It's Not Easy
Being Different or Bumps Ahead! |
Sunday, December 26, 1999
- David Filip
It's Not Easy Being Different
or
Bumps Ahead!
It's not easy being different.
You see, my parents never told me about Santa Claus and I never even
imagined the concept until kids spoke about Jolly Saint Nick at
school. I don't recall the exact patterns of speech I used in
first grade, so I'll just substitute with Ebonics that everyone can
understand. With that in mind, this is probably what I said:
"What? Dis Santa Claus
homey soundz totally whack! He be bustin' a move down da chimnez
'n' takin' yo milk 'n' cookiez like some hoochie, den leavin' toyz
unda yo tree? 'N' Rudolph think he all that wit' some funky nose
'n' reindeer homeskillitz dat fly inta da hood? 'N' Santa think
he da bomb cuz he so phat? Don't that make him some kinda bee-ahtch?"
"Word up mah funk lord!"
The kids would reply. "Don't you be dissin' 'im o' yo won't
git no toys 'n' hos."
"Well I'll check da word on da
street wit' mah mama!"
After asking my mother about this, I
discovered that Santa Claus was little more than a mass marketed lie
that parents use for one of two purposes: Either for adults to
have the fun of tricking gullible children or when people want to
avoid telling others that they gave the gifts themselves. Armed
with this knowledge, I led a lonely life of "spreadin' da
word." It was not unlike Charleton Heston's incredible
moment at the end of Soylent Green, when he shouted up at the sky (and
viewers) and tried to get them to believe "It's people!
PEEEEEEE- PUUUUUULLLLLLLLLLLLGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!"
I don't think anyone believed me
when I called their parents dirty filthy liars, but at least that's
how I remember it. It's hard to be the lone truth teller out
there.
It's also pretty difficult to be the
only card manufacturer with certain features. How do you get
developers to decide, with all the competing "standards" out
there, that they should do some extra work and get things to operate
on your card instead of someone else’s? Just when DirectX
seemed to work on the same level as Glide, you would have thought
standardization would continue as the order of the day. Perhaps,
with a new generation of cards ahead the manufacturers plan to leave
us stuck without standards?
The current situation is this:
Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 will offer excellent speed with multiple chip
configurations that will basically let you decide how much rendering
power you want for your dollar. Ravisent's Cinemaster software
will allow GeForce cards to be used as HDTV decoders, and S3 has a
nice budget card with ultra-cool texture compression. It's a big
split in market focus. When each card is so different, how will
developers decide which features to implement?
DirectX used to be a big help, but
even Microsoft's holy standard hasn't been fully supported in
hardware. Check out what separates Matrox's G400 cards from the
pack (aside from the sweet dual head display) and it's actually a
"standard" feature from DirectX 6. That's environment
mapped bump mapping, or EMBM.
Bump mapping is a process used where
the texture bitmap of a 3D object is enhanced by a second map that's
designed to realistically reflect or react to the light in a way that
makes the object appear "bumpy." 3D Cards originally
used "Emboss Bump Mapping", a form of multitexturing that
approximated the effects of light.
EMBM is a cut above in quality
though. It handles light, reflection, and shadows much better
from multiple light sources, and even with the current cards of 1999
and the expected cards in 2000, Matrox's G400 is the only in-hardware
supporter of the technology in games.
So what gives? It's supposed
to be a standard, isn't it? 3D Labs, Nvida, and others have incorporated
dot-based bump mapping into their hardware. It's a nice feature,
but to develop a game with bump mapping in mind programmers would lose
out on the time saved by the original "code once" approach
intended with DirectX or miss out on each individual card's benefits.
That's really a shame. Since
Matrox has been the main proponent of EMBM, they have the most
pictures to prove the feature’s worth. Check out their list of
EMBM enhanced games at
http://www.matrox.com/mga/3d_gaming/enhanced.htm
Doesn't EMBM's enhanced dynamic
lighting make a huge difference in the quality level of those vehicles
in Battlezone II, and Descent? Isn't the water's surface
incredible in Dungeon Keeper II, Expendable, and the others?
I find the ancient ruins' detail in
Wild Metal Country to be the most dramatic effect. The pyramid
statue's bump mapping practically makes the statues look like they've
been modeled with real polygons. It really is a world of
difference. Check that one out, if no others, here http://www.matrox.com/mga/3d_gaming/bump/wildmc.htm
Bump mapping could be a pretty cool
tool for custom mods and skins too. Players could give
themselves dueling scars, reflective and textured badges, or maybe
even scratch their names into the walls (forget tagging!) and
otherwise make themselves individuals in the game worlds.
It's possible someone will complain
that this won't help games play better, just look nicer. Maybe,
but it may help game development as well. Small but detailed art
like the statues in Wild Metal Country can be done without taking up
precious polygon space, and that would help overall quality without
adding to the geometry load. It isn’t a cure-all, but the more
options developers have to optimize image quality, the better.
If only card manufacturers could agree on a standard beyond emboss
bump mapping...
Advanced bump mapping doesn't
deserve to be left out of the next generation of cards so check the
feature out in real life if you can - that's when you can really see
the bumps in action. Will the card companies work together to
allow developers to make bumps ahead, or will the hopes of a bump
mapping standard disappear into the real-time shadows of divergent
feature lists? It ain't easy for developers when hardware
support is spotty and I just hope that the current lack of cross-brand
standardization doesn't "bust a cap in bump mapping's boo-tay."
Happy Holidays everyone, and tune in
next week for the shocking End-of-Millennium and End-of-the-World
Opinionated article. Who will live? Who will die?
Who has enough Spam stocked up in their buried crates? Comparing
the revelations in that article to the upcoming Y2K disaster will be
like comparing ebola to a case of the sniffles. Brace
yourselves!
If you have a need to share your opinion
on this article then please feel free to write/share your opinion in our
Discussion
forum.
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