Quake Wars raytraced

My question is where can I pick it up? I imagine it would be pretty darn cheap now and it was the adventure game of the year in 99.
 
Well there's voxels and then there's voxels. The voxel engines used in old PC games were just using height maps.

If you don't have a 3D card at your disposal height maps (and displacement maps) can be much more efficiently rendered than their corresponding meshes through iterative raycasting along the epipolar lines, which was what those old PC games were doing (although generally they restricted the viewpoint such that the epipolar lines were vertical).

In fact 3D cards have gotten flexible enough that you could use this method again on them ...
 
There is voxelstein, but I look forward to something better in the future that does not have such poor size.
 
Well there's voxels and then there's voxels. The voxel engines used in old PC games were just using height maps.
So why not model with Catmull-Rom splines?

If you don't have a 3D card at your disposal height maps (and displacement maps) can be much more efficiently rendered than their corresponding meshes through iterative raycasting along the epipolar lines, which was what those old PC games were doing (although generally they restricted the viewpoint such that the epipolar lines were vertical).
I'm not familiar with the term "epipolar" but I'm taking a wild guess that what you are describing is (IIRC**) White's algorithm; the sort of thing one programmed on a circa 1981 computer to draw functions such as y=sin(sqrt(x^2+z^2)) with asterisks.



**I can't find a reference and as this was >20 years ago my memory is not to be trusted.
 
I'm not familiar with the term "epipolar" but I'm taking a wild guess that what you are describing is (IIRC**) White's algorithm;

I think he's referring to a technique called "ray surfing". (I think there was an article about it at GameDev, but I'm somehow unable to find it now. :()

Edit:

Nah, it's on flipcode, that's why I couldn't find it. Looks like my memory isn't to be trusted either. :D
keyword: wave surfing

Or google for "A Terrain Rendering Method Using Vertical Ray Coherence", to see a more general algorithm (with 6 DoF) based on this idea.
 
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I'm not familiar with the term "epipolar"
It's an image based rendering term. I was indeed referring to the method from the paper Mate Kovacs linked, although the link to epipolar lines was made in a later paper "Efficient displacement mapping by image warping". A better explanation of the theory in my opinion, lousy job on the literature search though :)

Surprised you haven't read them yet ... I've spammed these quite a few times over the years.
 
It's an image based rendering term. I was indeed referring to the method from the paper Mate Kovacs linked, although the link to epipolar lines was made in a later paper "Efficient displacement mapping by image warping". A better explanation of the theory in my opinion, lousy job on the literature search though :)

Surprised you haven't read them yet ... I've spammed these quite a few times over the years.
Sigh... yet another paper on the pile to read. :???:
 
The link actually isn't clear whether it is 16 or 8. It could be 8 cores since that is what they used for the demonstration. Still doubling cores is getting cheaper than doubling frequency so...

It's quite clear, actually. 4x quad core systems connected via GigE = "simulated" 16 core system.
 
So when the adverage person gets a pc roughly 500% more powerfull than they have now they will be able to play quake 4 at 1280x720 - bet they cant wait ;)
 
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