The Company:
Dynamix

The Speaker:
Mark Frohnmayer - Lead Programmer

Q1.
Tribes 2 supports OpenGL only as its graphics rendering API. We will fully utilize hardware that supports T&L through OpenGL (currently all hardware that has accelerated T&L supports it through OpenGL). We will also take advantage of specific extensions for particular hardware manufacturers (i.e. nVidia's vertex morph skinning extension).

Q2.
The advantages of letting the hardware do T&L for you are several... one, you can (obviously) pump way more triangles at the scene, while at the same time freeing the host CPU to do other computations besides transform, light and clip. The major disadvantage is simply having to cope with the rapid change and incredible gap between low and high end target systems. When Tribes 1 shipped, low end was a 200MHz Pentium running in software and high end was a 450 MHz P2 Voodoo2 SLI. Not a huge gap in terms of total triangle count. Now, our low end has moved up only a bit while the high end machine (projected by the time we ship) will probably be a 1.2 GHz CPU and a graphics card capable of churning out 20-30 million triangles with an insane fill rate.

This gap provides a serious challenge; we want to tax even the best system to produce stunning worlds, yet not leave the majority of our customers in the dust. Scalability is a pain; especially when different cards have totally different feature sets; i.e. card A has extreme fill rate, good texture handling and average triangle rate, card B has extreme triangle rate, good fill rate and mediocre texture handling, card C is good all around but has only half the texture memory. Sometimes makes me wish we were targeting a fixed platform ;)

Q3.
We've evaluated several new/emerging technologies for use in Tribes 2. It's likely that we'll utilize the T-Buffer primarily for fullscreen AA, though motion blurred projectiles might look cool... we'll have to wait and see for that. We're planning on supporting some forms of both environment mapping and bump mapping - and possibly environmental bump mapping as well.