Having seen this subject looked at across the dregs of the the internet (Gamefaqs for example).. I figured what better place to bring it up than here, simply because the people here actually have Brains and will discuss it properly and accurately. Patent's tend to use extremely complicated writing (from my perspective anyway haha) and I figured people here could probably help decifer it. The patent in question can be viewed [here] It relates to a graphics processing method, the general concensus around the interweb is that it refers to a form of cube mapping. I know I would appreciate it if some of the more tech savvy members could give this a glance over and perhaps explain it all (or at least the more complicated parts), hopefully some of the other members will appreciate it too. At least it wont turn into a troll war (like when it's brought up on Gamefaqs), cos Assembler (from my experience) has a decent userbase Thanks to all participating in this topic (final note - I appologise if this topic has been brought up before, I did a search but didn't find it, but I'm having a bit of a tard day today, and screwing things up, so there is a chance i missed it)
yeah, i heard about 8 months ago about some people in the movie industry claiming that they wanted to add a new technology or something to cinema screens or something, i don't remember well, and they talked abit about nintendo's technology...and this wasn't on a video game website. Anyway, going to check the link now thanks.
it seems to be a powerful audio/video chip... but i can't see anything so incredible about it. maybe is cheap and small and could be fitted inside a TV...?
"Emboss style effects are created using fully pipelined hardware including two distinct dot-product computation units that perform a scaled model view matrix multiply without requiring the Normal input vector and which also compute dot-products between the Binormal and Tangent vectors and a light direction vector in parallel". I dont know what you are talking about. I understood this perfectly!
I'm not a hundred percent on this, probably not even twenty percent, but it seems to me to be just some info on rendering in 3D, and bumpmapping it. Doesn't seem too "Revolutionary" to me, just seems like the basic groundwork for the system's rendering (the "boring" part most consumers won't care about), you know, turning all the 3D information into a 2D image to be displayed on the screen. I'm probably wrong, so don't hold me to my word, though.
I'd say that's almost certainly what it is. Companies patent all kinds of shit, almost none of which is interesting to normal gamers. I recall looking through Sega's patents once and one of the only ones I could figure out was a patent on the algorithm describing the way people ran out of the way of your car in Crazy Taxi. Woo! That was a revolution, too, I guess. ...word is bondage...
