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Everything posted by WelfareBuysMyWeed
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Grand Theft Auto 3 ported to the Sega Dreamcast
WelfareBuysMyWeed replied to WelfareBuysMyWeed's topic in Video Games
It's sort of baking, sort of not. What we are using is known as triangle strips, it's a feature of the PVR core of the Dreamcast. Triangle strips aren't used too much anymore in games, but in the 90's they were a good performance boost. The way it works is that triangles are represented by a triplet of decimal numbers called a vertex. These numbers represent positions in space (think back to geometry class and plotting points) that form a triangle when connected. These triangles make up all the polygons in the world and characters and such. You do math on these points with what's called a matrix to do things like transform their position, rotate them around, etc. These matrix transformations are what move the polygons around the world so you can paint with them. Doing this kind of matrix math is super intensive, it's the part of computer graphics that takes the single most time, so the more triangles you have, the more vertices you have to do math on, the slower it takes. Well, if you have a model that has two triangle that share a same edge, that means two of their points lie on exactly the same position. So, using triangle strips, you can combine them, so instead of having to do math on 4 vertices, you only have to do them on two. It works like the image below. The problem with a triangle strip is every triangle in the stip needs to share attributes about the texture being used. If you need to switch which texture is being used, you have to end the current triangle strip and start a new one. Now, Grand Theft Auto 3 normally was not made like this, the PS2 did not use triangle strips. So the models and geometry are all with redundant vertices. So we wrote a tool that goes through the models, looks for triangles which call the same texture which reside next to one another, and figures out a funky shape to combine as many triangles as possible, to reduce the math complexity of the scene. That's just one stage of optimization. A couple of major optimizations are being worked on right now. I'm currently working on a better caching system, the Dreamcast uses a kind of Cache known as a direct memory cache which is very different from the scratchpad cache the PS2 uses, with a lot more limitations. Currently, GTA3 basically isn't using any cache on the Dreamcast because the way the PS2 accesses cache thrashes the Dreamcast's cache. So reworking things so they're cache friendly will achieve an enormous performance boost. At the same time, the way the Dreamcast and the PS2 do math on these vertices is completely different. The PS2 has a second processor known as a Vertex Unit that is entirely responsible for doing the math we described above. So while it's crunching the math to move these triangles, the main CPU can be doing other work. The Dreamcast has no math co-processor, all the math is done on the main SH4 CPU. This means when the Dreamcast does math, it can't work on anything else. That alone is a bottleneck, but there's a bunch of tricks to this. The Dreamcast CPU has a FPU inside known as the fast math core. This core does math extremely fast, and can also do it in parallel on multiple vertices. This is known as SIMD. The Dreamcast can do math on 3 vertices at the exact same time using this fast math core. Currently, the Dreamcast is doing all the math on the triangles without the core, through plain old C++, using none of the math hardware inside, one vertex at a time. Using this fast math core requires writing a bunch of SH4 microprocessor assembly, but once the process of translating these math calls to the SH4 fast math is done, then you'll see another enormous performance boost. There are loads of other things that can be done to better performance on this. Most of it means really tailoring the thing to run as close to bare metal on the Dreamcast as possible, in a configuration that is specifically setup to match the way the Dreamcast is built. For example, the way the Dreamcast's ram is configured on the motherboard is in 2 separate DRAM chips that act like one giant blob of 8mb of memory. The way these DRAM chips actually work is they have 2 banks inside each. Each bank contains 512 rows of 4096 bytes of memory. When you access memory at any given location, a piece of hardware in the DRAM chip called a sense amplifier needs to move to the appropriate row to read it. If you read something that's on the same row that the sense amplifier is currently connected to, it doesn't need to move and can read the value immediately. Moving between rows takes time and incurs a performance penalty. Since each bank contains a sense amplifier, and there are 2 chips with 2 banks each, that means there are 4 sense amplifiers total. That means you can, at max, read 4 different locations in memory, spaced 2 MB apart, with no performance penalty. So using special kinds of buffers and adhering to these boundries and attacking the MMU of the Dreamcast, you can best keep locality of reference for data: data that is used frequently with others are stored together, to avoid this sort of memory performance penalty. Bunch of stuff like that. -
Deion Sanders "Coach Prime" Now At Colorado
WelfareBuysMyWeed replied to Don Johnson's topic in Football
also, bolster or beef up doesn't mean improved, the guy wasn't necessarily saying they were improved. That would be editorializing, which he just finished bitching to another reporter about doing. That was the point of his question, he was asking "they're bigger, does that make them better?" but Deion's 2nd grade vocabulary couldn't parse it so his smooth brain got reptilian angry instead. -
Back around 2001, this was THE biggest argument in video games. The PS2 came out with GTA3 and completely stomped the Dreamcast, it was an example of a kind of game the Dreamcast supposedly couldn't run, which is why it couldn't compete for the rest of the generation. For decades, conventional wisdom was that a game like GTA3 was too complex for the hardware. Recently, however, Rockstar, the people who made GTA3, said the game actually began life on the Dreamcast to begin with, and only really died on the console because Sega exited the hardware market before they could finish. So with that in mind, a few of my friends and I have been porting Grand Theft Auto 3 to the Dreamcast in our spare time. Our goal is not only to fully port the game, but have it run better on the Dreamcast than it does on the Playstation 2. For example, the Dreamcast has much more RAM than the PS2 does, and that allows us to port over the PC version's draw distance instead of the PS2 version's shorter distance. More RAM also means more NPCs on the scene. Additionally, the Dreamcast has graphics features that the PS2 hardware does not, such as built in hardware accelerated normal maps. For this reason, the road in the Dreamcast version of GTA3 features bump mapping, completely abscent on the PS2 version. The SD Card slot on the serial port of the back of the dreamcast and network adapter also opens options not on the PS2 version, such as custom soundtrack support. Many of the group working on this are porting masters for the Dreamcast. Myself, I ported Doom to the Dreamcast, and other members have ported things such as Mario 64, Quake, and Wipeout to the Dreamcast. We've been banging on this for a while now, and we've gotten to a point where the game runs well enough to demonstrate: The Dreamcast is the best video game system ever made, and doing shit like this is so much fun. I love seeing how far this hardware can go. The other side of this equation is that our community tools, known as KOS, which we've all collectively been working on for about 25 years now, has finally matured to the point where it's suitable for professional, of-the-era development. Previously, it was assumed the homebrew SDK was far behind the official SDK from 1999, known as Ninja. Over the past 2 and a half decades, we've slowly added features to the SDK to bring it in line with those offered by Sega and Microsoft back in the day, like being able to generate gprof compliant profiling charts, and the creation of a SIMD-enhanced Sh4 fastmath ABI. These improvements have inched us far enough where stuff like this is finally possible. Keep an eye out soon for a full release of this, as progress is speeding up drastically now.
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Running Alt-Right Thread of Mockery and Hypocrisy
WelfareBuysMyWeed replied to bad_teammate's topic in Cloak Room
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Thing$ $till not going well for Joe Rogan, I $ee.
WelfareBuysMyWeed replied to Parliament's topic in Cloak Room
Male blond joke? I thought dipshits like this love aryans. -
When Mad Magazine used to do fold-ins, they'd make the picture make sense before you folded it, like that was the entire joke. This looks like the shirt is having a fucking stroke. Here's a good example, just for aggy:
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The NCAA has the ability to ban people from official NCAA events, but i'm sure Horn up there will be dickriding soon enough to tell us why their hands are just so tied
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No and no, he was neither. They *THOUGHT* he was the check skipper, but it was the wrong person. He had been in prison before in the past, and had *escaped* prison a couple of times in the past before, but he was innocent in this situation, just a dude eating at a restaurant. Not fraudulent card. He's was just a super eccentric dude, hence the theatrics. But in this case, he really was just minding his own business when the police came. All of this is in the extended interview.
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video begins with him walking out of the restaurant and immediately closing the door in disgust too, lmfao
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Her grandfather is THE dixie chicken??
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"You're under arrest" "I'm under WHAT?!" I don't know why but that exchange fucking kills me, lmfaoooo When he says "How dare you" at the end while being loaded into the car, he reminds me of this from when I was a kid:
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2024 Presidential Election Thread - Let's keep the party going.
WelfareBuysMyWeed replied to bolverk's topic in Cloak Room
"Give him a CHANCE and he won't MOCK the opportunity" -
2024 Presidential Election Thread - Let's keep the party going.
WelfareBuysMyWeed replied to bolverk's topic in Cloak Room
Re: Battle cry of Freedom Here's the superior Burl Ives version: -
I legitimately wish I could bleach what I read out of my eyes, some of the worst shit I've ever read in my life. I spared you guys the fucked up details. That monster deserves to burn. He did this to fucking 40 puppies.
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2024 Presidential Election Thread - Let's keep the party going.
WelfareBuysMyWeed replied to bolverk's topic in Cloak Room
The song was insanely popular among even the confederates, to the point where they tried to steal the song and make it anti-union. -
I just finished reading a story about how some famous zoologist who works with David Attenborough is going to jail because he had a fucked up torture dungeon where he'd rape and kill puppies and would film it and spread it online to other fucking sickos. They were talking about how he specifically went to some underground forum or some shit where people would share their gross torture porn home videos. Apparently all the other sickos were the kinds who would do it to humans, but when that dude would post his sick filth, the people on the forum would unanimously get pissed off and call him a sick fuck for killing dogs and to go away. Even literal psychopaths with death fetishes are disgusted at that shit. Being associated in any way with harming dogs purposefully makes you reviled by the entire population.
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This is 100% real and unscripted: The guy above died yesterday. There was apparently a serial dine-and-dasher in the area, and an undercover detective thought he spotted the guy, so he followed him into a restaurant and called for backup. The police, thinking they were gonna make a big arrest, brought along news reporters to film the incident. Only problem: it was the wrong guy. And the person they were arresting would make Matt Berry blush. That is the dudes honestly, real reaction to being mistakenly arrested, and holy shit it's the funniest thing I've seen in months. Every time I watch the video I see or hear something new and it makes me laugh. Like how the video opens with him slamming the cop car in disgust. Apparently this has been a viral meme in Australia for years, but it was only semi-recently that the context of the video was discovered, when the dude in the above video was found and interviewed. The interview with him is equally as hilarious, and yes, he really talks like that: RIP to a fucking hilarious guy
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You're the one queefing about how there is absolutely nothing the NCAA can do, we're saying updating the fucking website is the bare minimum. Also I've been an astros fan since I was a kid, went to every home opener going back to the 80's. Watched so, so fucking many years where they were dogshit but didn't care, still went. I'm not indignant about the uproar over the signal bullshit from 17, I absolutely do not hold my middle finger up about that shit. How about you have some standards and stop being a rolled over bitch? Cheaters fucking suck.
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2024 Presidential Election Thread - Let's keep the party going.
WelfareBuysMyWeed replied to bolverk's topic in Cloak Room
That's cause all my indian friends were straight-A kids who became doctors, haha. -
Baxter is a man-child with an extremely bright future.
WelfareBuysMyWeed replied to TexArcher's topic in Football
Fucking shit. Hoping Baxter recovers well. Fuck. -
2024 Presidential Election Thread - Let's keep the party going.
WelfareBuysMyWeed replied to bolverk's topic in Cloak Room
100000000% not: https://highschool.utexas.edu/instructor/gwendolyn-cash That's actually why I felt so comfortable walking into her class with a ball cap, I thought she'd be cool since I was all jazzed up about getting accepted into Texas, lol. -
2024 Presidential Election Thread - Let's keep the party going.
WelfareBuysMyWeed replied to bolverk's topic in Cloak Room
The only time I ever got detention in highschool was from my black History teacher because I kept wearing my UT ball cap to class every day. She gave me a couple of warnings, then one day I came in and got exactly that tone. She was a very close family friend that we had known since well before I was in school, so it felt exactly like a mom's tone.
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