Amiga 3D Graphic Programming in Basic

[SamOS39]

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Amiga-3D-Graphic-Basic-for-Commodore-Amiga-Computer-NEW_W0QQitemZ160215827400QQihZ006QQcategoryZ4315QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQ_trksidZp1638.m118.l1247QQcmdZViewItem

Has anyone else got this book and if so im wondering if it covers programming textured 3D graphics on AGA machinces...?

cheers

Samm.

[Piru]

Textured 3D graphics on AGA machines... in amigabasic? Are you kidding? ;-)

[SamOS39]

.. so thats not what im loking for then .. :roll:

[bloodline]

While it was fairly straight forward to get a 68k to plough through the various transformation matricies required for a small number of low vertex polygons, I could never, not even on my 040, get anything more than a single simple cube to run at a reasonable speed... With AGA, simply trying to draw the texels takes an age! If I had a better background in maths and computer science, maybe I would have figured out a more optimised routine... But with Amiga, forget about texture mapping!

[Piru]

The now defunct amycoders homepage still has some interesting stuff on it:

Texturemapping Innerloops
Public C2P Sources

Also check the tutorials.

[bloodline]

Yeah, C2P would have helped, but I had lost interest in the whole thing before I had the texture mapping working properly... Pixel plotting speed was the least of my problems :-)

-Edit- I did learn about fixed point maths which was fun, though pointless in this modern world.

[Louis Dias]

real 3D math sucks...

recently I thought of what might be a better way to render and then I read about ray-tracing and it turned out that that's what I was thinking...but try to do that in real-time on any hardware, let alone Amiga...

[bloodline]

lou_dias wrote:
real 3D math sucks...

recently I thought of what might be a better way to render and then I read about ray-tracing and it turned out that that's what I was thinking...but try to do that in real-time on any hardware, let alone Amiga...

Realtime raytracing is the way forward... It's the only way to improve the quality over the current generation of 3D hardware... Plus you get shadows and lighting effects for free... Trying to do shadows on OpenGL is so hard I gave up.

[AJCopland]

That's rather a broad statement : "It's the only way to improve the quality over the current generation of 3D hardware".

Ray tracers aren't even used in most movies, Toy Story, Monsters Inc et al weren't done using ray tracers and indeed programmable shaders only came to modern 3D hardware from high-end scan line tracers so there's plenty of overhead left in conventional shading hardware and that's discounting it's ability to pull in elements of Ray Tracing.

Its also true that using Ray Tracing doesn't magically give you anything that which you'd want in a modern game.

Here the article and the following discussion (linked) should provide some decent background reading on the topic: John Carmack on ray tracing.

It's also quicker than me re-iterating some of the points made in that article/discussion :-D but to summarise : Ray-Tracing != "magical pancea to our graphical woes"

Andy

[AJCopland]

I think Piro has already linked you to some good sources for tutorials and erm... source. Anyway just wanted to say that you're probably not going to be wanting to fling a lot of texture mapped graphics around on the miggy in realtime so you're better of attempting to play to some of it's other strengths wherever possible and minimise the use of geometric detail etc.

Guess it depends one what you had in mind really.

Andy

[Hans_]

@bloodline

I remember playing a 3D texture-mapped racing game on my A1200 with an 030@40MHz (with no graphics card, so it can be done.

Hans

[bloodline]

Hans_ wrote:
@bloodline

I remember playing a 3D texture-mapped racing game on my A1200 with an 030@40MHz (with no graphics card, so it can be done.

Hans

It certainly can be done! But not by me :-)

[amigadave]

SamOS39 wrote:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Amiga-3D-Graphic-Basic-for-Commodore-Amiga-Computer-NEW_W0QQitemZ160215827400QQihZ006QQcategoryZ4315QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQ_trksidZp1638.m118.l1247QQcmdZViewItem

Has anyone else got this book and if so im wondering if it covers programming textured 3D graphics on AGA machinces...?

cheers

Samm.

I have the book, let me go open it.  Here are the titles of the major chapters in the book:

1. Introduction
2. The Basics of Ray Tracing
3. The Tracer Program
4. Using the Program
5. Program Enhancements
6. 3D Tricks and Tips
7. Mathematical Basics
8. The Optional Disk
Appendices
A. Modules of the Tracer
B. The Tracer Program
C. The Editor Program
D. The SetPoint Program
E. Tracer Error Messages

I doubt this book has anything related to AGA as I believe it was written before AGA was released.

[bloodline]

AJCopland wrote:
That's rather a broad statement : "It's the only way to improve the quality over the current generation of 3D hardware".

Not only broad, but also true! ;-)

Ray tracers aren't even used in most movies, Toy Story, Monsters Inc et al weren't done using ray tracers and indeed programmable shaders only came to modern 3D hardware from high-end scan line tracers so there's plenty of overhead left in conventional shading hardware and that's discounting it's ability to pull in elements of Ray Tracing.

Yes, there is headroom (I think the word you were looking for :-) ) in current hardware to get faster and more details.. sure... but... (I'll get to it later)

Its also true that using Ray Tracing doesn't magically give you anything that which you'd want in a modern game.

Yes it does... (still building this up for a dramatic effect)

Here the article and the following discussion (linked) should provide some decent background reading on the topic: John Carmack on ray tracing.

It's also quicker than me re-iterating some of the points made in that article/discussion :-D but to summarise : Ray-Tracing != "magical pancea to our graphical woes"

Andy

Raytacing gives you lighting effects for free... and if you've ever tried to write a shadow engine in your 3D code you'll know why I don't want to have to worry about it :-D

[AJCopland]

 :lol:
Thats skirting round my point, and you're right I did mean headroom :-D

Rasterisation hardware will get faster which gives you something for free as a developer, yes. That wasn't the headroom I was referring too.

Firstly, not everyone wants ray traced graphics. Ray tracing isn't going to make Geometry Wars look better for example.

Secondly, and part of the reason I linked that article, is that instead of switching to using ray tracing for everything (which has numerous pitfalls and caveats anyway) rasterisation is going to continue "winning" in terms of usage because it's free to pull the parts or ray tracing it wants into it's paradigm.
You've used lighting and thus shadows as an example of something perfect that you get for free. There's no reason this can't be combined with a rasteriation method so that the lighting and shading are calculated and combined in the pixel shader much like current shaders deal with deferred rendering.

I.e. rasterisation can absorb ray tracing but not the other way around.

There's other reasons it (ray tracing) probably won't replace rasterisation anytime soon, if ever, but this is already pretty far off topic.

Andy