Welcome, HellSpawnLucifer, I take it you're the person icecoolz was talking about.
First off,
HellSpawnLucifer said:
Please note that this is just FYI ... I wouldnt want anyone to take offence.
Nobody takes offence, you can be sure of that, least of all me. I know a developer when I see one, whether its 1 post or 1000, content is what matters. And if we can learn something from each other, well, that's the whole point to the forum, isn't it?
There's nothing I like more like someone correcting me and I learn something else new. The problem is this, I strayed from everything to do with hardware and game design more than two point five years ago, and while I've been following developments, now all I have is others' information guiding me, instead of a DIY approach. So sometimes I get misguided by other posts and usually tend to think that people post stuff on what they know about, and when someone corrects me, I at least Google for it and try to correct myself. I believe its called "The Serendipity Effect"
HellSpawnLucifer said:
So its more like "DOOM3 uses tangent space bump mapping with normal maps ....". Please feel free to look up any references on bump mapping if you feel I am incorrect.
Gotcha, I did look it up on Google and spent a lot of time reading through it again, and you're right. I stand corrected. I spent all afternoon looking for the source page that I had seen months earlier and what has happened is that somehow my brain twisted the information out of context a bit. The source reads:
Doom 3 uses normal maps for some models to "emulate" high geometry details. Theoretically, the bump maps we were so much told about by video card manufacturers are also normal maps, just tied up to textures instead of triangles. In both cases normal maps are responsible for the interaction of surfaces with their incident rays of light.
Needless to say, I think I twisted the letters in bold out of context. I apologize. Thank you for correcting me.
HellSpawnLucifer said:
The normal maps also do not have anything to do with shadows, these are rendered by a method called stencil shadows. If you notice carefully enough, "Counselor Swann's hexagonal skull" shadow will STILL be hexagonal, since stencil shadows are pixel precise.
Again, I dont know why I went into shadowing. I know Doom 3 uses shadow volumes for rendering shadows and I also know all it takes is a 8-bit stencil buffer for this. Yet I still read on Google that normal maps, (the surface-local) interact with the incident light to decide the shadowing, which is then rendered by either shadow volume or shadow mapping. So.... help me out here, will you? You specifically said that normal maps have nothing to do with shadows, yet what I read is different.
HellSpawnLucifer said:
The reason the polycount has to be reduced, is because of the per fragment overhead of pixel shaders. This is also the reason the monsters disappear. Memory is hardly a problem, because all entities (meshdata) are only referenced. The fillrate, however represents a huge problem, because performing several passes running a vertex and pixel shader for each one imposes a serious fill rate drain.
Actually, I did address this issue in a later post. I said that
"...it was better than leaving it in where every extra polygon rendered would inevitably lead to a drop in framerate."
And when it comes to multipass or multitexture rendering, doesn't the performance depend only on the memory and increases with increase in memory frequency and that the memory experiences the hardest strain of all? I've seen actual benchmarks with cards confirming this. Correct me if I am wrong, please!
HellSpawnLucifer said:
At this point, I'd advise you to go look up John Carmack's point plans ... where he discussed the R300 and the NV30 pipelines
I've seen that a long time ago, but thanks for refreshing my memory.
It was wonderful reading through it again. But you have to admit that its a bit dated, I mean, NV40s are flooding the market and are the standard now. I didnt want to go into it in detail, but..
Correct me if I go wrong with this. The first pass fills up Z buffer values for all pixels and provided MSAA isnt used, the NV3x/40 cards do this at double speed. Next it calculates shadow volumes and writes it to the stencil buffer, again at doubled speed after which it begins texturing.
So, while using the NVxx paths, it does the job faster. Which is pretty much the same thing I said ealier and is also pretty much one of the key things Carmack has said in that post. So, I am confused, why did you tell me to look at it?
Anyway, thanks a lot for correcting me and I apologize for the mistakes I made. This has been one of the best times I've had in a while, swapping ideas and I have you guys to thank for it. As always, please go through my posts and if you think there is a mistake, feel free to slam me. I wouldn't have it any other way.
gxsaurav said:
since we both know, atleast I do that nothing is perfect in this world, i just say that Kudos to ID for creating this much nice illusion that despite being low textured it looked so good
You said it!
Nothing's perfect, certainly not me or my video card, at least.
And yes, in the end I dont care about all of this as long as I can forget everything else and just play the game, and yes, even low settings will do.
Once Quake 4 and RtCW2 come out, I will forget everything and just care about bashing demons and the undead.
And oh, even I was talking about Splinter Cell not Pandora Tomorrow. The original Splinter Cell for the PC, XBox and PS2 versions as well as the sequel, are still based on Unreal Engine 2.0. Nothing of Splinter Cell was ever made on Unreal Engine 1.0. In fact, it even won the awards for it and was lauded in the UnrealTechnology.com and Epic websites.
@icecoolz: Dont worry, I am not that geeky myself. I still like the Ren and Stimpy show and dont miss a single episode of The Simpsons. Just your regular average guy that likes to read.
@allwyndlima: I will have to do a bit of research into the games, but as for the network adapter, yeah, I have it built in to my PSTwo. Still waiting for the Network Access Disc though. Will definitely post some info on it in a new thread.
and yes again misguiding (no prob) but.........
Just let it go, buddy. There's no point in starting a flame war and I dont want you getting into trouble because of me. Besides, we're the guys that stay patient and keep cool no matter what, right? 
for the last time i am telling its tarey_g and that g not= ji , ji is used for elders (sharma ji,verma ji etc) ,and its a long time(years) after which i wud like to be called tareyji. btw that g=gaurav thats my name. 
