I've just read an two interesting articles re: real time ray tracing.
This is exciting stuff.
In the mid 90's, Ken Silverman wrote a bleeding edge 2.5D ray casting engine which was used to create Duke Nukem 3D. This was however, quickly eclipsed by Carmack's Quake engine, which was based on triangle rasterization. Ten years on, not a whole lot has changed. Things just got faster, and hotter, and bigger. Loking forward however, there is some exciting new graphics tech coming our way. With a quad core multi GHz CPU, real time ray tracing might soon become a reality.
This raises everyone's favorite Python whipping boy, the GIL, in another context.
The GIL prevents Python from scaling (using threads) across multiple processors. Hopefully someone will solve this problem soon. I want to use multiple threads on my multi-core chip in Python, but, at the moment, I cannot. Sure, I can fork a process and do something clever with that, but on Win32, this is rarely worth the effort, and generally not very useful for game programming. As more users get multi-core chips, Python won't scale as naturally as other threaded languages.
Will anyone step up and take on this challenge? I hope so.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Popular Posts
-
These are the robots I've been working on for the last 12 months. They each weigh about 11 tonnes and have a 17 meter reach. The control... -
This hard-to-see screenshot is a Generic Node Graph Editing framework I'm building. I'm hoping it can be used for any kind of node... -
So, you've created a car prefab using WheelCollider components, and now you can apply a motorTorque to make the whole thing move along. ... -
MiddleMan: A Pub/Sub and Request/Response server in Go. This is my first Go project. It is a rewrite of an existing Python server, based o...
-
It is about 8 degrees C this morning. So cold, especially when last week we had high twenties. To help solve the problem, a friend suggeste...
-
Why would I ask that question? Python 3 has been available for some time now, yet uptake is slow. There aren't a whole lot of packages i...
-
After my last post, I decided to benchmark the scaling properties of Stackless, Kamaelia, Fibra using the same hackysack algorithm. Left axi... -
I'm now using bzr instead of svn. I'm pushing my repositories to: http://exactlysimilar.org/bzr/ I'm also auto publishing docume...
-
I've just read a newspaper article (courtesy of Kranzky ) from WA Business News documenting the malfeasance, gross negligence and misc...
-
Possibly slightly more correct lighting. The rim light is now only applied in the direction of the sun, rather than being purely based on vi...
No comments:
Post a Comment