Gish developers try to get onto WiiWare
From their blog:
Add comment September 8th, 2007
Archive for September 8th, 2007
Progression of real-time graphics…
Just over 6 years ago the real-time world was drooling over the first consumer-level programmable shading pipeline. Vertex shaders and pixel shaders, oh my!
Bump mapping, shadow volumes, and hardware skinning were creaming the pants of young graphics programmers who never experienced the power of RenderMan and Houdini… Nor had they experienced the joy of reading one of the great texts of computer graphics:
And this too:
At that time, majority of real-time graphics was still using the local illumination model with some outliers on the PC side using radiosity-based light maps.
Fast forward to a few years to 2003 and HDRI techniques (bloom + other effects), spherical harmonics, and normal mapping were all the rage.
Real-time graphics was getting respectable! No longer did the games/applications look like they were from a 1985 offline renderer.
Fast forward to now…. the current hype is over Ambient Occlusion, GPU-based acceleration of physics and other algorithms, film-quality shaders (skin). I no longer scoff at the images outputted. Subsurface scattering is still not implemented well in real-time, but vehicle rendering is nearly perfect.
Mental Ray renderer:
PGR4:
Is there much of a difference? Not really… glossy fresnel surfaces are perfectly recreated in real-time. I’m sure if I zoomed in, I could see the car paint speckle too.
And now, low-order dynamic global illumination is possible due to the research that began with “irradiance maps using spherical harmonics”, “real-time ambient occlusion”, and “pre-computed radiance transfer.”
Which means you get nice dynamic ambient occlusion plus hemispherical / spherical light (ala Debevec) – no more plastic please!
Throw in a cube or sphere map for reflection and you are closer to Mental ray quality… It’s amazing how far real-time graphics has progressed in the last few years. I opened mocked it for being 10 years behind offline CG, but now the results are respectable.
Add comment September 8th, 2007
PixelJunk racers looking good!
A high-speed old-school (with new school graphics) 2D racer with new non-racing mini-games arriving in the future – all based on pixel perfect accuracy I believe.
Add comment September 8th, 2007