I installed Q3 yesterday out of pure boredom and I’m still gobsmacked by how good it looks. After watching the DIII video today, I think I’m going to pass out if I ever get my hands on a copy.
The thing that bothers me however, is that once again I’m 5 years behind everybody else (just cracked the BSP\Portal engine).
Well, one of the 3D engines I am still working on (just for fun, not for real work !) uses spacecut instead of z-buffer (this dates back from the Atari Falcon 030 years…) so I am probably behind by more than 10 years !
Regards
Eric
P.S.: don’t go about explaining me that z-buffer is the way to go, I know that…
Originally posted by Robbo:
That far back and you can start talking about LED displays (all those flashing lights!) - when a single pixel could be measured in feet and inches
Hi
here at school we are developing a LED display matrix with around 128x128 pixels with 16 greyshades.The LEDS ar contolled by a 8bit microcontroller for each 12 LEDS, so we have real multiprocessing When we have a fast interface from PC to the LED display, I’ll port Quake I or II to the LEDS, it would not be that problem, just read back the frame buffer and sent it to the LED
I think that systems like this are pretty much used in advertising. I have seen large ones and I think they use light bulb sized LEDs or something (a bulb with 50 LEDs inside). LEDs are getting popular, used on police cars, ambulance, buses, traffic lights. There are UV LEDs as well.
…and Infrared LEDs, and combined LEDs that can do R, G and B, and even laser diodes
The neat thing is, the power input to light output ratio is quite a bit better with an LED than with a bulb (almost no energy dissipation in form of heat). So, even putting 50 or 100 LEDs together to reach brightness comparable to a light bulb will probably result in less power consumption.
When I was at Uni, I shared a house with a guy who was doing his P.H.D. thesis on light-emitting polymers. I do believe Cambridge Uni has spun off his and others work into a company which will bring these new screen types to the market. Apparently they will allow screens to be mapped onto almost any shape (even your t-shirt).