It has been two decades since the video game Max Payne was release on July 23, 2001. The game itself was some incredible homage to The Matrix and Detective Film Noire but in this article we are only going to examine the graphics. The rendering present in the game was phenomenal for its time and as such received multiple graphics awards. To understand the what the developers achieve and could have…
Simple Wheeled Cart Scene demonstrates the new multi-layer feature. Elements live only in a single layer but vertices can connect across layers. This enables the effective simulation of many complex mechanical systems. For our scene; a two dimensional wheel requires an axle connection from an independent layer. Per element material is also critical for this Cart demonstration . The wheel treading…
Mechanical one way latch. Toothed pendulum swings one way but when it swings the other way the latch kicks in and prevents further motion. Grid of solid circles of the same material. Material is has a high degree of restitution energy dissipation as well as a high surface friction coefficient. Early scene to prove out possible toothed gear simulation. Effective force propagates from the toothed…
Simple plastic material simulating a scenario equivalent to metal pressing. False color indicates von mises stress. Significant plastic deformation with moderate volume preservation. Early result using only volume preservation and damping produces a fluid-like effect. Slight checkerboarding is observer in the tessellated mesh. (The literature suggests this checkerboarding is common for the linear…
Validating UTF8 strings with Lookup Tables A recent post appearing on Daniel Lemire's blog heralds a new performance milestone in SIMD utf8 string validity verification using AVX(256 bits) instructions. While AVX performance on some existing hardware might actually be pessimization*, the older 128 bit SIMD version should still be blazingly fast on most systems. Checking for utf8 string validity…
DirectX Raytracing (DXR) DXR has recently been announced and many oldtime graphics programmers are obviously very interested in how this might change the future of GPU RealTime (RT) rendering. This article will be from the perspective of a Gen~3.5 render engineer and not someone currently writing production code against this new API. API Summary DXR presents new API for specifying 3D scene and…
Just like its predecessor Riven was a game composed of prerendered CGI images. Twenty years later Obduction a sequel in series was created as realtime with the unreal engine. Given the advancement of hardware and CGI algorithms over 20 years how do these two compare? Comparison validity It does not initially seem fair to compare offline rendering to realtime (desktop) rendering. Beyond simply…
This post is an attempted response to Steven Pinker's " THE FALSE ALLURE OF GROUP SELECTION " Introduction Can natural selection allow for reproductive individuals in a group to exhibit altruistic behaviors? In his lengthy article, Steve Pinker suggest that it cannot: "A new mutation with this effect would not come to predominate in the population, and even if it did, it would be driven out by any…
tldr : A uv coordinate transform field can transform texture sampling into something akin to a 2d quad mesh. This allows for much better representations of 2d vector graphics when represented as textures. Sampling Optimal sampling of raw spatial data does not necessarily consist of uniformly sampled points. While sampling at twice the lowest frequency ( Shannon ) results in detection of a given…
This is a obvious technique and merely an application of one way cryptographic functions. Suppose players in a peer network wish to participate in a game of chance. The primary object is high quality random binary numbers. However in a network without server authority, no single peer can be trusted to create these random values. The first solution that comes to mind is to have each peer submit a…
Test post