I was working from memory, it was a poor example.

My point was that I could imagine a few instances where it would be acceptable to allow the player to read - but not modify - the variables directly. 

Yet another reason to boycott Losedows 10! Once assholes, always assholes I guess... 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR4DSgjPVWg

I came across this today. It's a short demo of a rendering engine early in development. It might be interesting to follow where it goes in the future. 

Reminds me of this vapourware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y

These "Real Time Raytracing" engines never seem to catch on these days. As good as that demo looks, I'd have to see a lot more to believe it'll actually "happen". A downloadable demo for instance would be nice. Right now everything on their site is just "coming soon", which isn't exactly confidence inspiring. 

In the past they've only worked well for tight scenes where the bounces are rather confined and for lower poly stuff.

The promising thing about this is the claims it is "hybrid" raytracing. So perhaps traditional methods are being used on the more difficult with raytracing assisting.

I've been hanging out for realtime raytracing for over a decade now, I'll not hold my breath. 

I am not sure what Pritchard meant in #28560, but I would like to clarify that the ray-tracer engine from my link does have a demo you can try out. It's built into the "3D modeller" package that is on the downloads page. (It's not much of a modeller yet in this bare-bones demo. It just reads text files with scene descriptions.)

http://www.infinity3dengine.com/get-infinity/3d-modeller

You will probably find that the demo doesn't really give you very impressive frame rates for even mildly complex scenes. Until the author comes up with the benchmark he is promising, it's hard to say what reasonable applications this engine could have. I'm a little curious to see what he does with it, but you don't obviously have to be :) 

Euclideon??? 

I didn't think to check the link for the 3D modeller, I just went to the other two pages on the dropdown, since I assumed that it wouldn't be anything like the demo video on YT. It's about 50% of that at least but considering you can create more scenes than just the chess board that's pretty decent. Listening to my CPU fan spin up was fun.

It'll be interesting to see what comes next for this, I do want to see a decent realtime raytracing solution in the future. Perhaps even one that can be used for games! 

They actually have software out there using their tech.

Just not games... maybe never games.

You can't really call that vaporware. 

I only saw the cheesey "unlimited power" YT vids, hehe. Thanks for letting me know. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfMpG3RW_kU

Wolfenstein 3D running on a Game Boy Color. 

I couldn't work out how they had optimised the gbc to make it do that, then I read that the guy included a co-processor in the cart to make it work.

Cool, but cheating. 

I mean, it's not unheard of for console carts to include non-standard components in order to work. Tended to make them more expensive, of course, which sometimes made the games into commercial failures as a result, but still.

Perhaps in homebrew it could be considered cheating, but I'd still want to give the guy credit.
Apparently he's butting up against the ROM limit of 128k, which means he's managed to shrink what's on there pretty significantly. I think that's neat, even if it'd never actually run on a standard cart. 

Don't get me wrong, it's impressive as hell. But I'm more impressed by what people can do with programming wizardry, breaking the limits of what existing hardware can do, rather than adding extra hardware. 

I need a program that determines the average RGB value of an image (or part of image), in order to know which color I should apply to a light according to the source texture. Any idea? 

Resize the image to a 1x1 pixel and see what color that is? Not sure if that can be made to have the same result as strict averaging, but it's at least an interesting/relevant result.

Or if using Photoshop, try Filter-Blur-Average.

A few other things found on quick Googling:

http://www.wisegeek.com/how-can-i-find-the-average-color-in-a-photograph.htm
http://www.gpick.org/ (try "Palette from image")
http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/color-summarizer/ 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVLecokaRv4 

Cute present :) 

The evening has already started here, so I'll see y'all on the other side of the Christmas tree.