3D Rendering with the new screen tech

[Koruzarius]

Hey all! So I've been playing around with the new screen tech on the PTS, and decided to try to create a basic 3D renderer. It was a bit of a pain because there's a 50,000 character limit, and no vector libraries in place (yet?) but it was a fun challenge, and it runs fairly well!

 

 

 

Anyone else playing around with the new screens yet?

[CptLoRes]

Nice project. Reminds me of old skool demo scene stuff.

But I also have to be a bit of a downer, since I have a feeling CSS 3D transformations would not only be simpler, but also much faster.

[EasternGamer]

Perspective?

I'm working on a HUD-based projection system. Probably would run faster on the new screen API because it's all just lines and circles.

[Koruzarius]

2 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

Nice project. Reminds me of old skool demo scene stuff.

But I also have to be a bit of a downer, since I have a feeling CSS 3D transformations would not only be simpler, but also much faster.

Simpler, quite probably! This was quite a lot of work =D

 

But faster? I honestly really doubt it. This is some very very basic level stuff, there's very few operations involved in each of these steps, and the amount of data being transferred over the server is also minimal, just the 50 kb (45kb of which is the teapot itself) one time, then the client's computer handles all of the processing. That said, it's also pretty limited in its ability, I kept the code pretty tight and efficient, but the trade-off is it isn't super versatile. It can handle any OBJ file that has faces that only have 3 vertices each. I'll expand it out later (probably) but the more versatile you get the slower and more bulky it becomes.

 

The loading step at the beginning could probably go 10-100x faster, I seriously lowballed how much processing to do at each step, I may optimize that later, I just wanted to be absolutely certain it wouldn't overload!

[CptLoRes]

It is a bit of an apples to oranges to bananas comparison..

In most browser CSS/SVG transform is GPU accelerated, so that would definitively be A LOT faster. But at the same time I have a feeling that the CSS/SVG implementation in DU is not using the GPU, so then it becomes a question on how optimized the software fallback is.

 

And of course while importing your own 3d engine is seriously cool, it also leaves less script space for other stuff.

If NQ really wanted people to make cool screen projects they should add support for webassembly and webgl, instead of re-making functionality themselfs. But that is not their way.

[IvanGrozniy]

10 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

It is a bit of an apples to oranges to bananas comparison..

In most browser CSS/SVG transform is GPU accelerated, so that would definitively be A LOT faster. But at the same time I have a feeling that the CSS/SVG implementation in DU is not using the GPU, so then it becomes a question on how optimized the software fallback is.

 

And of course while importing your own 3d engine is seriously cool, it also leaves less script space for other stuff.

If NQ really wanted people to make cool screen projects they should add support for webassembly and webgl, instead of re-making functionality themselfs. But that is not their way.

 

"... HTML/CSS/Javascript is a group that forms a UI technology. For reasons beyond the scope of this topic we do not allow the use of Javascript inside the screen units. When you remove Javascript, the group effectively becomes a not so efficient vector image drawing technology which we have very little control over in terms of rendering. " - NQ

Meanwhile Coherent ui:

Coherent GT incorporates the proprietary Renoir graphics library and performs all rendering on the GPU. Renoir backends are provided for all major graphics APIs and multi-threaded rendering engines. Users can also customize the low-level rendering code and even write their own backend that uses the application engine. - https://coherent-labs.com/Documentation/cpp-gt/db/d12/rendering_guide.html

[IvanGrozniy]

11 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

In most browser CSS/SVG transform is GPU accelerated, so that would definitively be A LOT faster.

 

It could be that they are not using gpu acceleration, but we also know that they are not using databinding, which means the whole DOM tree gets refreshed and stored in memory on every frame.... smh....

[joaocordeiro]

One of this days, i will have to reinstall DU just to play with that

[GraXXoR]

I would love someone to recreate the original Elite in an in-game screen... That would be... meta.