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To graphics programmers

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-16 23:10

Cool, I didn't know /prog/ existed.

Were you impressed with John Carmac's Rage + iPhone demo?

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 18:32

>>24
No, I don't like portable consoles and phones merging at all. It means the death of good portable games if all we have is a touchscreen.
No it doesn't. Look at this: http://icontrolpad.com/

Apple actually filed a patent for this right out from under them. You can read about it here: http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/04/02/2110233/DavidGoliath-Story-Brewing-Between-Apple-and-iControlPad-Makers

Expect this sort of control attachment announced by Apple very soon. Like maybe even next month, alongside the new iPod Touch with retina display.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 18:33

>>40
Because this sort of idea-inbreeding is detrimental to the state of our board. Though looking at its quality in recent times, I wonder if it could be lowered further.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 18:35

>>42
It'd be less shit, if people would stop filling it with complaints about how it's shit.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 18:39

>>26
Are you being serious right now? These features are far more important than the number of polys it can render.

Did you know that the PSP, DSi, and Wii do not even have programmable shaders? The graphics Carmack just demonstrated on the iPhone are not possible on any of these platforms.

That's like, one hundredth of what a mid-range mobile graphics card done by a real company will get you today. Now you have enough power to run games similar to what we had in 2003.
It's a fucking PHONE. A PHONE. A mobile device. Smaller than the size of your hand. Geez.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 18:40

>>39
It's like you'd really want /prog/ to be filled with threads about programming.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 18:45

>>42
I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. And why, being a drooling idiot, wouldn't he?

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 19:03

>>42
I have found /prog/ to be much better whenever I put effort into making a thread, which involves picking a topic that is usefully discussable and interesting.

If people did that enough, >>43's point would be more obvious: imagine someone at LtU (or some other forum with high SNR) bitching about the odd garbage thread started by a newcomer. Everyone would agree that the complaint would be pointless also.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 19:07

>>41
The dpad on that looks fucking horrible. Almost as bad as the one on the 360 controller. The whole thing attached to the iPhone is really ugly which goes against the appeal of Apple products. But if you'd really want portable gaming that badly you'd just get a PSP or a DS or even a Gameboy.

>>44
Did you know that the PSP, DSi, and Wii do not even have programmable shaders? The graphics Carmack just demonstrated on the iPhone are not possible on any of these platforms.

The difference is those platforms have some great games. The tech demo was impressive but you don't play tech demos, you play games.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 19:41

>>48
The dpad on that looks fucking horrible.
This is the very first prototype example of a D-pad, made by a bunch of backyard hackers with zero funding. Did you miss the part where Apple are making their own?

Sorry to burst your bubble, but portable game consoles are dead. They have merged into the smartphone, alongside so many other portable technologies. It is only a matter of time now. Welcome to the future.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 19:58

>>49
Sorry to burst your bubble, but portable game consoles are dead.

I'll consider them dead when I see Nintendo franchises on smartphones. You do realize the PSP and DS sold almost 200 million units combined (that's hardly dead) and the 3DS will also sell a lot thanks to it's 3D gimmick.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 20:10

>>50
I'm not endorsing >>49's comment, but Sony's doing the phone thing (and the compromise doesn't seem too horrid IMO) and Nintendo is doing the feeling-out-phones thing again.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 20:13

>>51
The Sony phone thing has been a rumor for years now. Also there was a rumor about PSP2 for like a year now. Until Sony tells us what they're doing, it's pure speculation.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 20:24

>>52
http://www.phonesreview.co.uk/2010/08/12/sony-ericsson-developing-android-3-0-gaming-platform-and-smartphone/

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 20:27

>>50

It sure is 3D gimmick.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 20:33

>>44
So is the PSP and it's graphics are still comparable, yet the PSP is 6 years old.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 23:29

>>50
You do realize the PSP and DS sold almost 200 million units combined
Yeah no shit, they both launched almost six years ago. This is three times as long as iPhone OS 2 has existed. Of course they were successful; at the time they were the only way to play mobile 3D games.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 23:39

>>55
Uhh no, they are not comparable at all. The iPhone 4 has more than ten times the RAM of the PSP. It has more than five times the resolution. It has a CPU running a much more modern architecture and instruction set at triple the clock speed. It has a dedicated programmable GPU supporting normal mapping, per-pixel lighting, etc. The PSP has none of these things.

The iPhone 4 is brand new and the games already look much better than PSP. Seriously watch the video the OP is talking about:

http://www.cultofmac.com/rage-for-iphone-4-boasts-xbox-level-graphics-at-60fps/54914

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 23:47

>>57
Too bad a touch screen will never replace proper controls.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-17 23:49

Geometry shaders!? That's just what my $2 tower defense app needs!

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-18 0:16

>>58
don't feed the troll. don't feed the troll. don't feed the troll.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-18 1:27

>>56
Of course they were successful; at the time they were the only way to play mobile 3D games.

They still are, until the 3DS hits.

>>57
The iPhone 4 is brand new and the games already look much better than PSP. Seriously watch the video the OP is talking about:

That does look good!

I saw the DSi, PSP and Wii compared to the iPhone in this thread so let's check out some of their more recent offerings.

Wii has Metroid: Other M - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRMBerJtJjM#t=01m45s

PSP has God of War: Ghost of Sparta - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPyu0RNEJuY

DS has a Mario RPG - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW6YDv_EhnY

What are some exciting upcoming iPhone game? (Rage is just a tech demo at this point)

Also about it being more powerful than the original Xbox: CALL ME WHEN IT CAN PLAY THIS PROPERLY - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMBwKT0uDig

Name: ­ 2010-08-18 1:37

>>59


fucking win

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-18 1:53

>>57
Still, it doesn't look that much better than PSP games.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-18 5:39

>>61
The first two videos made me laugh; you couldn't possibly think they look anything like Carmack's demo. It took until the third video for me to realize you were trolling :(

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-18 6:36

>>57
IHBT

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-18 7:52

>>44
Uhh... Rage's not taxing at all on the graphics side. The technology works by reading a unique texture foe everything in the world. Since each texel is unique, it comes pre-shaded and pre-lit.

The advantage is that it can look as good as you want and it'll be cheap on the hardware. The disadvantage is that it's completely static, you can't even move lights so the shadows move around.

The trick is loading the right textures at the right mipmap levels at the right time. And also storing the huge amount of data on disk (this is the biggest problem I see for an iPhone app). But the rendering itself is pretty simple. It does use pixel shaders, but only to ease the transition between several texture tiles at different qualities and stuff like that.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-18 9:56

>>66
[citation needed]

What you're saying does sound mostly true for the environment. You are correct that doing intelligent asynchronous texture swapping is probably the most difficult issue in creating rich environments given the low texture memory of an iPhone 4 compared to its screen size.

But lots of iPhone games have non-static shadows with moving lights and such (especially racing games), so just because Carmack didn't demonstrate it there doesn't mean he can't do it. Also, the characters in that video looked way too smoothly shaded; they are almost certainly normal-mapped. It's a relatively cheap way of making a dozen box-shaped polygons look like an awesomely detailed mesh, and I guarantee they will be using it for characters on the iPhone.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-18 10:14

>>67
The engine can do it in the sense that you can use models, and these models use straightforward shadow mapping. In the iPhone demo it looks like some kind of blob shadow, or some very low resolution shadow map on the characters. Since I didn't see any trace of self-shadowing or shadows on uneven surfaces, I'm betting on blobs.

However most of the lightning and shadowing is static by design. That's the engine's strength. Apart from unique texturing, it allows stuff such as proper radiosity that would be too expensive to do real-time.

I don't really know what you are trying to imply with "they are almost certainly normal-mapped". It's not unusual to use different methods for the world and models, and everybody uses normal-mapped models now. Normal mapping does not require pixel shaders; Doom3 worked just fine (image quality-wise) on a GeForce2 (with bump&specular), and several games use bump-mapping on the GC/Wii.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-18 10:19

>>67
making a dozen box-shaped polygons look like an awesomely detailed mesh
This has its limitations too. The edges/silhouette are going to look awful if you take this too far, like Doom3 did. For human-like models to look decent, on top of the normal mapping you have to spend in the neighborhood of 10K polygons. And if you want them to look awesome (MGS4, Crysis), you'll need about 50K. There's no way around that.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-18 10:25

>There's no way around that.
Unlimited Detail+Infinite Compression

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-18 12:01

You know how shitty iPhone games are? I couldn't find a single video on youtube of an iPhone game with Drowning Pool - Let the bodies hit the floor playing in the background.

If a game doesn't have that, it's not successful.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-18 12:37

>>71
It's difficult because your post was mildly amusing, yet you bumped the thread in the end, ruining your chances for a better score.

Overall, 2/10.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-18 15:30

>>72
Nah I think it was rather good.

3/10

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-18 17:43

>>68
I don't really know what you are trying to imply with "they are almost certainly normal-mapped". It's not unusual to use different methods for the world and models, and everybody uses normal-mapped models now.
Yeah that's pretty much exactly what I meant. Not sure where the confusion is. I mentioned it because the PSP and DS don't support normal mapping; their characters cannot look that good.

Normal mapping does not require pixel shaders; Doom3 worked just fine (image quality-wise) on a GeForce2 (with bump&specular)
Doom3 worked on a GeForce 2 because it disabled normal mapping on it. I know because I played it on one.

It is possible to do normal mapping in certain scenarios if the video card supports a few extensions; for example the OpenGL DOT3 extension is one of them, but it requires normal maps in world space (not relative to each polygon), so you cannot use it with animated characters. In the general case, no, it requires pixel shaders.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-18 17:55

In the general case, no, it requires pixel shaders.
That is some really smelly bullshit right there.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-18 21:38

>>74
You were most certainly doing something wrong then. Doom3 was feature-complete on GeForce2 hardware, including per light bump-mapping, specular highlighting, and stencil shadowing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPpKIFn2Txo

Watch the second part of that video and tell me what is missing according to you.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-18 22:25

>>76
The video quality there is too terrible to tell (even at 480p); the only thing that actually moves around is the spider. You might be right about that, but GeForce2 definitely did not support programmable shaders. It only supports DirectX 7 features. So if it is fully featured, then I don't know what extensions they used to pull that off.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-19 2:07

>>77
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_2_Series

The GeForce 2 also formally introduces the NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer (NSR), a primitive type of programmable pixel pipeline that is somewhat similar to later pixel shaders.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-19 3:39

For example, Opera 6.10 now has standard features that support Geolocation and webM HTML5 video. Support is also given Opera on HTML 5 Appcache technology and Web Workers that allows the use of a browser for a broader application, such as word processors, image editors and others.

Name: Anonymous 2010-08-19 11:38

>>79
No one (.2% actually) uses Opera.

Back to /g/, please.
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