Volpeg
Just something I'm contemplating: As GPUs become more and more complex, data compression can become more complex. On the PS3, Uncharted's animation system made use of the SPUs to decompress animations on the fly. I'm wondering how long before something l is attempted with texture units.
We currently have the S3TC compression algorithms, but these are fixed block-size formats. Going forward, it may become useful to have lossier formats that trade off ease of calculation for additional detail. (Especially with the upcoming Larabee architecture.)
In Braid, all of the graphics are large 2D textures, presumably stored in JPEG format. Each 'layer' of a level is created in a program like Photoshop to give a hand-painted look to the finished product. I'm thinking it would be neat to be able to do the same sort of thing in 3D. Sort of.. cloud painting. (Without Patrick Stewart giggling like a schoolgirl.)
It would be an interesting project to see if the JPEG macro blocks could be adapted to a volumetric format. Maybe. The real space savings come in whenever you're able to declare a bunch of the macro blocks either 0 or 1, and ignore them. (They're either completely transparent, and thus don't need to be stored, or they're completely opaque and covered on all sides, and thus will never be seen. The rest are stored in volumetric macro blocks.)
Of course, you wouldn't just texture from this directly. On Larabee, maybe you'd decompress regions of it as necessary to some sort of cache. Might be useful for raytracing, or even just for arbitrarily large volumetric worlds. More or less the return of voxels, but if you can compress them really well, you can probably get the resolution to a point where you aren't seeing the blocks/points so much. Or at the very least, the types of artifacts generated by the compression algorithm would pass for additional detail or artistry rather than a limitation of the hardware.
Getting back to the Braid thing, though.. could you imagine a game where the whole world was 'drawn' in a painterly style in 3D? Sort of cloud-like auras on everything.. might be interesting..
We currently have the S3TC compression algorithms, but these are fixed block-size formats. Going forward, it may become useful to have lossier formats that trade off ease of calculation for additional detail. (Especially with the upcoming Larabee architecture.)
In Braid, all of the graphics are large 2D textures, presumably stored in JPEG format. Each 'layer' of a level is created in a program like Photoshop to give a hand-painted look to the finished product. I'm thinking it would be neat to be able to do the same sort of thing in 3D. Sort of.. cloud painting. (Without Patrick Stewart giggling like a schoolgirl.)
It would be an interesting project to see if the JPEG macro blocks could be adapted to a volumetric format. Maybe. The real space savings come in whenever you're able to declare a bunch of the macro blocks either 0 or 1, and ignore them. (They're either completely transparent, and thus don't need to be stored, or they're completely opaque and covered on all sides, and thus will never be seen. The rest are stored in volumetric macro blocks.)
Of course, you wouldn't just texture from this directly. On Larabee, maybe you'd decompress regions of it as necessary to some sort of cache. Might be useful for raytracing, or even just for arbitrarily large volumetric worlds. More or less the return of voxels, but if you can compress them really well, you can probably get the resolution to a point where you aren't seeing the blocks/points so much. Or at the very least, the types of artifacts generated by the compression algorithm would pass for additional detail or artistry rather than a limitation of the hardware.
Getting back to the Braid thing, though.. could you imagine a game where the whole world was 'drawn' in a painterly style in 3D? Sort of cloud-like auras on everything.. might be interesting..