[Algorithms] (no subject)

[Alain S. <sa...@pt...>]

Joris Mans:
I don't see the use of Z information with spheres that won't ever
intersect. Simple textures should do the trick.

Jon Watte:
I agree for the environment mapping and the shadows. But 160000 polys
for the balls only is too much if I also want to render some environment
(a pool hall with people in the background, etc...). The CLOD doesn't
reduce quality but enhances performance, so it's never a bad thing.

Tom Forsyth:
Okay, okay, I should use the correct terms. With CLOD I didn't the mean
the specific technique, but simply what it literally means: a method to
reduce polygon count in a continuous way. I already had your method of
some -hedron which is subdivided in mind. A real general-purpose CLOD
system would of course be overkill to render spheres. The thing with the
stencil buffer you mention sound jaggy. If I understand correctly you
take a texture of a disc and put it into the stencil buffer, which is 1
bit. At high resultions this will give worse edges than my blurry
textures. This technique is okay when rendering on a rather fixed
resolution, but what if someone plays my game at 1600x1200? I can't put
that large textures in there. The same counts for the pixel shader
method you describe. The problem is that textures have to be a fixed
size. The memory would be sufficient, but does most of the hardware
handle textures at really big sizes (1024x1024 & higher)?

Thanks guys,

Alain

P.S. Dear Santa Claus, please let me have a DrawAntialiasedDiscPrimitive
for next Christmas, will you?