Thoughtlessnessnessness

Some days I feel like the Duke of D'Uh!

Yesterday I posted about what was wrong with The Sims, and what features a real simulation system would have.
Just today I remembered a post I had made sometime back in August or so (although I can't find it. All I remember is it involved a discussion with aurium), in which I mentioned that I was working on a proposal for a new 3D engine that I hoped to sell to a Museum. I still haven't mailed that proposal out yet, but I have set myself a deadline of a week from Sunday for doing so. Anyway, a careful consideration of the features of said engine and the one I posted yesterday would reveal that they are one and the same project! So, I already KNOW someone I could sell such a simulation engine to....

Now I really need to get my act together and get my website up, so that it looks like I'm in business, if anyone ever reads my proposal...

Old, so old...

I can feel I'm aging rapidly. In another moment my teeth are bound to fall out...

I've spent the morning researching open- (and not-so open-) source 3D graphic engines, to see what is available for free or licenceable in a reasonable way. What I've seen is flabbergasting. Take "Radiosity Rendering" for instance. Radiosity rendering works by figuring out what all of the visible energy (ie light) sources are for a scene, what all of the absorption and radiation spectra are for each surface in the scene, and then computes what the fixed-point emission spectra is for all surfaces. This means that yellow walls have a golden glow when seen under sunlight, for instance, and a nearby white teapot will be slighly yellowed by reflections from the walls.

This was the latest thing in high-end techniques back in 96 when I was last researching graphics algorithms, and it was very compute intensive. I remember simple rooms that took upwards of 3 hours to render. Nowadays I'm seeing engines that do on-the-fly incremental radiosity calculations for large scenes with moving lights, without any precompute, and at interactive walkthrough rates...  Suddenly I feel myself hopelessly behind the times and obsolete, AGAIN.

Thats the thing about the software biz. You have to run at full speed just to stay where you are.

Oh well, enough bitching. Back to my research...

3D Engine Research: I'm done now.

Yup, I just finished surfing the Net, the WHOLE THING! Isn't it nice to have a fast connection?

Anyway, in case anyone cares, the best open source 3D engine I could find seemed to be Crystal Space, but special mention also goes to NeoEngine for a kickass physics model, and to Ogre, for being a really lean just-a-renderer designed for easy plugging into other engines.