Originally posted by knackered:
The explainations are just not good enough, michael. It doesn’t matter how simple your idea is, if you haven’t the ability to succinctly communicate it to other individuals then it will remain your idea, and any chance of developing the idea in parallel with other people (called team-thinking, or brain-storming) will be impossible. Unless you’re willing to put more effort into your explainations (more effort!=more words), I for one really don’t see the point in you posting here.
However, your cloud idea was not the purpose of your post - your purpose was that you didn’t know about the popular alpha test functionality that’s existed in graphics hardware for a great number of years, since IGL…even Glide. Your mouse pointer hovered over the ‘beginners forum’ button for a fleeting second, before thinking “no goddam it, I’ve got fancy cloud stuff in my head that would spoil stephen hawkings enjoyment of eastenders, I’m no beginner, I’m a genius.”. So here you are again, asking another beginners question in the advanced forum…simply because the project you’re working on could be described as advanced. But the OpenGL question is not advanced.
yeah you are right about glAlphaFunc… i’ve never needed that sort of functionality, and the only time i saw it before was once when i read straight through all the opengl commands just to see if i might get any ideas. i don’t know why i didn’t do a search for ‘alpha’… i guess i approached the idea from the perspective of the depth buffer api. i really can’t quote gl specifications like a bible. and no i never thought about putting it in the beginner forum. its also nice to get the deeper perspective of more committed users as well.
but in the end i admit, my disposition is pretty casual. if that bothers people so much i will just take a bow and make my exit before any reformation.
no succinct definition does not mean more words… i actually have an internet prescence where most of my work suitable for public consumption can be read about… within the scope of my best attempt at plane spoken concision. but writing like that for me is so difficult and time consuming, that very little can motivate me to do it. i would post a link to that material here. but this forum is too big, and i don’t want that sort of attention right now.
if you really want to find it, go to the domain i referenced in another thread, and look in the ‘users’ directory… but it won’t be that simple. just one more step.
but there is nothing too new there.
and this ‘cloud stuff’ is just an after thought… and no i had no intention of sticking that in here, but some one asked for a better explanation, so i gave some context.
finally i would’ve posted in teh beginner forum, but i was also curious about other matters, like whether triangles might be culled by alpha testing, and shader behavior… and maybe deeper insight into the general domain.
the cloud shader still has a fair flaw where the clouds meet empty sky. if you or anyone really wants to help work through this problem, i would be happy to try to explain it in detail, because i would really like to see it happen.
the shader is actually pretty interesting, and if you are willing to do it without clod, it doesn’t suffer from its only remaining flaw.
anyhow, i am a pretty casual, ‘stream of conscious’ sort… so if you don’t want my type polluting the board, just cast your vote.
sincerely,
michael
PS: just for the hell of saying so, today i’m programming the aformentioned SSE triangle mahjong game. its an interesting puzzler in itself. but too messy to do on paper.