[MUD-Dev] 3D engines for MUDs (was: The MLI Project)

[Michael Hohensee]

Miroslav Silovic wrote:
> 
> Michael Hohensee <michael at sparta.mainstream.net> writes:
> 
> > Of course, the POVRAY renderer does take time to work, and wouldn't be
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> This is gross understatement. :) While 2-3 seconds are quite
> acceptable for a game, 1-60 minutes are not.
> 

Heh, only if you want the highest quality in your image.  I'm talking
about images which take 4-10 seconds to display.  Every .pov file that I
ever saw could be traced in under 10 seconds if you wanted a little
80x80 (or thereabouts) image.

> > suitable for real-time graphics unless there is a way to have it
> > lower the quality of the rendering to a point where it took a
> > fraction of a second to finish.  If we're not desperate for
> > real-time images, however, this seems to be the logical solution.
> 
> POVray is slow for the following reasons:
> 
>         1) bad acceleration algorithm. They can only use bounding boxes
>            but not octree or bsp tree. Unfortuantely this is also hard
>            to fix because POV uses unbounded primitives, and you can't
>            take those away because POV's CSGs won't work with patches
>            (not to mention backward compatibility)
> 
>         2) POV is a raytracer. It's very hard to speed up raytracing
>            past certain point - that's why games use zbuffering instead.
>            Note that the only places where you /need/ raytracing are
>            reflective/refractive surfaces (and even there, you could
>            cheat by using environment maps).
> 
> <ShamelessPlug>
> Feel free to take the code from my renderer for both zbuffering and
> /really/ accelerated raytracing. Gah, now I need to speed up the
> bloody thing for scenes with fewer than 1,000 polygons (as raytracing
> becomes the low overhead operation in the low-complexity case, when
> procedural textures and image pre/postprocessing take over... 320x240
> low-quality previews take 2-3 seconds with 10 objects, 10-20 with
> 1000, using raytracing, and with zbuffering everything gets faster. I
> solved problems with quality loss with zbuffering and as a result, you
> get exactly the same image).
> 
> (renderer: http://petra.zesoi.fer.hr/~silovic/sart, and I announced it
> recently on Freshmeet site)
> </ShamelessPlug>

Heh, ok, I'll look it over. :)

--
Michael Hohensee       michael at mainstream.net
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