Posts by Defrag

Awesome.

There's only one thing for it, Mazy. Shave your head, invest in a suit and some piano wire and then go hunting for Mr. Gates.

You won't see the stock much (if at all) anyway

If you break down and buy one, it will respond in kind (by breaking down).

That looks good, merk. If it's going to be used a lot (and decently sized) then I'd be tempted to make the perspective less pronounced, though. I.e. make each slat more like | | rather than / \. I suck at making textures though, so it's probably safe to ignore me unless someone else agrees

From what I've seen so far, Battlefield2 is a more attractive game (and BF2 is two years old).

I was looking forward to this but I guess I'll wait and see what the finished game looks like.

BF2 is great IMO, it's just been horribly blighted by bugs and imbalances (even now the F-35B is a missile magnet, while the J-10 is nigh-on unhittable without resorting to esoteric tactics).

Yeah that's a fair point. I can terminate those ones sooner I guess (they run into the tail where I definitely do need them).

Yeah it's pretty tough to find quality orthographic drawings (whatever they're called, blueprints, plan views, 3 views). I often find shitty 150 pixel images and not much else. Resizing & sharpening only goes so far...

It's a Bell AH-1W Super Cobra. I just googled AH-1 and nabbed some images (being careful to ensure the images were of the correct model as loads are poorly labelled). I found some excellent sites in the process:

Pics:

http://www.airliners.net/search/index.main <- awesome site.

http://primeportal.net/home.htm <- aaaaaaaaawesome site. This site has so many detailed pictures you won't find elsewhere (like under nose-cones, undercarriages, details etc.)

http://walkarounds.airforce.ru/

Info / Links:

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/ah-1.htm -- pretty sure this has mis-labelled pics as it doesn't look like an AH-1W)

http://www.army-technology.com/

Quote from von*ferret

There is a lot of tessellations for something that doesn't look that smooth. Are you setting up a high poly for a low poly model?

Nope, I'm just fleshing it out. I'll remove some edge loops once I've got the body finished. It probably doesn't look remotely smooth as there's no smoothing groups (yet)

Here's a good starter for C++:

Teach Yourself C++ in 21 days (a complete lie, but it's still a decent starting point and deals with a lot of C++'s main features). Click.

That's some really cool stuff, Psychokiller. Makes me want to run run run run awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.

I did some more work on my Cobra; very slow going. Body shape is a lot more accurate now -- I need to sort out a few areas to keep the mesh all quads where smoothing is required.

[Blocked Image: http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~msimp2k2/models/ah-1W_Super_Cobra02.jpg]

I didn't see this coming at all. It's hard to say whether they are trying to send out a message (to the industry [don't make this kind of game], the media [we are mature and self-policing] or others) or genuinely setting a precedent which will be rigidly adhered to in future. My opinion pretty much mirrors Thrik's. I don't really get much out of mindless violence in games -- I want a motivation for doing what I'm doing (proper objectives, army games, saving the world etc.) Fair enough, some games like GTA do allow you to go on a violent rampage, but it's just a side part of the game and something that usually has boundaries (like you'll soon a load of stars and promptly shot up by the police). When it's the main thrust of the game it just feels 'wrong' to me.

The media coverage (whether you think the media is sensationalist / wrong or not) of games like Manhunt doesn't really do much to move gaming forwards. It just reaffirms gaming's perceived position as the preserve of socially retarded teenage nerds (which is far from the truth).

IMO the purpose of a WIP forum is so that people can get suggestions on how to improve something (or sometimes just get some encouragement to help them stick with it).

It's one thing to post "I personally think you use a cylindrical theme too much" or "I think you can improve the theme by " and quite another to post "Its not even the best pointless cylinder thing you've ever posted for christ sake". You might view this as cutting through the bs, but really, I don't think there's a need for it. You can get your point across just fine without potentially offending someone.

Well, that's my take on it, anyway.

What's the point in being so abrasive? You can actually critique something without it verging on the point of being abusive.

Sometimes people make stuff because they want to. I've seen JeanPaul's Black Mesa stuff and I was thoroughly impressed. I also liked the so-called 'pointless cylindrical' stuff he's posted in the past. Is it too much to just accept the fact that he likes making that stuff? If you don't like it, there are better ways to tell someone than to basically shit on what they're posting.

If you're in the UK and in education, you can get educational pricing for Wacom stuff. I got my Intuos about £50 cheaper than usual from this site: http://www.mycomputerbits.co.uk/acatalo ... blets.html

Apparently in DX10 and beyond, the driver is a lot more efficient when it comes to submitting draw calls, so it should be even better in future (imagine not being overly constrained by batching OR triangle count). Oooooh yes.

The fixed function pipeline (FFP) is just the bog-standard method of rendering. The programmer has little control over effects and lighting -- it's basically like dialling in some values and the API (D3D / OpenGL) takes care of various algorithms for you. This makes it nice and easy, but since the algorithms are fixed, you have little control over the result. There are various hardware limits as to what you can do and the 8 light thing is one of 'em. You can have a zillion lights, but only turn 8 on at any one time. I couldn't tell you in much detail why these limits exist (probably just to ensure a base level of compatibility), but they do.

However, the FFP has been effectively replaced by shaders now. Instead of dialling in the values via the API, the graphics programmer has complete control over what happens to each vertex & fragment/pixel. The graphics cards now have little/no notion of what it's 'meant' to be doing. All the graphics card knows is that at the end of a vertex shader, it outputs some values (vertex position, normal, whatever else the programmer wants) and, at the end of a pixel shader, it outputs some more values (usually just a single colour). What you do to get these values is completely flexible now -- it could be any kind of lighting model (say Cook-Torrence[sp] instead of just Phong) and any kind of lighting setup (calculate the contribution of one light per rendering pass, or sum up an arbitrary number of lights in a single rendering pass).

Now we've got support for static & dynamic branching and loops in shaders. What this means is that you can run a loop in a lighting shader and have an almost unlimited number of lights (you'd only be limited by the number of registers storing the light parameters and graphics cards have tonnes of those). It'd run like a dog if you're not careful, but the power is there. For something like a lighting preview, it'd probably be acceptable to cull unseen lights and render at a horrid framerate.

DX10 doesn't even have a FFP -- it's entirely shader-based. Shader capable cards have been around since 2001 and many games don't even use the FFP (as if you're writing shaders to do various things, it's more work to create in parallel a FFP equivalent of the shaders you're writing). What I'm trying to say is that these days, if you have the need for it, you technically can use as many lights as you want.

The 8 light limit is only for the fixed function pipeline -- you can sum up a zillion lights using shaders (though obviously it'll cost you). I'm not really bothered what they do, as long as it's fairly fast to render and gives a good indication of the final result.