It was thus said that the Great Tony Duell once stated:
>
> > A serious gamer I know says that there are actualy fairly few graphics
> > engines out there - many game companies buy the right to use existing
> > ones.
>
> This sort of comment worries me. If everyone just accepts what we have
> now, and nobody bothers to try anything different, then there will never
> be real progress.
But then again, since an off-the-shelf graphics engine *is* available, it
frees the company from the expense of writing a graphics engine and allows
them to concentrate on other things that can use the engine (perhaps a
program to allow architects to take 2D plans, extract them to 3D
walkthroughs, changing wall textures and the like).
I came across this neat hack the other day. What could be done using a
webcam, a ton of MP3s and precanned software to run both? And
realistically, what does a webcam have anything to do with MP3s? Not having
to worry about details like writing the low lever code to drive the webcam
and play the MP3s, it allows a higher level of tinkering (it even includes
the use of Lego bricks):
http://www.flatfeetpete.com/musicbox/
Now, how many different MP3 decoding libraries are there? Sure, there are
plenty of MP3 *players* out there, but decoding libraries? Not many (I
suspect there may be one or two).
Okay, so we're straying from the topics of this list, but if you search
hard enough, you'll still come across people doing innovative stuff with
computers even today.
-spc (But don't think that the graphic engines are reengineered ... they
are, almost constantly ... )
Received on Tue Jun 22 2004 - 19:21:14 BST