CoderHump - Latest Comments in Technical Notes on O3D

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

Todd — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 12:59:31 -0000

Very cool Ben!

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

Thomas — Fri, 08 May 2009 06:00:40 -0000

Keep in mind that Flash ain't GPU accelerated and O3D clearly is.

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

elenzil — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:54:26 -0000

it seems like O3D + google native would be an awesome combo.
the computation you can do on the GPU is pretty impressive these days (eg calculating julia sets, simple waves etc), but for really crunching data like in say a large gravity or fluid simulation i think you need a general-purpose CPU and i'm not sure that V8 or tamarin will really satisfy.

on another topic, what's the coolest O3D demo peeps have seen so far ?
has anyone used render targets + environment mapping do do dynamic reflections yet ? all the pieces are sorta just sitting there.

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

elenzil — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:43:22 -0000

thanks for taking the time to look at that .as code, zwetan.
i tried cacheAsBitmap as you suggested, but not much change (presuming i used it correctly - just shape.cacheAsBitmap = true ?)

i guess my fundamental take here is that rasterizing 400 rectangles should not be anywhere close to a bottleneck. i've got way more interesting things to do with my programming time than fight that.

compare, for example, to this demo which renders 1000 rotating bump-and-environment-mapped utah teapots (3783 triangles each) at 30 to 40+ FPS on the same exact machine, and barely bumps the CPU at all. and it uses javascript instead of actionscript, and there's no compilation step.

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

zwetan — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 02:37:24 -0000

I ran demo under OSX and no problem

but looking at the code, there is room for optimization

use Vector, not Array, this is a real boost in FP10

try also to use cacheAsBitmap, it speed up the rendering

other things to explore:
don't draw the 400 vector graphics on screen, keep them out of the display list,
copy them to a bitmapdata and just display that
(see for ex: http://www.bigspaceship.com... )

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

equex — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 02:13:27 -0000

uh, for gaming i use my crossfire setup at home, no browser needed.

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

Ben Garney — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:49:51 -0000

Good to see you here, Aras. :)

Yeah - a lot of people have crappy 3d capable hardware (like the intel chips) but they DO have 3d capable hardware. O3D needs to get a path for those chips.

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

Ben Garney — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:47:35 -0000

I just ran it on my XP box at home and it ran very smoothly. My OS X laptop at work had trouble, though.

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

elenzil — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:41:08 -0000

vista

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

Aras Pranckevičius — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:40:43 -0000

Well, according to the our stats - http://unity3d.com/webplaye... - there's still almost 30% of the machines that have fixed function hardware. That number is dropping, but it's still quite significant. O3D currently does not support Intel GMA 950 (aka 945), which is also very popular - but that's probably just some bugs or missing workarounds; technically GMA 950 can run SM2.0.

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

Ben Garney — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:03:45 -0000

Are you running under OS X with these tests?

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

elenzil — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:32:57 -0000

huh. many thanks for looking at the demo. other folks have mentioned it gives errors. where to these errors show up ? do i need a debugger installed ? but in any event i doubt it's the errors which are giving it trouble; at small window sizes it uses just a tiny portion of the CPU.

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

elenzil — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:30:31 -0000

well it doesn't behave incorrectly, but it chews up nearly all the CPU of my pretty zippy machine at say 1000 x 1000 pixels.
it's clearly the rasterization which is the issue. http://elenzil.com/flash/fl...

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

Ben Garney — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:28:20 -0000

I checked out the demo. You're right, not running super smooth. I was getting some errors, maybe something internally is going wrong and causing problems?

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

Ben Garney — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:27:05 -0000

400 squares made Flash10 break? What resolution were you running at?

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

elenzil — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:19:53 -0000

now *this* feels like the web-based graphics environment i've been looking for !
i'll try to port my "400 rotating squares" demo, which imo exposes Flash10 as a dog, to it tonight.

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

Ben Garney — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:51:32 -0000

I wish Linux had good 3d support. But the infrastructure just isn't there. A shame. But really, if you want a desktop linux experience, why not use OSX?

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

JeramieH — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:37:22 -0000

"... so most corporate workstations cant deal with it. So this is pretty much a hobby level trinket."

Blizzard, Sony, EA, etc seem to have tapped a hidden market full of computers with 3D cards not in a corporate environment. Maybe they're onto something.

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

sul — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:31:24 -0000

funny there is no linux support, but i don't blame them. linux 3d is like a mud hut compared to a mansion.

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

Ben Garney — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:47:54 -0000

Yeah, I guess it will really hurt the sales of your game to people who play during work hours.

Seriously, though, what market are you targeting? Every cheap computer sold in the past few years has some sort of minimal 3d capable graphics chip on board. X300s are plenty to run O3D on, and even the Intel parts are capable enough to do it. Heck, even really terrible cards like S3s have SM2 support nowadays.

Certainly there are situations where you will want to go with something like Flash that requires no special hardware, but claiming that O3D is a "hobby level trinket" is like saying that Half Life 2 or Left 4 Dead was a "small success." The set of people that can run O3D, HL2, and L4D are basically identical.

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

Ben Garney — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:36:10 -0000

Yeah definitely - then the issue is mainly penetration rate. But as an alternative to something like Unity where you're already pushing a player plugin...

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

equex — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:59:14 -0000

O3D doesnt work on non-3d accellerated cards, so most corporate workstations cant deal with it :(
So this is pretty much a hobby level trinket.

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

repi — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:55:35 -0000

Ooh very cool, looking forward to seeing it used!

Re: Technical Notes on O3D

zwetan — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:52:13 -0000

thanks for the review, very good stuff indeed

and technically it should be possible to make another branch of the code base and use tamarin as the running engine instead of v8 (agreed it's a lot of work, but definitively possible =))