Wishlist for Marine Aquarium 3 and Future - Page 72

schneb · 07-27-2006, 01:33 PM

Yes, this would require doubling or tripling the resolution. Which would not be practical and would slow everything down. There are utilities that will magnify your monitor resolution (for both Mac and PC) and this might help get you something like that.

johnblommers · 07-27-2006, 03:07 PM

Originally posted by Jim Sachs:

The only problem with a magnified view is that someone (me) would have to put in all that detail.

Why Jim, does that mean you are going to work on that texture resolution enhancement project and update the aquarium? Excellent! Now I still love MA 2.6 on the Mac. But on my 24-inch Dell 2405FPW at 1920x1200 some of that coral does get pixelated (see attached). Why not address the coral first? The fish are great!

On the other hand even on my lowly QuickSilver Mac MA2.6 runs at a very respectable 66fps at 1920x1200 and thousands of colors. You do know how to code for performance!

Rock on!

- John

feldon34 · 07-27-2006, 03:29 PM

Don't count on it.

The goal is for Jim to recreate the Aquarium with 3D objects and high-resolution textures so that the background scales to any resolution without jaggies. For some reason, on many systems, the background does not antialias.

johnblommers · 07-27-2006, 03:48 PM

Originally posted by feldon30:

Don't count on it.

The goal is for Jim to recreate the Aquarium with 3D objects and high-resolution textures so that the background scales to any resolution without jaggies. For some reason, on many systems, the background does not antialias.

The grey matter does seem to recall that there was a new 3D aquarium in the works but that it had been set aside. It has been so long .... So I stand corrected and welcome Jim's efforts on it.

Leave MA2.6 be, it's not broken.

Perhaps someobody could educate me as to why 3D modelers are devoted to texture mapping polygons. Why not use procedurally generated textures that are resolution independent? I may be blowing smoke here

feldon34 · 07-27-2006, 04:05 PM

Originally posted by johnblommers:

Perhaps someobody could educate me as to why 3D modelers are devoted to texture mapping polygons. Why not use procedurally generated textures that are resolution independent? I may be blowing smoke here

Because then you can't pan, tilt, or swivel the camera.

Jim Sachs · 07-27-2006, 05:52 PM

JB - Yes, I've been working on 3.0 for some time now. All the textures will have at least four times the area of the originals. All the fish have to be redone also, though it may not be quite so apparent as the background objects.

BBtm64 · 08-10-2006, 06:01 AM

It's good to know that your work is ongoing, Jim. I've never found a better aquarium screen saver than your's.

johnblommers · 08-10-2006, 09:40 AM

Originally posted by Jim Sachs:

JB - Yes, I've been working on 3.0 for some time now. All the textures will have at least four times the area of the originals. All the fish have to be redone also, though it may not be quite so apparent as the background objects.

The lionfish mesh of MA 2.6 fame gets its colored barbs not from the mesh but from an alpha map of the fin mesh textures. Hence they don't seem to benefit from anti-aliasing effects. I wonder if you have thought to increase the poly count and actualy produce real barbs?

- john

spiralmonkey · 08-10-2006, 10:05 AM

Originally posted by johnblommers:

Perhaps someobody could educate me as to why 3D modelers are devoted to texture mapping polygons. Why not use procedurally generated textures that are resolution independent? I may be blowing smoke here

Well, in my experience good procedurally generated textures (aka shaders) are very difficult to create. Imagine having to come up with an equation to draw a stick figure vs. actually just drawing a stick figure. There's almost always a quality tradeoff, as well as being much more work. Much easier to just paint a texture at higher resolution and then scale it down to your needs, which i assume is what jim is doing.

feldon34 · 08-10-2006, 11:25 AM

Procedurally generated textures almost always look it.

And memory is so cheap that there's no reason not to just go photograph something and stick it on there.

Some exceptions are trees and water, and libraries have been written to draw large numbers of trees and realistic water without the programmer having to reinvent the wheel.

johnblommers · 08-10-2006, 12:10 PM

Originally posted by feldon30:

...And memory is so cheap that there's no reason not to just go photograph something and stick it on there....

True enough, the latest crop of video cards carry a whopping 512 meg of dedicated VRAM but require PCI express slots. So that rules out a lot of users with older hardware. Plus once the texture buffers get full, the application has to do a lot of texture juggling, and that consumes backplane bandwidth, which in turn cases lag and slowed frame rates.

MA is so cool because it will run well at 1024x768xthousands of colors on an 8-meg VRAM system - my trusty and aged Pismo Powerbook. Its RAM cannot be upgraded or retrofitted to make room for textures.

But procedurally generated textures at that resolution might look nice and won't take up more VRAM.

I think. Here I'm not clear.

Tiny Turtle · 08-10-2006, 01:43 PM

There has to be some middle ground in there. Even of latest-and-greatest half-a-gig vid cards isn't exactly standard, a Pismo is still a bit old. Developing something now with the aim of it looking good enough to sell to people buying computers today won't be helped by having to factor in the performance of a portable computer released in early 2000...

Sorry if I come across as grumpy.

/Tiny Reflective Scales

johnblommers · 08-10-2006, 03:07 PM

Originally posted by Tiny Turtle:

....a Pismo is still a bit old. Developing something now with the aim of it looking good enough to sell to people buying computers today won't be helped by having to factor in the performance of a portable computer released in early 2000...

Sorry if I come across as grumpy.

/Tiny Reflective Scales

Not at all Tiny Turtle, we're really on the same page. I really don't expect the 3D MA to run on the Pismo. It amazes me how well MA works on that ancient Pismo given its modest 8 meg of VRAM. And that old video card propably has no means to generate procedural textures anyway. Given that textures are easy to capture with a camera, it's the clear choice for 3D artists. I see that now.

So to support small-VRAM systems, would not a technique called Mipmapping help out? This method draws low-res textures on large distant objects and swaps in a higher-res texture when the camera moves closer. Given a low VRAM system you can use the lower res textures and for modern 512-Meg VRAM cards you an use all the high res textures.

As I have never coded in OpenGL I have no idea how easy or hard or stupid MipMapping is

feldon34 · 08-10-2006, 03:40 PM

If someone wants a great Aquarium that runs on older computers, that's what Marine Aquarium 2.6 is for. Hopefully it won't be removed from SereneScreen.com when 3.0 comes out.

Tiny Turtle · 08-10-2006, 04:02 PM

Probably just renamed "Marine Aquarium Classic"

drfish · 08-10-2006, 04:29 PM

MAC? I think they could get into trouble for that...

What about, "Sachs Marine Aquarium Classic?" Oh wait...

Tiny Turtle · 08-10-2006, 06:30 PM

Jim Sachs · 08-10-2006, 11:13 PM

Too many questions for me to remember, so I'll just throw out some answers and maybe they'll match up to some of the questions

Procedural textures - I've never seen any that were very realistic. Even Alan doesn't use them, and he won an Academy Award for computer effects.

Mipmapping - nearly all Direct3D programs use them, and MA is no exception. A mipped texture is 33.3% bigger (in bytes) than a single-level texture, so they are not a byte-saving item, but a visual-quality item. When a 3D object goes off into the distance so that its size is only half what it was when near the camera, the graphics system has a hard time deciding which of pixels of the original large texture to display on the now-small object. This causes aliasing, or sparkling of the texture. With mipmapping, it just switches to the next smaller picture, until it finds one which more closely matches the size of the object on the screen.

Lionfish barbs - The new Lionfish does have polygon barbs on its head. The barbs on the fins are in the textures. Yes, all the new fish will have more polygons than the existing fish, but the added realism will mostly come from bigger textures. A high-res texture with alpha will automatically anti-alias itself when stretched, but the only card that I've ever seen perform a decent job of polygon anti-aliasing is the now-obsolete 3Dfx series (and then only when using its native Glide language).

I wrote MA to squeeze every last bit of realism possible out of an 8-meg card at 1024x768. Sure, a lot of people still have these cards, and for them MA 2.6 will continue to be sold and supported for years to come. Now it's time to move on and give the people with systems made in THIS decade something to look at.

Jav400 · 08-14-2006, 10:43 AM

Jim,

I am glad to hear things are progressing. As for something to consider for future use, ( I know you have too much going on getting things built for now ), but maybe someone at Prolific could get it added later. Would you even consider actinic lighting in the new version? It would be awesome to see something like the Blue Faced Angel in the first photo, turned into the second one with lighting changes.

I can't remember seeing any other aquarium that has anything close to this and it would be another way to set yours apart from the rest.

feldon34 · 08-14-2006, 11:01 AM

Basically it would be a second texture that only lights up when that texture gets close to a certain light source. I would love to see this. I don't know if that second texture would have to have the same resolution as the fish's main texture.

07-27-2006, 01:33 PM	#1421
schneb Registered Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Redlands, CA Posts: 51	Magnifier Yes, this would require doubling or tripling the resolution. Which would not be practical and would slow everything down. There are utilities that will magnify your monitor resolution (for both Mac and PC) and this might help get you something like that.

07-27-2006, 03:29 PM	#1423
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,939	Don't count on it. The goal is for Jim to recreate the Aquarium with 3D objects and high-resolution textures so that the background scales to any resolution without jaggies. For some reason, on many systems, the background does not antialias. "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

07-27-2006, 03:48 PM	#1424
johnblommers The Architect Join Date: Aug 2004 Location: Seattle Posts: 756	Better Yet Originally posted by feldon30: Don't count on it. The goal is for Jim to recreate the Aquarium with 3D objects and high-resolution textures so that the background scales to any resolution without jaggies. For some reason, on many systems, the background does not antialias. The grey matter does seem to recall that there was a new 3D aquarium in the works but that it had been set aside. It has been so long .... So I stand corrected and welcome Jim's efforts on it. Leave MA2.6 be, it's not broken. Perhaps someobody could educate me as to why 3D modelers are devoted to texture mapping polygons. Why not use procedurally generated textures that are resolution independent? I may be blowing smoke here Reasons people don't watch Star Trek: 60% - It’s for nerds. 39% - The show’s stupid. 01% - My parents were killed by Klingons and it's still too painful.

07-27-2006, 04:05 PM	#1425
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,939	Originally posted by johnblommers: Perhaps someobody could educate me as to why 3D modelers are devoted to texture mapping polygons. Why not use procedurally generated textures that are resolution independent? I may be blowing smoke here Because then you can't pan, tilt, or swivel the camera. "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

07-27-2006, 05:52 PM	#1426
Jim Sachs Developer Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Southern Oregon Posts: 9,791	JB - Yes, I've been working on 3.0 for some time now. All the textures will have at least four times the area of the originals. All the fish have to be redone also, though it may not be quite so apparent as the background objects. Jim Sachs Creator of SereneScreen Aquarium

08-10-2006, 06:01 AM	#1427
BBtm64 Careful, I bite :) Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Springfield,OH Posts: 16	It's good to know that your work is ongoing, Jim. I've never found a better aquarium screen saver than your's. I know nothing, I see nothing, I hear nothing & I admit to less.

08-10-2006, 10:05 AM	#1429
spiralmonkey Developer Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: Toronto, Canada Posts: 72	Originally posted by johnblommers: Perhaps someobody could educate me as to why 3D modelers are devoted to texture mapping polygons. Why not use procedurally generated textures that are resolution independent? I may be blowing smoke here Well, in my experience good procedurally generated textures (aka shaders) are very difficult to create. Imagine having to come up with an equation to draw a stick figure vs. actually just drawing a stick figure. There's almost always a quality tradeoff, as well as being much more work. Much easier to just paint a texture at higher resolution and then scale it down to your needs, which i assume is what jim is doing. Developer of Dream Aquarium

08-10-2006, 11:25 AM	#1430
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,939	Procedurally generated textures almost always look it. And memory is so cheap that there's no reason not to just go photograph something and stick it on there. Some exceptions are trees and water, and libraries have been written to draw large numbers of trees and realistic water without the programmer having to reinvent the wheel. "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

08-10-2006, 12:10 PM	#1431
johnblommers The Architect Join Date: Aug 2004 Location: Seattle Posts: 756	It's not just the memory Originally posted by feldon30: ...And memory is so cheap that there's no reason not to just go photograph something and stick it on there.... True enough, the latest crop of video cards carry a whopping 512 meg of dedicated VRAM but require PCI express slots. So that rules out a lot of users with older hardware. Plus once the texture buffers get full, the application has to do a lot of texture juggling, and that consumes backplane bandwidth, which in turn cases lag and slowed frame rates. MA is so cool because it will run well at 1024x768xthousands of colors on an 8-meg VRAM system - my trusty and aged Pismo Powerbook. Its RAM cannot be upgraded or retrofitted to make room for textures. But procedurally generated textures at that resolution might look nice and won't take up more VRAM. I think. Here I'm not clear. Reasons people don't watch Star Trek: 60% - It’s for nerds. 39% - The show’s stupid. 01% - My parents were killed by Klingons and it's still too painful.

08-10-2006, 01:43 PM	#1432
Tiny Turtle is pleased Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Stockholm, Sweden Posts: 7,365	There has to be some middle ground in there. Even of latest-and-greatest half-a-gig vid cards isn't exactly standard, a Pismo is still a bit old. Developing something now with the aim of it looking good enough to sell to people buying computers today won't be helped by having to factor in the performance of a portable computer released in early 2000... Sorry if I come across as grumpy. /Tiny Reflective Scales Thanks to Morgan, Tiny Snapshots is up and running again with "Tiny Järvafält" as the latest addition – Go have a look and tell me what you think. "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another." /Robert Oppenheimer on witnessing the first thermonuclear detonation in history.

08-10-2006, 03:07 PM	#1433
johnblommers The Architect Join Date: Aug 2004 Location: Seattle Posts: 756	Actually you are being kind Originally posted by Tiny Turtle: ....a Pismo is still a bit old. Developing something now with the aim of it looking good enough to sell to people buying computers today won't be helped by having to factor in the performance of a portable computer released in early 2000... Sorry if I come across as grumpy. /Tiny Reflective Scales Not at all Tiny Turtle, we're really on the same page. I really don't expect the 3D MA to run on the Pismo. It amazes me how well MA works on that ancient Pismo given its modest 8 meg of VRAM. And that old video card propably has no means to generate procedural textures anyway. Given that textures are easy to capture with a camera, it's the clear choice for 3D artists. I see that now. So to support small-VRAM systems, would not a technique called Mipmapping help out? This method draws low-res textures on large distant objects and swaps in a higher-res texture when the camera moves closer. Given a low VRAM system you can use the lower res textures and for modern 512-Meg VRAM cards you an use all the high res textures. As I have never coded in OpenGL I have no idea how easy or hard or stupid MipMapping is Reasons people don't watch Star Trek: 60% - It’s for nerds. 39% - The show’s stupid. 01% - My parents were killed by Klingons and it's still too painful.

08-10-2006, 03:40 PM	#1434
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,939	If someone wants a great Aquarium that runs on older computers, that's what Marine Aquarium 2.6 is for. Hopefully it won't be removed from SereneScreen.com when 3.0 comes out. "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

08-10-2006, 04:02 PM	#1435
Tiny Turtle is pleased Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Stockholm, Sweden Posts: 7,365	Probably just renamed "Marine Aquarium Classic" Thanks to Morgan, Tiny Snapshots is up and running again with "Tiny Järvafält" as the latest addition – Go have a look and tell me what you think. "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another." /Robert Oppenheimer on witnessing the first thermonuclear detonation in history.

08-10-2006, 04:29 PM	#1436
drfish the Doc Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Zeeland, MI Posts: 5,357	MAC? I think they could get into trouble for that... What about, "Sachs Marine Aquarium Classic?" Oh wait... I don't watch commercials.

08-10-2006, 06:30 PM	#1437
Tiny Turtle is pleased Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Stockholm, Sweden Posts: 7,365	Thanks to Morgan, Tiny Snapshots is up and running again with "Tiny Järvafält" as the latest addition – Go have a look and tell me what you think. "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another." /Robert Oppenheimer on witnessing the first thermonuclear detonation in history.

08-10-2006, 11:13 PM	#1438
Jim Sachs Developer Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Southern Oregon Posts: 9,791	Too many questions for me to remember, so I'll just throw out some answers and maybe they'll match up to some of the questions Procedural textures - I've never seen any that were very realistic. Even Alan doesn't use them, and he won an Academy Award for computer effects. Mipmapping - nearly all Direct3D programs use them, and MA is no exception. A mipped texture is 33.3% bigger (in bytes) than a single-level texture, so they are not a byte-saving item, but a visual-quality item. When a 3D object goes off into the distance so that its size is only half what it was when near the camera, the graphics system has a hard time deciding which of pixels of the original large texture to display on the now-small object. This causes aliasing, or sparkling of the texture. With mipmapping, it just switches to the next smaller picture, until it finds one which more closely matches the size of the object on the screen. Lionfish barbs - The new Lionfish does have polygon barbs on its head. The barbs on the fins are in the textures. Yes, all the new fish will have more polygons than the existing fish, but the added realism will mostly come from bigger textures. A high-res texture with alpha will automatically anti-alias itself when stretched, but the only card that I've ever seen perform a decent job of polygon anti-aliasing is the now-obsolete 3Dfx series (and then only when using its native Glide language). I wrote MA to squeeze every last bit of realism possible out of an 8-meg card at 1024x768. Sure, a lot of people still have these cards, and for them MA 2.6 will continue to be sold and supported for years to come. Now it's time to move on and give the people with systems made in THIS decade something to look at. Jim Sachs Creator of SereneScreen Aquarium

08-14-2006, 11:01 AM	#1440
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,939	Basically it would be a second texture that only lights up when that texture gets close to a certain light source. I would love to see this. I don't know if that second texture would have to have the same resolution as the fish's main texture. "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman