higher end than the home
market, but the correspondence in numbers is interesting.

>Somewhere between 2000 and 2003 they go to copper-based
>chips which give another burst of speed (with a simultaneous drop in
>power, heat, and size), and around 2015 or so they go straight to
>laser-based optical chips -- at which point we basically have no clue
>what computing or computer usage will look like.  

The laser curve looks like being a *lot* faster off the starting block. 
It is already beginning to bite.  HP and a few others are already making
laser interfaced NICs using the new silicon cone lasers.  By mid 1999 I
expect to start to see serious discussion of laser based motherboard bus
designs.  

>So: if you're starting on a large project today that is expecting to ship
>for Christmas of 1999 (less than a 24-month cycle), well... you probably
>can't buy the equivalent target consumer machine yet.  Oh, and it's easy
>to scoff at these numbers, but if you look backwards, these are
>completely in line with the physics, marketing, and overall realities of
>computer speeds -- Moore's Law still rules. :)  

Which also suggests, as DASD speeds keep up, that I may also finally get a
solution for my bandwidth problems.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
----------(*)                              Internet: coder at ibm.net
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...