[sldev] An experiment in paleocomputing

[Dzonatas]

The original quake used prebaked tiles and shadows.. nothing was 
dynamic. It was one step up from wolfenstein, which didn't use any 
shadow. The topology of objects is limited, also. If you notice, you 
really can't see multifloors in any room.  You can go around corners and 
it appears like multifloors, but you'll never actually see multifloors 
in one screen. That is how it gain it speed. There was always a single 
"top" and a single "bottom" draw path for every vertical render line.

Quake 2 introduced dynamic shadows and effects lighting. Quake 3 
introduced the multifloors and dynamic scenes with real-time lighting, 
if enabled. The rest is history.

Even still, Quake series still use prebaked lighting and a know set of 
objects to work with.

SL constantly loads and unloads objects into the render buffer. The 
scene is no where near as static as found in Quake.

Alan Grimes wrote:
> I fired up my 150 mhz Pentium MMX; 64mb ram a few minutes ago.
>
> I ran quake, and was treated to a very responsive 20 fps... (more or
> less), at 640x480.
>
> This machine from the mid '90s was playing Quake 1 with nothing but a
> linear framebuffer for graphics and beating the living $#!7 out of my
> dual athlon 1.2ghz/linux on Second life... Granted linux extracts a
> fairly hefty performance penalty for 3D apps but the degree of slowdown
> I've been seeing is outrageous. The bus on this machine is 5x faster
> than the Pentium 150, it has a video card that's faster than the sum
> total of every transistor in the elder machine,
>
> What gives?
>
>   

-- 
Power to Change the Void