<\/a><\/td><\/tr>And even if you do pour all that money into your PC, odds are the games will suck<\/a> anyway, and run like a sick turtle. On an uphill grade. Against the wind. While, like, pulling some heavy stuff or something. You know: Slow<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You know in eighteen months “everyone” will have one of these cards. So you add bling-mapping to your graphics engine. Sadly, this is not as easy as dropping it into place and walking away. <\/p>\n Sure, it makes polygons look nicer, but it makes them take longer to render. Is it worth it for little polygons in the distance? Where is the point at which the feature is just slowing things down and not adding to the game visually? A meter from the camera? Ten meters? A hundred? You need to figure this out. Oh, and this distance probably varies based on resolution, so at 800×600 the cutoff is N meters but at 1024×768 the cutoff is (maybe) N*2 meters. You’ll need to work out how this scale works so you know how far away a polygon needs to be before you can safely disable bling-mapping for it.<\/p>\n Looking at the complex calculations that are needed to “bling” a polygon, are there any approximations or shortcuts that will be (say) twice as fast but look nearly the same? Perhaps there is a shortcut that will make all bling-mapped objects render faster, but it causes very ugly distortions and artifacts up close. Perhaps there is another, different optimization that only works well at a distance, and perhaps these two optimizations can’t be combined. Figuring out how to use them properly, and when to use one and when to use the other, is no small task. <\/p>\n What about transparent polygons? Perhaps bling-mapping looks fantastic, but for textures with transparent areas (like grass, or leaves) the effect is ten times slower to render? Is there a way around this? Maybe you should disable bling for these parts of the scene? Or is there some way your artists could build these items that will mitigate this problem?<\/p>\n What happens when you go to put a decal on the polygon? (A decal is another texture slapped over the surface, usually things like adding scorch marks or blood splats to walls, or cracks and bullet holes to a plane of glass.) Maybe bling-mapping and decals don’t look very nice together, or they cause really heavy slowdowns.<\/p>\n The variables are endless. There are many aspects to the scene that need to be considered. I’ve barely scratched the surface, really. This work will take months.<\/p>\n All done? Got all those tradeoffs worked out? Think you can render the scene with bling-mapping enabled and not waste too many GPU cycles? Great. Now go do it all again. ATI has a card that does the same thing, only slightly differently. It doesn’t have the problems with transparent textures like NVIDIA, but it ends up being really, really ugly with polygons which have certain shadow effects applied. So you’ll need to find some way around that.<\/p>\n Done? Great. By the way, NVIDIA just came out with a new card. It speeds up bling-mapping by 50% in certain cases, but only if you do this other optimization over here which is incompatible with other optimizations that you’ve already put into place and calibrated.<\/p>\n Our game should be ready to ship by now. Aren’t you done yet? You were only working on one feature.<\/p>\n Obviously old cards won’t support bling-mapping. But since it is now an intergral part of our render path, we must write an entirely different path that does all of the rendering without the aid of bling-mapping. Ah, screw it. We’ll just drop support for old cards. We’re already four months past our intended release date.<\/p><\/div>\n
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