New Visualizer

New Visualizer released. In case you got heavy videocard nVidia 7800GT and higher or ATI 1800 and higher check it out at http://www.exsotron.com/

Since it doesn't mention scripting or customisation anywhere I am not even going to download this. Sorry. I'm waiting for (slowly contributing to) fridge still.

Originally posted by jheriko
Since it doesn't mention scripting or customisation anywhere I am not even going to download this. Sorry. I'm waiting for (slowly contributing to) fridge still.

The visualizer is in use for quite some time in commercial environments and those blokes do not like to do anything themselves. If I get enough interest from private users then I'll add scripting. If there is no interest then why bother?

people mostly use AVS because it either:

a) comes with winamp
b) is programmable

almost everyone who comes in here wants a hardware accelerated version of what AVS does. quite a few people i know (myself included) only use winamp because it comes with avs, because avs is scriptable. if you did add scripting it would set your visualiser above the rest, plus with a community of artists making presets for it you wouldn't have to bother updating the visuals yourself.

if you do decide on making it scriptable i will warn you that finding a suitable scripting language will be ... er... fun 😉

sorry to write your vis off so quickly, but i just have little interest in visualisers that aren't programmable in some way

EDIT: btw, you should try to make the graphics features scale down onto lower end cards. it might also make it more popular.

totally agree with Jheriko

Originally posted by jheriko
almost everyone who comes in here wants a hardware accelerated version of what AVS does.

Every technology has it's good and bad sides. If you just want to accelerate AVS then get R4. I have no intentions of replicated something that is already done hundred times.

quite a few people i know (myself included) only use winamp because it comes with avs, because avs is scriptable. if you did add scripting it would set your visualiser above the rest

I have no problems adding scripting. However it does involve some work and before I do it I want to know if people like the concept in the first place. If they just say nah then why bother

, plus with a community of artists making presets for it you wouldn't have to bother updating the visuals yourself.

I have to. I use this visualizer in the commercial environment and I can not use somebody else's presets without making agreements and paying the authors. And if I got 100 authors that'll be a nightmare.

if you do decide on making it scriptable i will warn you that finding a suitable scripting language will be ... er... fun 😉

I have one. It is full blown language and compiles to native code. Leaves interpreters in the dust. Also majort part of visualizer is scriptable using HLSL (High Level Shading Language) which is executed on video card directly.

sorry to write your vis off so quickly, but i just have little interest in visualisers that aren't programmable in some way

No problem. I do not expect people to fall all over. If they like it good. If not, well I am still getting paid buy using it in commercial environments.

btw, you should try to make the graphics features scale down onto lower end cards. it might also make it more popular.

No. I believe I should not. I want my presets to look the way I design them and lower level hardware just does not cut it. Besides those things are getting cheaper and cheaper while giving more power. So at one pint what I do now would be possible using just on-board hardware and can certainly wait. Btw the cards that I need are being released by millions in quantity. So there are people with the hardware😉

I think you're aiming at a complete different audience then.

For AVS, we would love that every user is able to use it and enjoy it without much hassle. Noone wants to upgrade their hardware first just to see "some swirly images", as most people refer to visuals anyway.

Audio visualizations aren't a reason to upgrade your PC unless someone's *really* into it of course.
But as you said yourself, you're not too certain about your product yet.
(which also raises the question for me why you're asking money for something that's possibly inferior to free software but that's something else)

Why are you so afraid of people making presets for it by the way?
You're really making it hard for yourself to make this a popular product. I understand that you're proud of what you made, but if you want this to get an audience bigger than just you, at least equip it with some wings before you send it flying over the internet, even if that would be a free, stripped version. (I guess that's what you're aiming for? a free and a (paid) full version?)

edit, PS: in no way are we trying to scare you off.. We just tend to be really constructive in here. Some people find that offensive, but that really isn't our goal, we're just thinking with you 🙂

Originally posted by jheriko
Since it doesn't mention scripting or customisation anywhere I am not even going to download this. Sorry. I'm waiting for (slowly contributing to) fridge still.

Which reminds me, how's that coming along? Tell me about it.

Re: New Visualizer

Originally posted by kostyap
New Visualizer released. In case you got heavy videocard nVidia 7800GT and higher or ATI 1800 and higher check it out at http://www.exsotron.com/

7800GT and higher 🧟
i have only 6600gt

Re: Re: New Visualizer

Originally posted by !!!!unlem!!!!
7800GT and higher 🧟
i have only 6600gt

ATI just released X1650 XT. That thingy has 24 pixel shaders and cost the same as 6600GT. Manufacturers releasing new cards faster then one sneezes. http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/10..._ati_x1650_xt/

Originally posted by Warrior of the Light
I think you're aiming at a complete different audience then.

I am not aiming at any particular group. Just posted announcements in forums where people in general could be interested in visuzlisations

For AVS, we would love that every user is able to use it and enjoy it without much hassle. Noone wants to upgrade their hardware first just to see "some swirly images", as most people refer to visuals anyway.

I am in no way advocating that someone upgrades hardware for that purpose. I just thought that some of you might be running hardware that is good enough to run that vis of mine.

But as you said yourself, you're not too certain about your product yet.

I am certain in the way that I do use it in commercial installations. I am kinda clueless about home user market. It seems that at leas one company (Soundspectrum that makes G-Force) manages to sell vis commercially to home users

(which also raises the question for me why you're asking money for something that's possibly inferior to free software but that's something else

First: I did not ask you for money. Second: I do not think that my software is "inferior". Third: making software free is not a duty, there is enough space for both models

Why are you so afraid of people making presets for it by the way?

ROFL. Why would I be afraid? I already said that if enough people will like the general concept then I will create interface that will let other people to create their presets.

Re: Re: Re: New Visualizer

Originally posted by kostyap
ATI just released X1650 XT. That thingy has 24 pixel shaders and cost the same as 6600GT. Manufacturers releasing new cards faster then one sneezes. http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/10..._ati_x1650_xt/

👍 it's very cheap.

I thought that by "And if I got 100 authors that'll be a nightmare." you meant people that made presets.

When you wrote about the not being sure about scripting, I thought you meant using/modifying the visualizer in general. That's why I thought you were incertain. forget about that then.
Keep up the good work then and make something beautiful.

Originally posted by Warrior of the Light
Keep up the good work then and make something beautiful.

If you got the hardware then check it out. Some people told me that it is already beautiful. At least some presets😉

What is this R4? Sounds like it might be good.

Also you using other artists work doesn't mean you have to pay them. It depends on how you manage it.

Also, what features do you use exactly that stop this from being scalable? Looking at the screenshots (I know screenshots aren't great) it looks like a load of stuff you could render without any fancy pixel shader loops and branches.

I am also curious, which functionality of the GeForce 7800 series do you use that isn't on the 6800 or earlier models? IIRC the difference is nothing in terms of extensions and shader model etc.. there is just some extra UltraShadow API or something. Is it just a guideline for speed?

J: R4

Originally posted by jheriko
Also you using other artists work doesn't mean you have to pay them. It depends on how you manage it.

First of all good preset writers are hard to come by. And the few I know want to get paid.

Also, what features do you use exactly that stop this from being scalable? Looking at the screenshots (I know screenshots aren't great) it looks like a load of stuff you could render without any fancy pixel shader loops and branches.

Ok. Try replicating this for example:
http://www.exsotron.com/exs_pics/vis_1/0135.JPG along with lighting and bump-mapping. Just keep in mind that it is all real time and moving (no static stuff in there) and high resolution. When you do we would have something to discuss.

I am also curious, which functionality of the GeForce 7800 series do you use that isn't on the 6800 or earlier models? IIRC the difference is nothing in terms of extensions and shader model etc.. there is just some extra UltraShadow API or something. Is it just a guideline for speed?

24 Pixel shader piplines and raw speed. Shapes colors bump-mapping and lighting that you see are all generated at runtime using pixel shaders. t does run on 6600GT for example but with low FPS. It does have "light" mode where one layer is removed and it is possible in this case to use it on 6600GT.

I will check out R4 when I get home, but it doesn't look very programmable.

The geometry is very nice and the lighting looks reasonably nice, but there is nothing in this image that can't be done using PS2.0 and a lower specification card in a lower resolution with a less detailed model. I'm probably going to download your plugin when I get home after all this discussion just to see how good it is when moving.

Bump-mapping and lighting don't make things slow. Accessing large textures and rendering with a high polycount is more of an issue normally, especially on lower end cards like GeForce FX.

I understand that its annoying to make stuff scale nicely, I'm always trying to do it and its time consuming and takes the fun out of the code (not that I've finished anything big yet). There are somethings which are quite easy to do on PS3 compared to 2, such as omni-directional shadow mapping. (I've never been able to make it look good on GeForce FX) The reason to make things scalable though is that it opens up your software to a larger chunk of the market since, for instance, home users do not have high-end PS3.0 cards as a rule.

Anyway, you remind me that I must take the time to sit down and write a proper demo. If my guesses are right and you are using some light with normal mapping, specularity and some kind of parallax effect (there is a nasty patchy aliasy border around your model that I can't explain any other way) in which case its nothing I haven't done before on other models in different contexts both hardware and software, real-time or not. Also nothing I can't derive from first principles. So there is no good reason other than sheer lazyness (maybe lack of time from full time work but..) that I can't copy paste my existing code and throw together a demo.

EDIT: didnt realise how long that was!

Also, I don't expect you to make it programmable. Its a whole order of magnitude more complexity to add. You would be surprised how much you can get away with (and not even notice problems with) when you limit yourself to high-end hardware and non-programmable content. That goes for all software in my experience. Fast CPUs/GPUs let programmers get away with all sorts of evil.

BTW, my current project (woefully unfinished) game engine runs fine on any windows NT (3.51,2000,XP,2k3) machine with an OpenGL 1.2 compliant graphics card. Doesn't render anything amazing like yours though, just a boring console and a programmable UI.

Originally posted by jheriko
I will check out R4 when I get home, but it doesn't look very programmable.

It is programmable. Scripting engine is built-in

The geometry is very nice and the lighting looks reasonably nice, but there is nothing in this image that can't be done using PS2.0 and a lower specification card in a lower resolution with a less detailed model.

Less detailed picture looks awful. And there IS NO MODEL. Shapes are generated on pixel shaders

I'm probably going to download your plugin when I get home after all this discussion just to see how good it is when moving.

It is not plugin. Standalone app that grabs sound from audio card.
[QUOTE]

Bump-mapping and lighting don't make things slow. Accessing large textures and rendering with a high polycount is more of an issue normally, especially on lower end cards like GeForce FX.

There are no polygons there. How many times do I have to explain that shapes are created using Pixel Shaders.

[QUOTE]
The reason to make things scalable though is that it opens up your software to a larger chunk of the market since, for instance, home users do not have high-end PS3.0 cards as a rule.
[QUOTE]

These cards are produced in quantity of millions now.

Originally posted by jheriko
Also, I don't expect you to make it programmable. Its a whole order of magnitude more complexity to add. You would be surprised how much you can get away with (and not even notice problems with) when you limit yourself to high-end hardware and non-programmable content. That goes for all software in my experience. Fast CPUs/GPUs let programmers get away with all sorts of evil.

I would recommend you to refrain from assumptions like that. I have a scripting engine that compiles to native code and is blindingly fast. As for what it takes to add it, well I am not commenting here about your coding abilities so I'd like you not comment on mine. I have used various scripting engines for years in applications that I have created for various enterprises.

BTW, my current project (woefully unfinished) game engine runs fine on any windows NT (3.51,2000,XP,2k3) machine with an OpenGL 1.2 compliant graphics card. Doesn't render anything amazing like yours though, just a boring console and a programmable UI.

My "hello world" application does not need any graphics and compiles and runs on just about everything

Originally posted by kostyap
I would recommend you to refrain from assumptions like that.

Its not an assumption. As a trivial example: if you have a fixed view point for instance, you can neglect considering the back halves and occluded areas of models without doing any bfc/occlusion tests. If you allow the user to choose a view point you can no longer do that without resorting to expensive tests which are often not possible to perform in real-time without expensive pre-calculations (hence generally useless in this situation).

Also I'm not doubting your scripting language, evallib already exists and compiles to reasonably fast code (no MMX, SSEn instructions...) in memory. All I'm saying is that there is a world of difference between rendering something to the screen without allowing it to be programmable and allowing it to be programmable. As mentioned above optimisation becomes much more difficult since your program knows much less 'ahead of time'. More importantly though is that rather than creating single instances of some object and using them you have to write code that manages multiple instances, creating, destroying, rendering from them (inheritence is nice here) etc... which isn't difficult, but its time consuming. You need to scan directories to look for files, create and maintain lists/trees in memory etc... None of this is necessary or even desireable for a stand alone plugin with fixed options.

A simple example of this is texturing. With hard coded scenes there is no reason to give any general mechanism to link together the various components of textures, you can just assign which ever one to which ever texture unit you like, and then use them as you like within shader code. Its faster and easier to write this way, at least it is how I would do it for a stand-alone demo. Its also very little work to add specific optimisations for a specific texture.

In a more general model though it is preferable to have some kind of script which defines the texture components, blend modes, which shader it needs to be rendered with etc... this means having to find all of these files out of a directory, parse them and store the data in some structure for fast and easy access, you also have to write more generic rendering code so that a texture appears on the screen. For all of this to be useful there needs to be some kind of UI for selecting a texture file and some mechanism for applying it to an object. Then there is allowing custom shaders for textures and working out which texture will end up in which unit etc.. This all boils down to needing some base class (without OO function pointers or whatever) for any component (triangle render, line render, spectrum, moving particle etc..) using textures. The bottom line is that you usually end up with a much bigger 'mess' of dynamic allocation, inheritance and data structures that you would need in a non programmable vis.

If we decide to make it scalable as well it becomes even messier since many routines will need to be written multiple times for different targets to allow the program to exploit the better features of newer hardware.

Ideally you would end up with something like the Quake 3 .shader or Doom 3 engine .mtr files.

You can of course do all the above with a static renderer and get benefits and since I haven't seen yours yet I can't comment on it specifically.

Originally posted by kostyap
My "hello world" application does not need any graphics and compiles and runs on just about everything

I guess I should have been more detailed about what the program does. "Hello" World doesn't really compare to even an empty window (assuming Win32). Here, this one runs on *nix and Win32 consoles:

#include <stdio.h>



int main(int argc, char** argv)

{

    printf("Hello World\n");

    return 0;

}

Sorry if I have offended you btw, I seem to do that easily without realising when I get overzealous about stuff.

Sorry: mashed quote instead of edit...

EDIT: About polygons and creating the geometry in a pixel shader. Out of interest, does it raytrace per-pixel?

Just checked out your vis. It seems that all of the presets do the same thing but with different textures to me... I prefer the light mode a lot, the other mode is way too busy and the colours make it plain ugly some of the time. Also in light mode you can see the differences between presets more clearly. I'm also slightly shocked to see it so flat and 2d, I was expecting 3d and awesome lighting. TBH this looks like an incredible waste of resources.

AA would be nice btw, it looks very jaggy here.

Also checked out r4, it seems quite nice and very powerful but it lacks the key feature that makes AVS, which is allowing the bulk of the programming to be done through a drag and drop interface. although r4's language is nearer to c than evallib, which is nice. the r4 ui is also terrible, they wasted right click by having it do nothing 😛 I am probably going to play with it still.. but yeah.

Relying on the sound card settings is quite annoying too. If the user can configure it then so can the software, enumerating windows and sending keyboard events is useful.

Originally posted by jheriko
EDIT: About polygons and creating the geometry in a pixel shader. Out of interest, does it raytrace per-pixel?

THERE ARE NO POLYGONS. How many times do I have to spell it

Originally posted by kostyap
THERE ARE NO POLYGONS. How many times do I have to spell it

Go back over this thread and actually read what you have said and what I have said. You needed to say it once. After the first time that you explicitly mentioned this I asked a question relating to it.

Learn to read and learn some terminology whilst you are at it. Then you might understand the sentence of mine that you quoted and mis-interpreted.

Originally posted by jheriko
Go back over this thread and actually read what you have said and what I have said. You needed to say it once. After the first time that you explicitly mentioned this I asked a question relating to it.

Learn to read and learn some terminology whilst you are at it. Then you might understand the sentence of mine that you quoted and mis-interpreted.

I think we are polluting the thread with our lengthy conversation. If you are interested in discussion we can do it either over email kostya___REMOVE___IT___@rogers.com or you can try live chat using MSN Messenger (my ID there is poukhov_kostya___REMOVE___IT___@hotmail.com)

Sorry for polluting your thread.

Originally posted by jheriko
Sorry for polluting your thread.

Why do you act like this? Two of us shoved ton of messages in this thread with virtually nobody else participating. There is no point keeping this conversation in here IMO. If you want to continue I gave you coordinates for contact. If you want to play offended then well, there is nothing I can do

A few points:

1) You are posting in the AVS forums; this forum is essentially dedicated to discussing preset editing. I appreciate that you just wanted to post about a visualisation in a place where you thought people would be interested, but you have to appreciate that everyone here is interested in scriptable, easily modifyable visualisations (and we put up with a huge amount of failings in AVS for it) so the reception is unlikely to be highly enthusiastic.

2) Just because they make millions of high end graphics cards doesnt mean everyone has them. If you take a straw poll I think you will find a small minority of people actually own cards that new. I also agree with J that there is nothing in your vis that seems to require such a high end card, and if there is, it should be scalable. Its not good enough to just say "I want them to be seen as I made them" because you're basically saying "fuck the end user, you either watch it like this or you dont watch it at all". If you want people to watch your vis try to appeal to the biggest possible market.

I dont mean to dump on your efforts, it all looks very nice, but as I have said we are more about making visualisations here than watching them.

Originally posted by PAK-9
A few points:
1)You are posting in the AVS forums;

You should probably notice that I did not post in "AVS Presets" subforums but in general one. And if these forums had section for something like "Third Party Vis" then I would post there.

you have to appreciate that everyone here is interested in scriptable, easily modifyable visualisations (and we put up with a huge amount of failings in AVS for it) so the reception is unlikely to be highly enthusiastic.

Did not you read what I said? If people like the concept then I'll add preset building interface. If not then why bother.

I also agree with J that there is nothing in your vis that seems to require such a high end card

The best way would be for you to prove your point and replicate some of the presets in AVS at high resolution with with all details.

because you're basically saying "fuck the end user, you either watch it like this or you dont watch it at all". If you want people to watch your vis try to appeal to the biggest possible market.

What I am saying is that there are plenty visualizers out there and each one has it's own weaknesses and strengths and there is no need for them to replicate each other. There is enough space for everything I think. As for scalability I could throw it back to you: if I put AVS full-screen on HI-Res monitor and throw some fancy formula's it just does not work, I can assume then that it is not scalable either. See there are small cars, trucks, race cars etc. What you are saying is that everyone should have the same car.

... as I have said we are more about making visualisations here than watching them.

Then you are not an end user for sure. You are preset author, the same as I am. I just decided not to use AVS for my presets. And I want my presets to look the way I made them. You probably want the same for yours.

PS. You can grab new version from website. This one optimized more and "light" mode should run on lower cards. Still requires shader model 3 support