Subject: Various stuff...

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1992 08:29:17 +0200

Hi dudes and dudettes!

Just sat there rotating a few thangs on my screen with Rend386
(Qwik question: Why does my 486/33 flicker where my 386/20 does not?!?)
when I got a bunch of small ideas, questions and so on. Here goes:

* Anybody actually WRITTEN any neat software, or is everybody sitting
  spinning BBC.PLG around in the demo.exe program?
  I was thinking about writing a 3D breakout game or a virtual tetris,
  but I only have Microsoft compiler and can't use the libraries :-( 

* Anybody thinking of writing a 'mike the talking face' for rend386?
  (You all seen the SGI one, rite?)

* Anybody of Bernie and bunch think about adding SPECULAR REFLECTION to
  R386? I will tell you, that it will make things look A HELLUVA LOT MORE
  REAL. 
  You can use two approaches: CHEAT specular, where you simply raise the
  cosine lighting to a power (a lookup table naturally for speedz sake)
  OR:
  Find vector towards observer and vector towards light. Find the
  'halfway' vector between these, and do a dot product between this half
  way vector and the normal vector, raise this to a power (lookup table)
  and you are off!
  It'l probably slow down things slightly - but only for things that have
  specularity turned on, naturally. I bet you a few bux that it will look
  VERY MUCH MORE NATURAL!!!!

* The 'selected object grid': It annoys me to death. Why not just highlight
  the verticies, not the lines. Now I cant really SEE the object while it
  is selected - all I see is a massive blob of white. Also, please take
  something non-white. It totally destroys the 'effect'. Pulsating green
  would be neater :-)

All for now.

If anybody wanna see some of my "virtualities" check out the RayTracker
animations on phoenix.oulu.fi ;-)

/Z/Z

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---

From: Dave Stampe-Psy+Eng <dstamp@watserv1>
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 92 10:18:04 -0400

1)  Face stuff should probably wait till "rubber polys" are going
(whenever that may be).  These will be special polys joining 2 parts
of a segmented object, but may only be triangular (so they stay copanar).

2) Specular:  Wouldn't work except for objects with many small, flat polys.  
If you want it, modify user_poly_color() yourself.

3) Selected object: The outline could be made to cycle, I suppose.  But
highlighting vertices would be pretty useless.  Also, cycling loses one 
one palette slot (anyone have a favorite color they want to lose?)

- Dave Stampe