[MUD-Dev] The impact of the web on muds

[Chris Gray]

[Michael Hohensee:]

:Alternatively, graphics could be sent in the form of ascii code which
:describes how a ray-tracer or other rendering engine on the client side
:is to draw the scene.	See my webpage (perpetually unfinished) for an
:example of what could be done.

How big would such a description be? Is it within the range of the 1K
that Caliban gave for the text description?

:It only takes a few seconds for the ray-tracer to draw a good little
:scene from any viewpoint within the world.  It wouldn't be a purely
:graphical mud, but it'd give you the consistency you're looking for.
:Incidentally, such a system would quite neatly solve the problem of
:which objects should be shown to a player in a co-ordinate based world
:(just don't reflect light rays which travel more than X units away from
:you).
:
:Heh, maybe we should work on optimizing a ray-tracer. :)

Hasn't that already happened in some games? I'm pretty out of touch in
the rendering field, but I thought most polygon engines essentially did
ray-tracing of one ray for each polygon they draw, so as to get the
proper colour/texture for that polygon.

--
Chris Gray   cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA