Forum Overview :: Motherfucking News :: Thank you - this was exactly my point

[quote name="Senor Barborito"][quote name="mark"][quote name="I need clarification"] How the hell was BSP not revolutionary for its time? Because sooner or later it would have been invented anyway? Does that mean if and when time travel is invented, the guy will be considered a fucking implementer of BINRO'S THEORY?[/quote] Well, Carmack would need a time machine to have created BSP trees as I believe the data structure was first discussed in a 1975 paper by J. L. Bentley (athough discussions of using trees to do hidden edge removal dates back to 1969 paper by R. A. Schumacker, R. Brand, M. Gilliland, and W. Sharp). Furthermore, the first use of it as a way to render solid 3d scenes was by Fuchs, Kedem, and Naylor in 1983. Naylor went on to write a whole slug of papers about 3d rendering using BSP through-out the 1980s and 1990s. Other exciting papers include Chin and Feiner's paper on using BSP trees for near real time shadow generation from 1989, etc. Of course all they did was to come up with the theories, show proof of the validity, and in many cases implement these algorithms opposed to implementing them 10 years later (when hardware had caught up) and making a game out of it. mark[/quote] It was the Schumacker and Bentley papers I believe Carmack was referring to when I read where the idea came from, but the fact that there were prior existing implementations (albeit many in tech demos and papers) can also be said of, to the best of my knowledge, every major 'innovation' of Carmack's with the exception of Commander Keen's clock-independence to the best of my knowledge. As for the Reverse . . . it would be nice if someone more qualified than me (and with a better inside knowledge of the who/when of the) weighed in on this. Unlike visibility, I don't really have a good understanding of shadow algorithms. This is, again, what I've been saying from the beginning - Carmack excels at taking existing ideas and finding local optima for them with 1-2 notable exceptions. There is a difference between a great <i>programmer</i> and someone who gives birth to fundamentally new ideas like some sort of oracle, and many people seem to misunderstand this. --SB[/quote]