"Also it does have to be said that not all multichannel wave driver implementations are equal (which is what the ID audio engine outputs to). We believe that ours is one of the more stable / reliabe"

Stable? STABLE?! Your fucking sound card crashes every 3 hours where my sounds lock up and I have to do at the least a game reboot, and for certain games a full reboot to get the damn sound back. This happens in EVERY SINGLE FUCKING GAME, with the exception of X2, where after three or four hours of playing, the announcements are just cut off after 0.2 seconds.

Stable my fucking ass. Learn to write a fucking decent driver, then act all fucking indignant, you monopolistic pieces of shit. Your !Live card was an unmitigated disaster, but I figured that you had learned your lessons, and got an Audigy 2. Worst fucking mistake I ever made, but it's the LAST one I'll ever make where your 2 cents worth of code company is concerned.

11 Phd's in music. Since the trade deadline is coming up, how about you trade two of those 11, for one prospect who knows a single thing about WRITING FUCKING DRIVERS.

Creston

Edit : I THINK the good thing is that the game was already out to gold mastering before this deal was announced, so when EAX gets added, it will presumably have to be through a patch, which we don't HAVE to install. (hopefully).
I also hope that the option to turn it off and simply use Id's implementation of sound is readily available. One of the best news snippets I had EVER heard about Doom 3 was that Id was using their own, in house developed, sound engine. Fucking Creative.

This comment was edited on Jul 30, 21:20.

At least you didn't say educated in front of opinion.

Oh, and good choice Ray. I don't feel you should go to the mat when your reasoning has so many holes in it. Save that for the political threads.

Makes me feel bad I bought an Audigy card a few months back. I won't be buying anything else from Creative. Legal or not, it's a bullshit tactic designed to strong-arm id into adding a feature into their game they had no intention of adding. The consumers know it, id knows it, and Creative knows it, no matter what they say to the public. I don't give my money to companies that operate like that.

Conversation is over.

Even though my opinion differs with yours, I felt (and still feel) no need to insult you.

Saying "Goodbye,"
Ray

Edit: Removed pointless comment.
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This comment was edited on Jul 30, 13:06.

" they could've easily tried to screw id over with it, but instead just got a deal for their little audio enhancements to be added at a later date"

Just got a deal for their audio enhancements or they'd screw ID over is not tantamount to, it is the definition of blackmail. I fucking hate EAX as much as I hate digital effects on guitars - they both sound fake and made from plastic. Blackmail called "Creative forced deal making for a patent on a process we didn't invent" is still blackmail.

gg creative. gamers are not that stupid.

The companies will be very pleased.

Ooops! Creative just lost another future customer. I'm building a new computer, but now I will be sure to not include a Creative card. Thanks for making the choice easier, Creative!

I hate stupid patents. I'm going to patent hinge joints. You'll all have to pay me because of your elbows! OMG!!11 I ARE RICHHHH!!!11

Its worth noting as well that software patents are on an idea rather than the code itself which is already protected by standard copyright infringement legislation. I work for a company that uses and develops open source software and the current move in the EU towards US style laws is deeply worrying - it effectivly sets up an anticompetative market where something like the amazon patent on delivery of goods where the recievers address is unknown to the sendee can limit trade, inovation and development.

John Carmack on shadow volumes...

I recieved this in email from John on May 23rd, 2000.

- Mark Kilgard


I solved this in a way that is so elegant you just won't believe it. Here
is a description that I posted to a private mailing list:

----------------------------------------------------------

I first implemented stencil shadow volumes over two years ago in the
post-Q2 research period. They looked great until you flew the viewpoint
into one of the volumes, and depending on the exact test you used, either
most of the screen went into negative shadow, or most of the shadows
disappeared.

The classic shadow volume works that stencil shadows are derived from
usually suggest "inverting the test when the view is inside a shadow
volume". That is not a robust solution, because a non-zero near clip plane
will give situations where the plane is not cleanly on one side or the
other of the view point. It is also non-trivial to make the "inside a
shadow volume" determination, especially after silhouette optimizations.

The conventional wisdom has been that you will need to clip the shadow
volumes to the view plane and cap with triangles, treating the shadow
volumes as if they were polyhedrons.

I implemented the easy cases of this, choosing to project the silhouette
points to either the far plane of the light's effect or the view plane.
For the clear-cut cases, this worked fine, allowing you to walk in front of
a shadowed object, or look directly at it with the light behind it.
Intermediate cases, where some of the vertexes should project onto the
light plane and some should project onto the view plane could also be
handled, but the cost of all the testing was starting to pile up.

Unfortunately, there are cases when an occluding triangle projects a shadow
volume that will clip to something other than a triangular prism. There
are cases where real, honest volume clipping must take place.

Anything that requires finding convex hulls in realtime is starting to
sound like a Bad Idea.

I sweated over this for a while, with the code getting grosser and grosser,
but then I had an idea for a different direction.

It should be possible to let the shadow volumes get clipped off at the view
plane like they always do, then find the clipped off areas in image space
and correct them.

The way to find if a volume has been clipped off is to render the shadow
volume with depth testing disabled, incrementing for the front faces and
decrementing for the back faces. If the stencil buffer ends up with the
original value, the shadow volume is well formed in front of the view volume.

My first attempt to utilize this involved a whole bunch of passes to
determine if it was well formed and combine it with the standard volume
stencil operations. It was an interesting experiment with masking and
anding in the stencil buffer to perform two operations, but it turned out
that, while it worked for simple shapes, complex shapes needed more
information from the volume clipping than just "well formed" or not.

The next iteration involved attempting to "preload" the standard stencil
shadow algorithm by the number of clipped away planes. I first drew the
shadow volumes with depth test disabled, incrementing for back sides and
decrementing for front sides. This finishes with a positive value in the
stencil buffer for each plane that is clipped away at the view plane. The
normal depth tested shadow volume is drawn next, with the change polarity
reversed, decrementing for back sides and incrementing for front sides.
The areas not equal to the initial clear value are in shadow.

That works all the time.

Later, I realized something else. The algorithm was now basically:

Draw back sides, incrementing both with depth pass and depth fail.
Draw front sides, decrementing both with depth pass and depth fail.
Draw back sides, decrementing with depth pass and doing nothing with depth
fail.
Draw front sides, incrementing both with depth and doing nothing with depth
fail.

Rearrange the passes and you get:
Draw back sides, incrementing both with depth pass and depth fail.
Draw back sides, decrementing with depth pass and doing nothing with depth
fail.
Draw front sides, decrementing both with depth pass and depth fail.
Draw front sides, incrementing both with depth and doing nothing with depth
fail.

It is then obvious that they partially cancel each out and can be combined
into:

Draw back sides, doing nothing with depth pass and incrementing with depth
fail.
Draw front sides, doing nothing with depth pass and decrementing with depth
fail.

I was shocked. I went from feeling pretty clever with my unbalanced
preloading algorithm (which I would only apply on surfaces that were likely
to intersect the view plane) to just feeling dumb that I had never seen the
trivial solution before. Thinking about operating on depth test fails is a
bit non-intuitive, but if you work it through a couple times, what is going
on makes pretty good sense.

Shadows done this way have none of the "fragile" feel that geometric
algorithms tend to give. You can use them for major occluders in the world
and noclip fly right through them without any problems at all.

Stencil shadows still aren't cheap by any means. It can cost 3x the
triangle count of the source model (although <2x with some optimizations is
reasonable) per shadowing light, and it can have pathological fill rate
utilization in some cases, like a light shining out horizontally through a
jail cell door. Still, they are quick operations even if there are a lot
of them. The vertexes are just bare xyz points without texcoords or color,
and the fill rate is only to the depth/stencil buffer.

There are lots of subtleties to actually using this, like making sure your
shadow volumes are capped on both ends if they need to be (you can often
optimize away the caps based on culling information), making sure that none
of the shadow volumes get clipped off by your far clipping plane (which
would unbalance the count), and all the normal picky silhouette
optimization issues.

Depth buffer based shadows still sound like they have a lot of advantages:

Not much in the way of coding subtleties required.

The performance is more level (fixed fill rate overhead) and theoretically
somewhat faster (only one extra drawing of the surface into the shadow
buffer) in most cases.

They avoid the silhouette finding work that still needs to be done with the
shadow volumes (a per-face dot product and some copying), and don't require
any connectivity information.

Unfortunately, the quality just isn't good enough unless you use extremely
high resolution shadow maps (or possibly many offset passes with a lower
resolution map, although the bias issues become complex), and you need to
tweak the biases and ranges in many scenes. For comparison, Pixar will
commonly use 2k or 4k shadow maps, focused in on a very narrow field of
view (they assume projections outside the map are NOT in shadow, which
works for movie sets but not for architectural walkthroughs), along with 16
jittered samples of the shadow map for each pixel and occasional hand
tweaking of the bias.

I still want to research the options for cropping and skewing shadow depth
buffer projection planes, but I am now positive that the stencil shadow
architecture works out.


John Carmack

also SimmerD updated his post

"- Update : Actually I first presented this at GDC '99 in March, although I may have also presented at at the Creativity '99 conference later in the year as well."

Creatives patent was filed in May I beleive, so even if carmaks note was late [edit, oops, 2000, yup it is , jsut adds weight to showing he did it independantly], SimmerD's presentation was definately prior art, I REALLY hope we hear that something is being done about this formally soon.

This comment was edited on Jul 30, 05:46.

SmyTTor, well put.
I am a game programmer. If this story is true. I will have to think twice before adding any code that helps out creative. I hate people like this. These people make our job hards and affect our games. Also blocks the future innovations from happening in video games.

quote I do think there is a gray area, though - if there is no protection for original work, it sucks for the company that spends five years developing something...and then has another company, one that sat on the sidelines, effectively steal it and sell it for cheaper (either directly or somply out of not needing to recoup five years of investment.) endquote

Like CL did in 1999 at the dev conference when they took someone elses idea and patented it?

This comment was edited on Jul 29, 23:30.

You know I read a lot of happy birthday posts to Ray and a few posts implying Ray had some sort of keen intellect. After reading the past few posts, I have come to the conclusion that people really need to get out and read some quality writing.

You people want to read some decent writing? Try Lawrence Lessig.

Ray, no offense, but you’re attitude towards software patents and the “everyone does it” patent attack defense is asinine. We’re not talking about a copyright infringement of taking someone’s program and just stripping their credits and using it as your own. This is an independently developed idea that was implemented in different syntax, but it is a similar concept. This patent doesn’t even have anything to do with Creative’s core business. It’s the same sort of thing companies do to strong-arm other companies between a rock and a hard place. It is no better than patent lawyers doing research to see what the next big technology niche will be and patenting a wide range of ideas in hopes of a legal windfall later on.

While needing a way to covertly sink British ships during the American Revolution, David Bushnell designed what is regarded as the first submarine called the Turtle. The first official use was on September 6, 1776 by Ezra Lee. However, the truth is there were previous examples of submarine research that had been done. A diagram was drawn up by a British mathematician in 1578 in a creative attempt at strengthening the Royal Navy, but it was never implemented. In 1620 a Dutch inventor named Cornelius van Drebbel actually built the first recognized and tested submarine in an attempt to explore the seas in a different way. What’s the point? Cornelius van Drebbel had no knowledge of the British diagram just as David Bushnell had no knowledge of either of their earlier submarine exploits. They each had a problem or a goal they wanted to achieve and from their own inventiveness developed their own solutions. None of the three men’s designs were the same, but they all covered the same concept.

You can make the same assertions with just about anything: cars, planes, hell even filing systems. Software is built more upon past ideas or methods than any other thing I can think of aside from the art of writing itself. Don’t forget the reason Doom3 is even able to exist today is because of tens of thousands of people who pioneered programming languades, operating systems and networks and the internet and didn’t patent or copyright every damn thing in existence. It wasn’t until business saw a new way to sap the efforts of those pioneers and turn it into capital that all this came about.

Now you say what’s the big deal? First off, this isn’t a valid patent, it has been refuted as such. It’s also being used as a weapon. Id created what they thought was a better sound system yet are being forced to include what they consider an inferior sound system into their product or face huge potential losses in dealing with it legally. It costs great deals of money, time, and effort to invalidate even the worst of patents. Go look at the EFF and you’ll get an idea of what is involved. It takes as little as eight hours effort to create a bad patent. It takes an average of 18 months to invalidate a bad patent. Think of the legal fees alone.

So, when it comes out Half-life 2 or whatever big name game comes out using a method similar to this patent and Creative decides it needs a cash influx and adds a levy of $5 a sale or face a total shutdown of the title, how do you think this will affect you then? What if there happen to be six other overly broad and equally bad patents applied? That just raised the average game price $30 more.

Copying someone’s code is one thing; using an idea similar to another person’s is another.

@Ray

You are the kind of dickhead that gives fanboyz a bad name.

Creative did not do anything illegal but neither did slaveowners in the 1800, but that does not make their actions right.

I completely understand.

However, things being what they are, I do not see Creative doing anything illegal - if anything, it worked within the laws that the U.S. has.

I do think the patents can go too far, but did Creative specifically make that happen? Nope.

I do think there is a gray area, though - if there is no protection for original work, it sucks for the company that spends five years developing something...and then has another company, one that sat on the sidelines, effectively steal it and sell it for cheaper (either directly or somply out of not needing to recoup five years of investment.)

Things get even trickier when talking about capitalism in the country - the system is very favorable to companies making money at the expesne, through limitation or exclusion, of other companies.

Being generally forward looking; saying nothing about EAX in Doom 3,
Ray

-----
Friends do not let EVIL piglets play Doom 3!
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I love you, mom.

The stencil buffer is a FEATURE that has been part of openGL from the beginning. What these idiots did was patent a feature of someone elses API as if it were an invention. Corporate dickheads don't understand this because they can barely spell their own names. Trust me, no one above grunt at Creative knows WTF a stencil buffer is.

This patent, using the stencil buffer as the API was created for, is akin to nVidia patenting the ability of Audigy cards to convert digital signals into analog sound. What would be poetically just is for someone to patent a particular feature of EAX such as using EAX specifically to simulate underwater noises. No one else from that point on could simulate underwater noises with an EAX card without paying up.

God I hate shithead MBAs.

Glad that I will be able to use 3D sound in more games ,
___________________________________________________________
I don't understand this, either you have not read John Carmack's post or do not understand the technical aspects of the post.

DOOM 3 is NOT going to use Creative's EAX technology, in fact it is not going to use ANY hardware acceleration for sound.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It is a patent, just like all the other millions, billions, gazillions of patents.
___________________________________________________________

If you don't understand the difference between traditional patents and software patents, you should go here http://www.eff.org/patent/wanted/ to find out more.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Meanwhile, we could have completely crappy framerates, wait another year for the game, or have Creative try to sue id out of existence... ___________________________________________________________

The double pass algorithm which ID was going to use instead of Creative's zfail is certainly not crappy. Furthermore, it would not have taken any more time as it was already ready.

I don't understand the part about Creative suing ID as John Carmack specifically said that they will never use any patented software algorithms.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
This comment was edited on Jul 29, 21:02.

Ray, you dont seem to understand.
It is only in the USA that a software idea can be patented(though the corps are buying those laws in the EU right now...)

If id had started patenting stuff when it made wolf3d or doom or quake, there would be NO FPS's out right now that would not belong to id

It is a patent, just like all the other millions, billions, gazillions of patents.

Meanwhile, we could have completely crappy framerates, wait another year for the game, or have Creative try to sue id out of existence...

Glad that I will be able to use 3D sound in more games :D,
Ray

-----
Friends do not let EVIL piglets play Doom 3!
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I love you, mom.

vacs is probably the only other person who understand the weight of this situation.

Doom 3 didn't need EAX or any of Creative's sound cards to produce quality sound for Doom 3. There is some insight of this that made it to Blues News and other sites a few days ago:

http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=50216
http://www.bdgamer.net/?itemid=12211

So we now have EAX ADVANCED HD, a fancy label for "Use EAX since Creative now owns the piece of code that helps make Doom 3 what it is. Buy Creative Today.."

Here is my annotated version of Franco De Bonis comments on the matter. My thoughts are bold text within parenthesis:


In our earlier graphics years (1999) we developed a technique for shadowing that is optimized)Along with countless other developers). Recently "id" approached us informing us that they had used this technique(Independantly developed I might add towards the Doom III engine that Creative had no business sticking their foot in the door) in the development of DoomIII and had subsequently discovered that we owned the patent on it.

Like any company Creative owns a number of technology patents and like any company we need to ensure that our patents are protected(Protecting inovation is a double bladed sword, but when you patend an algorithm that other developers have come up on their own that counts as prior art and can be challenged). Simply allowing another company to knowingly use a patent you own weakens your position and future claims against infringement(If your goal was to monopolize the gaming market and force other game developers to comply with your standards than yes). We therefore had to find a legally acceptable way to allow id to use this technique without it being seen as an infringement(Even when Creative had no business using the algorithm for their own use. When Doom 3 didn't require EAX to produce high end 5.1 surround sound, Creative found another way of making EAX work for Doom III). The goal was the same from id's perspective(Because Id had no choice but to keep the method that word best. The method that was hand written independantly from the ground up for explicit use with the Doom III engine.)

DoomIII from the outset will not support our EAX gaming technologies and there are a number of reasons for this, the primary of which is that id decided to implement the best audio implementation they could, that would work equally well across the widest percentage of PC systems possible(In other words, John Carmack knew what he was doing, and that would exclude third party sound engines such as Creative's line of sound cards). Naturally however, being the leaders in PC audio (A great acomplishment, but since when was patenting software algorithms part of their business model?)(with no fewer than 11 PhDs in various fields of Audio[What does that have to do with a game engine?]), we truly felt that the buyers of DoomIII would be missing out on a crucial element of the gaming experience(Creative not being a major factor with Doom III decides to patent a piece of software algorithm to associate itself with Doom III and not be left out), i.e. id have undoubtedly developed a masterpiece in terms of gameplay and especially graphics, so why not complete that masterpiece with a truly incredible audio engine?(An audio engine that is not needed when the Doom III engine produces it's own quality 5.1 surround sound without the need of an exterior sound engine)

Also it does have to be said that not all multichannel wave driver implementations are equal (which is what the ID audio engine outputs to). We believe that ours is one of the more stable / reliabe performers so even without EAX implemented we firmly stand by the fact that the audio playback will sound better and gameplay will be smoother with a Sound Blaster card installed in the system, not to mention the quality aspect (108dB SNR on Audigy 2 ZS vs anywhere from 88db to 95db on host audio)(That's right. Let us not forget what this is all about.. Creative's sound cards). That means we deliver better performance with up to 10X the quality of a MB audio system(That would have been true about two or three years ago. Again the point is made that Creative's line of sound cards are the only sound cards up for the task even when the Doom III engine does all it's own work by itself)

So with this deal everybody wins(Well there is choice is there?). The world gets to play DoomIII with the optimized shadowing technique(That other developers had invented in the past and isn't something Creative brilliantly thought up of out of the blue), id did not have to pay any cash or royalties and Creative gets to add EAX into the DoomIII engine and make it available to gamers everywhere(So Creative finally gets to cash in on a game that really did not require it's patented EAX technology)

It is very funny that people are now saying "Creative blackmails id"(What else would it be? Creative and Id were not the only one's to come up with the Zfail algorithm). You only have to think about this for a nanosecond to realise that Creative was in no position to blackmail anyone. Yes, we had to take a stance to protect our patent, but had we resolutely demanded what most companies in this situation would have, what do you think would have happened?(Id Software would have had to delay the game due to the legal issues with the algorithm patent) It's very simple, id would have been forced to either pay a huge amount of cash or develop a less optimized method for shadowing that would have impacted performance and this may have caused the game to be delayed. On all counts Creative would have been publically vilified in the press. So blackmail, when id customers are our customers too?? I don't think so(yes, when you can get away with it)

So we come to John Carmack's comments on Beyond3D. It seems to be his philosophy that patents should not exist(Oh patents should exist, just not be used to secure and prevent every developers' right to invent for their creations). Certainly id are altruistic in making their game engines public (crucially after a certain period of time has elapsed), but that is a unique stance and frankly outside the scope of this discussion(Especially when you question Doom III's engine avalibilty to the public many years down the line thanks to Creative). However, as can be seen from this example Creative created a graphics technique in 1999(Evidence yet to be seen) and despite the pace of graphics development it is still applicable 5 years later(and still, for years to come). The same cannot be said for game engines - no matter how good they are when they first launch

People are just bashing Creative out of misdirected ire toward (certain?) patents and certain people are just id fanboys.

Creative uphelds its rights like nearly any other company would. On top of that, it was very nice with id.

Having six more days...,
Ray

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creative doesn't do 5.1 implimentations in games. that's up to the sound designers of a given title. creative provides EAX as a technology to the game companies and it's the developer's responsibility to impliment it if they choose.