kometbomb

Programming and stuff.

Tag Archives: Raytracing

08 Sep

You Can Stop Programming Now

The above is puls, a 256-byte intro by ?r?ola. It’s basically a raytracer with screen space ambient occlusion (which makes it so much realistic and cooler). While tube — which I think was the best 256-byte intro until now (when design and code are judged together) — also did raytracing of a cylinders, and after that many other intros did similar tracing of more complex surfaces, puls simply crushes all of them with objects that are formed by multiple plane surfaces (e.g. a cube would be a combination of six intersecting planes), a very nice color palette and that delicious ambient occlusion.

Thinking it out in C and sketching it out in asm took about a week, byte crunching took another one… that’s like forty hours of full focus and eighty of playing.

It’s also really, really slow which is the only minus especially because you can’t run 16-bit executables on Windows 7, so you have to use DOSBox to watch it (or, use a boot floppy to run it or something). There’s now a Windows port including a screensaver, see the Pouet.net page for more. A big thank you to nordak5 who was kind enough to upload a video on Youtube.

?r?ola has also included source code with the binary that you can find over here. That said, I’ll be deleting all my own source code since perfection has finally been achieved and there is no need for programmers anymore.

22 Mar

Amazing 4KB Ray Tracer

2008-07-27T12:24:18+00:00: Updated with an even more impressive 4 KB raytracer from RGBA1


Slisesix

The above is the output of a 4KB intro by Rgba that uses purely generated data to render a nice creepy landscape scene. To give some perspective: the same image compressed into a JPEG of similar size would look crap. And it still needs code for displaying the compressed image. You can try and run the program yourself, it can be downloaded from the Rgba site (32-bit Windows binary)2. It takes about 10 seconds for the image to appear on my Athlon XP 3000+. Let’s hope they will make a screen saver of it, with random parameters for the scene.

Things like this make me think of how much things have gone forward since I first looked into ray tracing. It used to take many hours for a similar image to render in POV-Ray (not including the time used for modelling!). Nowadays, you can optimize for size (as opposed to optimizing for speed) and still have a reasonably fast ray tracer. It’s not too far fetched that the above landscape could be rendered real-time on a fast processor and probably with some speed optimizations.