Hi, can anyone please put a stop to a personal arguement and tell me that if quake III did indeed invent proper curved surfaces ?. Being a newbie to opengl programming I can see in the manual for opengl that commands already exist for nurbs and rounded surfaces, so is quake using these commands or was it all down to the bods at ID. ? BTW - the first computer game to use rounded surfaces was the space shootemup "FRONTIER", some 7+ years ago.

Well, obviously id didn''t invent them if they were used in a previous game, so I don''t know where you''re going with that. And of course curved surfaces have been around much longer in non-game computer graphics.

But as for your second question, no, they didn''t use the opengl functions. They tesselate the curves down to a few discrete levels and then render them as triangles, popping between lod levels at certain distances.

Hope you won your argument.

I think they invented curved surfaces for Lara Croft''s boobs.

Yeah it was invented by bezier for designing Citroen cars

yes, i guess so.
when quake 3 was in development the mags all made a point of the 3d curved surfaces. But looking through the API of OpenGL I can see that there`s already support for nurbs. So the question being - did they invent the process or were they just the first games software house to use it !.

It was the first game, that I know of, to use curves. But as stated, he does his own "curve" generation in-game. The curves are stored as bezier patches ( or something similar ), which really just stores the control points ( usually 9 or 16 of them ), then using the curve function, it generates the proper triangles to approximate a curve. The LOD that it uses adjusts the "time" parameter for the curve function.

I think

Correct me if I''m wrong,

doesn''t Unreal (version 1) have an "Curved Surfaces" option
in the configuration file. I know it does, havn''t tried
it cause I had a sucky 3dcard before.

tascho,

you''re right to an extent. Bezier invented a type of curve to aid the creating of curved lines. Strangely enough he called them Bezier curves (Presumably after his father or something). Other kinds of curves exist though, including cubic splines, B-splines and about a million other methods. Each with advantages and disadvantages.

Curves have been around for many, many years even before Mr. Bezier designed his, but obviously had limited use.

The point is that if implemented correctly, the level of the curve can be altered quite simply. For example think of a sin curve. By specifying only 2 control points (and slopes) and using a cubic spline we can find the points in between these points. Depending on the speed of the processor or geometry level, we can increase the number of subdivisions, thus how intensive the process will be. By using this method, if the LOD is set very low, we can ignore the intermediate points and only display the control points (9 or 16 according to mitchw in q3). Nice.

Well I hope I know what Im on about (My exam on this subject is on Friday so I''ll find out one way or the other).

Right ive said too much and completely avoided the point of whether q3 was the first to use them, but I hope that helps to some degree.