Checking in
Wednesday, November 24th, 2004
Having a lovely time in the violent fantasy world of Half-Life 2, which I still haven’t managed to play though yet. In the snapshot you can see my recent visit to the flooded basement of what looks like a nightmarish hospital for the criminally insane.
As a result of I am finding myself in that weird headspace I haven’t experienced for a while, where my perceptions of reality are temporarily affected by the immersive gaming experience. In the real world now I walk into a room and automatically do a visual scan for explosive items… and as I walk close to objects I can’t help noticing how realistically they are rendered.
Back when I was working on 3D realism I used to think like this all the time… when I drove through the country I was constantly staggered by the level of detail in the trees and fields, trying to gauge in my mind the sort of processing power required to generate that sort of imagery in real time. Then I would think: I am such a nerd.
November 25th, 2004 at 5:41 pm
I was always impressed by the efficiency of the procedural texture generation, but I guess even if you had to store the textures as bitmaps you have a whole world (which coincidentally and amazingly is precisely the right size) to keep them in.
Have you read the (I think Italo Calvino, but it could be Eco) piece on the difficulties of making a 1:1 scale map of a place?
November 26th, 2004 at 12:30 am
Re: 1:1 mapping - I don’t think I’ve read it, but it does ring a bell.
Re: procedural texture generation - it is hard to not be impressed by the achievements of these guys:
(ie the 96K demo which came out a while back)
Note that they have a procedural texture tool there now… might be worth checking out