PCPER: You’ve had choice words for what AGEIA was trying to do with the hardware physics add-in cards. Now that they are off the scene, having been purchased by NVIDIA, what are your thoughts on that past situation?
CARMACK: That was one of those things where it was a stupid plan from the start and I really hope NVIDIA didn’t pay too much because I found the whole thing disingenuous. Many people from the very beginning said their entire business strategy was to be acquired because it should have been obvious to everybody that the market for an add-in physics card was just not there. And the market proved not to be there. The whole thing about setting up a company and essentially lying to consumers, that this is a good idea, in order to cash out and be bought out by a big company, I saw the whole thing as pretty distasteful.
I thought it was a bunch of crap all along. My posts on the subject are around.
Edit: Oh, so an octree is similar to a
BSP tree, though higher-ordered. I had to deal with those in a job I had about 14 years ago. I had to program a BSP tree by hand for a tech demo because the startup company didn't even have a tool to do it with. That was great fun for over a week.
It was raycasting technology, similar to Doom's (I & II). I can sort of see that real 3D would benefit from octrees, which have 4X the splits per node, though I'm too removed from all this now to really understand the nitty gritty.
