/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.4422662]

what's wrong with quads?

[Anonymous No.4422665]

why do you ask? it made sense at the time

[Anonymous No.4422670]

Nothing. They're just two triangles.

[Anonymous No.4422672]

>>4422670
wrong

[Anonymous No.4422686]

>>4422672
Warping only happens with affine texture mapping. Not perspective correct.

[Anonymous No.4422732]

With 4 coordinates, you can specify shapes that are nonplanar, or have badly-defined texture coordinate differentials.

[Anonymous No.4422738]

Nothing, they're much better for modelling.

[Anonymous No.4422759]

>>4422686
aren't we talking about the saturn?

[Anonymous No.4422776]

People were using triangles

[Anonymous No.4422882]

>>4422662
Quads don’t have the versatility of triangles for 3D modeling as illustrated by >>4422672, AND they can function identically to quads when needed although that does increase the number of polygons that need to be rendered.

[Anonymous No.4422898]

>>4422662
try making an origami ball out of identical squares without distorting them

[Anonymous No.4422945]

Jesus christ, just google it instead of shitting up the board.

[Anonymous No.4423730]

>>4422945
>Jesus christ, I'm too antisocial for a Mongolian comics image board

[Anonymous No.4423791]

as a game dev this is simple:

Any surface made out of more than 3 points (anything except a triangle) can only make flat surface. Otherwise they are rendered incorrectly. That means, yes an engine that can render more than only triangles is better. BUT with triangles you can generate any surface without errors, if it is a polygonal surface.

Lets take for example a surface with 4 points, which works in 2d with no problems. So if you now rotate the camera so you see it isometric, and move one of the points on the z axis (all 4 points before had the same z=0) you can't render the surface correctly without splitting it into triangles. There are a few exceptions to this rule. I think you can render concave, but not convex shapes. But it's too long ago I worked with 3d.

Anyway, always keep in mind that polygones aka triangles are SHIT. All the modern 3d rendering is all a hack. If you wanted real 3d we would need voxels:
http://www.atomontage.com/

But thanks to shit companies like nvidia and american trash laws we are still in the stone age of visual rendering and rendering in general.

[Anonymous No.4424239]

>>4422662
they're fine but modern computer hardware aren't built to handle quads. Saturn emulation is demanding due to this. It being shit is more on the devs and convoluted Saturn hardware.

[Anonymous No.4424306]

>>4423791
>I DON'T LIKE "POLYGONES", THEREFORE THEY'RE SHITTY HACKS!

Don't act like voxels don't also have their own quirks and drawbacks.

[Anonymous No.4425081]

>>4422672
That is just an issue with uv mapping and issue with using same texture. This doesn't imply the topology is wrong at all and besides the floor doesn't even deform.
Triangles matter because everything gets tesselated into triangles when it's drawn on screen.
In older games when characters where 300-700 polygons modeling with perfect triangles was very important because you could express the silhouette and deform the geometry in most optimal way. Look at some Quake models for example.
These days games have so many polygons on screen that strictly optimizing for triangles doesn't matter that much. But however, everything is still rasterized into triangles so one quad becomes two triangle faces.

In the past if you modeled just with quads your polycount would suddenly double and that was a huge overload for the current hardware back then.

[Anonymous No.4425086]

>>4425081
Here is an example why triangles were important back then. It deforms nicely and shows nice silhouette.

[Anonymous No.4425117]

>>4422882
>although that does increase the number of polygons that need to be rendered.

Not really, since when you hand your GPU some quad geometry to render the first thing it does with that geometry is decompose it to a triangle mesh to simplify the math involved. Blender may tell you your quad model is 1000 "faces" but as far as your GPU is concerned quads are an abstraction intended to make life easier on the artist and it's really just 2000 tris (or 8000 or 32000 etc if you've got any subdivide going on).

Saturn was a near-unique rare case of a GPU that DIDN'T do this, but the math in its rendering pipeline was a lot more complex as a result and it's debatable weather it was worth the end result given the speed of silicon at the time and the comically low polycounts involved (i mean sure texture mapping was better but that just meant everything looked like it was made out of very well textured Duplo blocks)