Re: [palito-dev] Re: New renderer

[zed]

On Sun, Aug 10, 2003 at 03:32:05AM +0100, Tom Barnes-Lawrence wrote:
> Hi Barrett (and everyone else of course),
>  Sorry I didn't reply earlier, I was far too tired yesterday, and today it's
> been boiling hot and too hard to think. But I am still here! :)
> 
> On Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 11:55:12PM -0300, address@hidden wrote:
> > Tom, what about making IWR a GIMP plugin?
> > Take a look at the 'Land' script that come with it as an example..
> 
>  The only advantage I can think of would be that you could draw the
> input heightmap by hand, and then generate the image for it immediately.
> But you'd still want the heightmap kept around for the game itself. Also,
> I'd thought that IWR was most suited for batch processing (like called
> by some other program, especially in pipelines).
 
seems that barrett is thinking on the maps being all pre-processed.

but i think a dynamic renderer can be quite usefull, especially for
the case of unbounded maps (fractal generated heightfields without
limits in all directions)

>
>  In fact, one of the main ideas about it was that if Palito included IWR
> with it, map files would only need to be distributed as heightfields
> and/or texturing functions (the game could come with some default
> heightfields and default texturing functions, so new maps would be able
> to use any of these). The image file could then be generated relatively
> quickly at the start of the game.
 
even with the iwr built in palito somehow (running at map load, or running
on-the-fly for boundless maps) it should be very usefull to map designers
to have a instant feedback of how their maps would look like... and even more,
it should be usefull to edit the shaders and to retouch the final map image.

>
>  Really, for any maps where you wanted to create the image along with the
> heightfield and package it all together, you'd probably want that image
> to look as good as possible, so would most likely find a much better
> renderer for that (as the time taken in rendering, and any licensing
> issues, wouldn't be a problem there).
 
i think that your renderer is quite enough for palito, the shaders must
handle most cases, and its a simple alternative to povray or bryce, that
only specialists would use.