Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!scea!greg_labrec@interactive.sony.com From: Darco Newsgroups: scea.yaroze.freetalk Subject: Fractals for better graphics Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1998 19:44:58 -0400 Organization: SCEA News Server Lines: 35 Message-ID: <3535467A.A219E4C1@mail.datasys.net> Reply-To: darco@bigfoot.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 367.dialup.datasys.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (Win95; I) I'm not a yaroze guru, but I like to think of myself as an intelegent programer. Here's my idea: If you need to have some snazzy graphics in your game, why not use fractals? Slow, maybe - but you can be generating them in the background while you display that title screen... While not good for pictures(Unless you have access to fractal compression algorythms), they can make absolutely beautiful designs and patterns that take up virtually no space at all(Depending on how much you can crunch your fractal generator code). You can hide the calculation times behind any static screen - as long as the static image serves some purpose(Like a map, instructions screen, or even a copyright or title screen). Manderbrolt and Julia fractals would probably be best suited for this, but you could use any fractal. Fractal Plasma routines could be especially useful for generating TMD data for land terrain, instead of sending all of the data to the playstation via the serial cable. Have a game with thousands of different levels, without having to send any data back and forth between the playstation and the computer! Anyway, I hope this sparks some imagination. All comments are welcome. -- 'Darco darco@bigfoot.com UIN: 1454810 (You can page me at http://wwp.mirabilis.com/1454810) WWW: (sorry, page is down) Voria: http://www.datasys.net/users/stu/rquat/voria PGPKey: http://www.datasys.net/users/stu/rquat/pgpkey.txt "Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean that they are not out to get me."