tday@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Tim Day) (05/03/90)
At the SIGGRAPH trade exhibition in Boston last year, the most impressive demo on the Sun stand was a flight simulator flying over real DEMs (digital elevation models). I did ask for some info on it, but never heard anything. Does anyone actually have a copy of this? Has anyone seen it since? Does Sun sell it? I did try writing my own, but could only do wireframe without hidden surface removal at reasonable speed through Sunview; simple back-to-front rendering with polygons was too slow (yes, I was double-buffering, using pw_lock and writing directly to the screen; the GX doesn't seem to accelerate retained canvases). The Sun demo also seemed to be rendering the DEM at a resolution dependent on distance, which probably speeds things up a fair bit. Don't know if they were accessing the GX chips at a lower level as well... I have't been able to obtain a copy of the elusive ''GX Technical Note'' to find out anything about this.
matt@oddjob.uchicago.edu (Matt Crawford) (05/09/90)
The 4/60 GX flight simulator is called "Aviator". Your Sun sales representatives can obtain it through the corporate network and are allowed to give away copies as they see fit. Naturally, the intent is to use it to stimulate sales. Whether you can get a copy may depend on how nice you are to your sales rep and vice versa. Matt Crawford busy piloting the F/A-14 down the Grand Canyon