StarDestroyer.Net BBS

While I can't contribute much on the technical side, damn, but the, shall we say, narrative of it all sounds like Nintendo. A technology which could offer great uses but would require people to overhaul their way of doing things...

If I'm understanding the technical discussion, NURBS would be a great benefit for games that would require lots of on-the-fly scaling, since you wouldn't have to make as many copies of the models with new levels of detail?

SirNitram wrote:If I'm understanding the technical discussion, NURBS would be a great benefit for games that would require lots of on-the-fly scaling, since you wouldn't have to make as many copies of the models with new levels of detail?

Yes, because one NURBS model is always going to look accurate at any distance. But it is more computationally intensive than polygons. If a NURBS surface is the real thing, then polygons are a rough approximation of the real thing. That's why they're inferior from a modeler's perspective, but it's also why they have been overwhelmingly adopted in the CGI world in the past.

Personally, I always liked using Bezier surfaces and then converting them to NURBS later, but that's just me. Bezier surfaces are better for fine modeling of aesthetically critical surfaces in my experience, because they make it so easy to warp and distort surfaces in a smooth and curvilinear fashion. A lot of CAD/CAM packages can handle both Bezier and NURBS surfaces.

Praxis wrote:Remember that GameSpy is doing Nintendo's online, and IGN owns GameSpy.


The 24th would be one week from the conference...

Small nitpick,Praxis.

IGN and Gamespy merged, neither directly owns the other as far as I am aware.