November | 2009 | Alberto's Blog

Fun at 700MHz: RayWarping renders

2009-11-02 at 14:35 | Posted in Computer path | Leave a comment
Tags: 3D, C++, fractal, game, procedural, ray tracing

So I bought a K7 at 700MHz which is still working 24/7 as server at my home and then put it to work: ray tracing rules, I felt that at a very deep level, so I immediately concentrated all my efforts on making a real-time ray tracing engine. It was a little tricky at 700MHz and so it teach me interesting things. This engine was called RayWarping, it was able to move in real-time at low resolution and also synthesising HQ static images usually in less than 10 seconds. To support fast ray tracing I developed a spatial partition I called CNP (Cubic Neighbor Partition). It was in essence a non uniform grid with each face of each cell communicated with each neighbor trough a 2D binary spatial partition. Here are some examples of static images (for real-time videos see next post):

From Intel to AMD

2009-11-02 at 14:00 | Posted in Computer path | 1 Comment
Tags: 3D, C++, fractal, game, procedural, ray tracing

Except my first 8 bit computer all the rest until now used Intel CPUs, but not any more AMD began building seriously good cheap chips and so I decided to buy a K5 at 400MHz, what a good processor. Again I felt the duty of putting to use all that new power and began to understand that, with time, raytracing was going to be just the best way to represent things. This are my fisrts experiments:

: My firsts raytracings

: More raytraced spheres

32 bits rules

2009-11-02 at 11:47 | Posted in Computer path | Leave a comment
Tags: 3D, C++, fractal, game, procedural, ray tracing

Yea, I was buzzing with excitement when I got my first 32 bit computer, I jump from a 286 directly to a wonderful 486Dx2 66 MHz without ever having a 386 (which I regard as an incredibly good CPU for that time anyway). I think it was then I began to feel a kind of obligation to make programs that put to use all that overwhelming computer power for a good cause. The math coprocessor of the 486 worked amazingly fast (this was the first Intel CPU with integrated math coprocessor) and I decided to stop using integer fix point arithmetic in favor of 32 bit floating point maths. So all the operations started to be much more accurate and a myriad of new possibilities became reachable. Also the games were better, much better, in fact I spent so much time playing Doom that I could see corridors passing by when I closed my eyes, for real, not joking man. Then I got a Pentium 133MHz (without the division bug) and the floating point arithmetic became so fast I couldn’t believe it. So I kept improving my engines and did a two player tank game among other things. Since the game was made absolutely from scratch it teach me a lot, specially about 3D collision detection. Of course I stopped using Turbo C and started enjoying the DOS4GW world of real 32 bit indexing RAM, so much fun.