Re: [Plib-devel] PLIB developers needed.

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

Christian Mayer wrote:

> > It certainly does use clip-texture - that's why they wrote that particular
> > demo.
> 
> Sorry, but what's the clip-texture really doing?

Clip texture is lots of things - but essentially it allows you to have
a 'virtual' texture map that is *MASSIVE* - perhaps 1,000,000 x 1,000,000
texels.  Since that's impossibly large, you are allowed to write into just
some sections at the highest MIPmap level - and others at lower levels -
and where there are gaps it can fill in.

Urgh - that's a terrible explanation - but essentially, it allows you
much more freedom in paging texture from disk efficiently.

The only 'gotcha' is that only hideously expensive ONYX'en have the
hardware to make it truly work.
 
> But it's been still very impressive (esp. at a time where nobody would
> expect 3d accelleration for consumer PCs)

It doesn't run on PC's (AFAIK) - or at least if it does, they found a way
to cram it all in without cliptexture (which is certainly possible).

> > They had a version where you zoomed in past the mountain and onto a
> > Nintendo-64 (which was developed by SGI) - through the case and down
> > into the 'Reality Chip'.
> 
> Yup, that's the demo I saw. SGI also had a Nintendo-64 prototype at
> their booth running SuperMario 64.

Exactly.  They actually offered me a job on the N64 design team - it
would have been a blast - but their pay scales (whilst MUCH better than
I was earning at the time in actual $$$) didn't come close to what I
was earning when you considered the cost of living in Silicon Valley
versus Texas.
              :-(

-- 
Steve Baker   HomeEmail: <sjb...@ai...>
              WorkEmail: <sj...@li...>
              HomePage : http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
              Projects : http://plib.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxaqfh.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxkart.sourceforge.net
                         http://prettypoly.sourceforge.net