Downloadable documentation suggestion

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twp
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Downloadable documentation suggestion

Post by twp » 2012-12-27, 22:30

I would like to have the contents of the wiki docs available off-line. Have you considered making it downloadable?
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Carsten
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Re: Downloadable documentation suggestion

Post by Carsten » 2012-12-28, 00:11

Hi twp,

welcome to the Cafu forums! :welcome:
twp wrote:I would like to have the contents of the wiki docs available off-line. Have you considered making it downloadable?
Your question is a good one; I have in fact considered this several times in the past, but unfortunately never found the time to come up with a concise solution.

Initially I thought that generating LaTeX source code from the DokuWiki pages, then compiling this to a pdf document would be the best approach to achieve this, but today it looks as if generating an eBook instead is both simpler and more useful.

Anyways, I've created a ticket for this: http://trac.cafu.de/ticket/126
I'll do my best to address this as quickly as possible, but it will take me at least several days to find the time for it, and to experiment, etc.
Best regards,
Carsten
twp
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Re: Downloadable documentation suggestion

Post by twp » 2012-12-28, 00:58

Thanks for the quick reply. Pdf would be a better (albeit not perfect) choice for me, unless you can generate html output from the wiki.
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Re: Downloadable documentation suggestion

Post by Carsten » 2012-12-28, 01:35

twp wrote:Thanks for the quick reply. Pdf would be a better (albeit not perfect) choice for me, unless you can generate html output from the wiki.
Ok, noted! :up:
As a first step, I'll have to do some broader research anyway, and it is well possible that it turns out that pdf is easier to generate than epub. But as far as I currently know, going from epub to pdf is easy as well, so we'll probably have plenty of options.
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HWGuy
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Re: Downloadable documentation suggestion

Post by HWGuy » 2012-12-28, 03:19

Offline documentation would be really nice since there's readers which support bookmarking, highlighting, taking notes.
There's quite a bit of free software which can generate PDF and epub and they're convertible either way, although people are more familiar with pdf.
Although it'll have to be an automated process since Cafu's documentation is regularly updated and you don't want to deal with re-spinning such a huge thing on a regular basis.

In a related matter;

Carsten, do you have a list of links to papers I can study on programming?
Your papers and any you used for Cafu, as well as anything else interesting.
As you know... Cafu has been an educational tool for many more than a game engine and some papers or links to papers to go along would help. I've read yours twice. :)
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Carsten
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Re: Downloadable documentation suggestion

Post by Carsten » 2012-12-28, 22:45

HWGuy wrote:Although it'll have to be an automated process since Cafu's documentation is regularly updated and you don't want to deal with re-spinning such a huge thing on a regular basis.
Yes, this is one of the key considerations for implementing this, and also what makes finding a good solution difficult.
Carsten, do you have a list of links to papers I can study on programming?
Your papers and any you used for Cafu, as well as anything else interesting.
As you know... Cafu has been an educational tool for many more than a game engine and some papers or links to papers to go along would help. I've read yours twice. :)
Thanks, it's good to hear this! :wohow:

However, providing a concise answer to your question is very difficult:
There is no single paper or book (or set of papers and books) that you can read and be done -- any list of recommendations that I can come up with will always be incomplete.
This is both because the scope of your question ("papers on programming") is very broad, and because it would not be possible to cover the countless "smaller" publications that I've read over the years. (In this context, "smaller" just means "not found at Amazon" or "not physically in my book shelf", but by no means refers to significance!)

Some examples for the latter: pure reference books; partially read books; books where only a single chapter out of twenty was useful to me; books that were much narrower or broader in scope than desired; manuals for compilers, tools and libraries; and of course the virtually infinity world of online resources of web pages, pdf documents, forum and newsgroups posts, etc.

But now, to get a start, are you aware of this FAQ?

And maybe the most important advice that I can give right now: Ask a more specific question. What exactly is it that you want papers for? C++? Lua? Code Design? Anything specific in the Cafu Engine?
If I knew that, I would probably be able to come up with a much better list.
You could of course even take it a step further, and see what a Google or Amazon search comes up with.

And I just see that I can create personal lists of favorites at Amazon, which would probably be a lot easier for me to create rather than updating the FAQ item above... :up:
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Carsten
HWGuy
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Re: Downloadable documentation suggestion

Post by HWGuy » 2012-12-29, 00:02

Well I was thinking of a general list of papers used directly or indirectly for Cafu, a list of stuff available free online and a more conventional cite list for those who want to go out acquiring things like books.
It could just be a forum sticky where you and the rest of us share information found on various topics, graphics, networking, database, physics.

I'm most interested in graphics, realtime global illumination, I find some older papers which are non-realtime are adaptable to modern GPUs because of the 100-1000x increase in processing power and the greater amount of VRAM available.
I'm using OpenGL ES 2.0(EGL-ES lets the OpenGL code work on any platform), I've been reading ATi/AMD and nVidia stuff but it often uses features different from OGLES so I've had to look towards mobile/console stuff.
twp
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Re: Downloadable documentation suggestion

Post by twp » 2012-12-30, 01:59

To continue the documentation request, I've tried to view the tutorial videos, without success on Firefox under Linux/Ubuntu. I was able to capture one of the videos and find the the .swf file is formatted as ffmjpeg, which doesn't play well in any of my video display tools. I can see a rapid set of screen shots, which go by in about 5 seconds. I'm unable to slow the frame/sec rate enough to make any sense of the tutorial. It would be nice to be able to download the tutorials, rather than view them in the browser, particularly since Adobe no longer support flash under Firefox/linux.

My suggestion is to convert the flash to some other format(s) which could include formats compatible with HTML5 video tools.
Thanks and I'll keep digging into Cafu...

[EDIT] the video format (ffmjpeg) might work better using ffmpeg (no 'j' )
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Re: Downloadable documentation suggestion

Post by Carsten » 2012-12-31, 01:06

Hi HWGuy,
HWGuy wrote:Well I was thinking of a general list of papers used directly or indirectly for Cafu, a list of stuff available free online and a more conventional cite list for those who want to go out acquiring things like books.
It could just be a forum sticky where you and the rest of us share information found on various topics, graphics, networking, database, physics.
Oh, ok, I see now what you mean.

However, I think that the best place to manage such information (i.e. quality references to relevant papers) is our Ticket System / Issue Tracker "Trac".

Each ticket is about a well defined, closed subject, be it a new feature or a bug, and each ticket collects all information that is relevant for the issue that it describes. While Trac is not for arbitrary "free" discussions like the forum, everyone can add comments to each ticket, the tickets can be searched, etc. In this sense, I think that the ticket system is the best place to keep meta-information like references to underlying papers.

For completeness, let me point out that I also think that our issue tracker is currently still underutilized -- the contents that's currently there is only the beginning, and it should be used more often and more rigorously than it is now (I use another Trac instance in another big project, and it works very very well). Nevertheless, some examples: These only have few references right now (I plan to add more especially for vegetation soon), but as I said, it's still underutilized.
I'm most interested in graphics, realtime global illumination, I find some older papers which are non-realtime are adaptable to modern GPUs because of the 100-1000x increase in processing power and the greater amount of VRAM available.
Realtime global illumination is, in general, still a big problem -- but it would certainly be worthwhile opening an own ticket for it, even though its a bit abstract topic. Working code is probably a while away, but also see http://gameware.autodesk.com/beast, and of course we could revive the material presented in my thesis: Unigine added SHL support only 2 months ago. :cheesy:

:up:
Best regards,
Carsten
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Carsten
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Re: Downloadable documentation suggestion

Post by Carsten » 2012-12-31, 01:16

Hi twp,
twp wrote:To continue the documentation request, I've tried to view the tutorial videos, without success on Firefox under Linux/Ubuntu. [...] It would be nice to be able to download the tutorials, rather than view them in the browser, particularly since Adobe no longer support flash under Firefox/linux.
Sorry, I cannot reproduce this. I use both Ubuntu 10.04 and 12.10, each with Firefox and the Shockwave Flash Plugin (most recently updated on 2012-12-16), and it works without any problems at all. Just re-tested with the tutorial at http://www.cafu.de/wiki/mapping:cawe:yourfirstmap without problems.
My suggestion is to convert the flash to some other format(s) which could include formats compatible with HTML5 video tools. [...]
[EDIT] the video format (ffmjpeg) might work better using ffmpeg (no 'j' )
Unfortunately, I fear that that is not possible: The Flash-Tutorials were made with Wink, and while I would prefer an open format myself, having these as Flash files is the best we can currently do. (However, most of our future tutorials will most likely be done via screen-capturing and uploaded to YouTube, such as this one.)

In summary, most likely something is not setup correctly with your system, and you might want to contact some form of Ubuntu support for getting this right.
Best regards,
Carsten
HWGuy
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Re: Downloadable documentation suggestion

Post by HWGuy » 2012-12-31, 04:26

Carsten wrote:Realtime global illumination is, in general, still a big problem -- but it would certainly be worthwhile opening an own ticket for it, even though its a bit abstract topic. Working code is probably a while away, but also see http://gameware.autodesk.com/beast, and of course we could revive the material presented in my thesis: Unigine added SHL support only 2 months ago. :cheesy:
:up:
Well my demo code will be in Go and using EGLES, but documented fairly well so anyone can port it quick.
It's really simple and takes advantage of deferred rendering and shader power in OpenGL, it's not really good at realtime since there's a lot of cpu-gpu communication.

It's mostly poly driven(tiny polys will only receive and not cast light, medium will have receive(the 3 verts) and cast a bounce light source, big can have multiple cast/receive points) but lights up the world well enough, just can't do hard shadows, but that can be done blended in with traditional direct shadows.
Light intensity determines how many times light bounces.
A light that's not in motion consumes pretty much no processing power, if it's moved then it recalculates the map chunks it can affect. If geometry is moved near it is also recalcs if the geometry shadows things... although you only really need to do light recalcs if it's a big thing, a small thing can just steal nearby lighting info and blend in.
This method's performance is based on poly count and number of lights, the lights themselves don't cast rays so it's pretty efficient.

The thing I need to figure out is lighting on very large scales, such as mountains reflecting light.
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