Re: point games

John Nagle wrote:
> Nathan Mates wrote:
>> In article 
>> <785160de-8577-4950-9424-14e91887063b@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
>>  <bob@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>> I was just wondering if we're going to start seeing computer games
>>> where the primitive is points rather than triangles.
>>
>>    You can do single-pixel points just fine in DirectX right now. [I
>> assume OpenGL is similar.] However, a huge screen (e.g. 1600x1200 or
>> bigger) would need a lot of single points to be visible. There's also
>> the problem that the hardware (graphics cards) tend to sup****t
>> triangles *great* and everything else not so well. This is a "network
>> effect" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
) where
>> what's sup****ted well gets a lot more sup****t, and everything else
>> gets ignored.
>>
>>    I suppose the bigger question is *why* would you think that points
>> (maybe you mean spheres?) would look better?
> 
>    He might be thinking of a ray-tracer.  We still can't quite do 
> ray-tracing
> in real time for non-trivial scenes on consumer grade hardware.  It's 
> getting
> close, though.  See "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLte5f34ya8".
> 
>                    John Nagle

He's probably mistakenly under the assumption that the triangles are 
always necessarily bigger than a pixel.

--
LTP

:)