SPARCstation flight simulator (seen at SIGGRAPH)
Tim Day
tday at cs.ucl.ac.uk
Fri May 4 02:24:39 AEST 1990
At the SIGGRAPH trade exhibition in Boston last year, the most impressive
demo on the Sun stand was a flight simulator flying over real DEMs
(digital elevation models). I did ask for some info on it, but never
heard anything. Does anyone actually have a copy of this? Has anyone
seen it since? Does Sun sell it?
I did try writing my own, but could only do wireframe without hidden
surface removal at reasonable speed through Sunview; simple back-to-front
rendering with polygons was too slow (yes, I was double-buffering, using
pw_lock and writing directly to the screen; the GX doesn't seem to
accelerate retained canvases). The Sun demo also seemed to be rendering
the DEM at a resolution dependent on distance, which probably speeds
things up a fair bit. Don't know if they were accessing the GX chips at a
lower level as well... I have't been able to obtain a copy of the elusive
''GX Technical Note'' to find out anything about this.
More information about the Comp.sys.sun
mailing list