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.



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