44 minutes ago, Samiorga said:

No mention of this whatsoever. They were a startup company so they were probably looking for someone young with a lot of programming experience. And they used lines of code as a reference to calculate the amount of experience that they had...

I suggest that they probably weren't expecting you to have *written* a million lines of code. I don't think anyone expects that of junior developers. The phrasing you used here is "how many lines experienced." I would assume that they were asking about whether you had worked in a codebase that large before. I suspect based on this that they already have a codebase that large and are looking for people who are comfortable working in those sorts of circumstances.

9 hours ago, Fulcrum.013 said:

For first mainstream engines failed to use a modern hardware abilities. for example it no engines around that support spline-based models, while it significantly improve quality, decreace size of models and have hardware support since DX11 has been introduced over 8 yers ago.

I suggest that if game artists wanted to deal with building, rigging, and animating spline-based models, and programmers wanted to deal with optimizing their rendering, then game engines would support them. Currently I don't believe that is the case.  

Quality generally takes a back seat to performance and tools support in the video game industry. Remember, video games are magic shows. They don't have to look exactly accurate, they just have to look "not wrong." Many corners are cut in the name of performance.

Also, source on DX11 supporting splines-based rendering? I googled, but I can't find anything on this. DX11 does support tesselation, but that's not the same thing.

10 hours ago, Fulcrum.013 said:

For first mainstream engines failed to use a modern hardware abilities. for example it no engines around that support spline-based models, while it significantly improve quality, decreace size of models and have hardware support since DX11 has been introduced over 8 yers ago. And for main gaming != graphics only. It ever more of phisic simulation and game ai/logic than graphic

And for instance, Nurbs, Splines and so on were removed from modern OpenGL, certainly not due to hazard. You can have such surfaces, for sure. But in the editor. And it will create as usual triangles. GPUs are very well optimized for triangles. OpenGL also deprecated quads for example. Triangles are nice because triangles are plane eggs.

True, you can decrease the size of models thanks to surface control points. But not that much. Also, if you want to add other attributes except vertex position and normals (ie color, texture coordinates, TBN basis...), then this will become very harmful to play with at rendering time.

9 hours ago, _Silence_ said:

And for instance, Nurbs, Splines and so on were removed from modern OpenGL, certainly not due to hazard.

At GeForce3 times i utilized bezier patches a lot, and after they have removed their hardware support i complained to NV and Mark Kilgard himself replied: "Nobody used them"  

At this time i was not aware the non-rational limitation made them useless anyways, @Fulcrum.013 pointed this out to me recently.

I agree with him about the fact that games ignore any alternative geometry, which is a missed opportunity. Irregular triangle meshes are not the most efficient thing - the have no LOD built in. I mean there is a lot about tiny voxels, or SDF, but restrictions to fixed world grids and huge memory requirements turns this mostly into a waste of time IMO.

Nurbs, converted to simple patches are quite interesting, not only for human made stuff. They have built in parametrization and so allow for seamless displacement mapping (e.g. landscape with overhangs and tunnels with little storage). The resolution of the parametrization however is not uniform, this is something quadrangulation aims to solve at the cost of less control over details. (I work on this - it's a torture, but i'm finally done, almost  ) 

All this is very interesting but underutilized in games yet.

3 minutes ago, Promit said:

ust to clarify, the primary reason that game developers don't use spline or patch based meshes at runtime is that the throughput on GPU is relatively poor. In most cases the GPUs are much better at pushing triangles than trying to do adaptive detail tessellation, as there are challenges across different hardware with how much expansion is actually viable and how on-chip buffers for tessellation outputs get sized. It can be more useful to use compute shaders to expand the tessellation ahead of time, but it's not really that helpful at the end of the day for most of the models we actually want in a game.

I agree with this and do not aim to use tesselation shaders. My motivation comes from a completely different direction: The need for global parametrization for GI with surface caching. I came across ideas to use this stuff for visible geometry as well only unintentionally, and i'm not sure yet if really works well (speaking of quadrangulation). I assume it works for most visible geometry, and it opens new possibilities to solve the LOD problem.

Graphics is about two things: Visibility and LOD. There is very little progress in games here. And in this context...

9 minutes ago, Promit said:

Please don't take Fulcrum's ignorance as representative of where game developers are at technically.

... such a comment gives me doubts who is ignorant here, in all respect. Our aim is to progress state of the art, not to stick at it forever.

Any discussion of ideas here, any showings of results should be welcomed i think.

It may be practicable now, it may not, it may need more work... but in the end it might turnout useful.

Personally i try to get there without any change on the workflow of artists, other than reducing their need to work on manual LODs.

Fulcrum pointed out CAD modeling is faster for many kinds of objects, which surely isn't wrong either.

16 minutes ago, JoeJ said:

.. such a comment gives me doubts who is ignorant here

A minute later i feel sorry. Surely you only want to put things in perspective, which i agree is necessary.

It's just i get triggered quickly because i often run against walls what talking about alternative ideas.