[fluxus] rendering 4D (newbie questions)

[Dave Griffiths]

> On 27/02/06, dave <dave at pawfal.org> wrote:
>> using opengl is a different approach to a software renderer, less
>> flexible (although this is arguable now with programmable shaders) but
>> very fast, and quite flexible if you take time to get the idea behind
>> some of the restrictions. for instance regarding the opacity problem,
>> there aren't many games out there that don't have this bug in them in
>> one form or another.
>
> yes, games designers have control over the environments anduse them
> in a creative way to hide the artefacts. but still most game engines /
> scene graph libraries address the problem by  marking and dynamicly
> resorting the transparent stuff. Mostly they sort per object though
> (not per polygon) and make sure that's enough.

I saw a paper a while ago where, rather than depth sorting every frame,
you could presort along the 3 axes and choose which sort to use based on
the camera orientation. Of course, if they are moving we'd have to do this
sort every frame anyway, so it wouldn't be worth much.

It's not hard to put in a depth sort, it's just slow