[MUD-Dev] Cg - Lowering the cost of 3D games?

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

From: Brian Hook [mailto:brianhook at pyrogon.com]
> On Behalf Of Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com
 
>> So whats everyone thing? Personally I'm pretty excited as it
>> narrows the gap between the big studios, who can afford time to
>> polish their engines, and the smaller ones who without this are
>> almost guaranteed to fail on the eye candy front.
 
> Shipping a 3D game has almost nothing to do with the raw
> technology.  Shaders and all that fancy eye candy is nice, but it
> really isn't the hard part.  The hard part is all the grimy crap
> associated with resource management, collision, basic rendering,
> content creation, content management, etc.
 
> How a specific pixel is drawn is almost completely and utterly
> irrelevant in the grand scheme of things when trying to push a
> title out the door.

Oh I certainly agree with that, but there is a baseline one needs to
achieve to be competetive, and hopefully this will alleviate some of
the difficulty and help develop a common language to describe these
concepts.

Its not just about the APIs intrinsic value, its a shift in thinking
to a higher level approach and trying to make 3D easier rather than
just prettier. Resource management and collision shouldn't have to
be something that gets re-implemented for every project. Of course
whether a gfx chipset vendor like nvidia will drive it that way is
another matter. As others have pointed out, they need this API so
that developers will start using their card's advanced features and
encourage the consumer to keep upgrading.  Whilst nvidia like to
push out new generations of cards every 6 months, I don't know
anyone who feels compelled to buy each iteration.

Right now writing 3D just seems harder than necessary.

Dan

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