pouët.net

has anyone already thought of implementing such a performance to render some very complex visuals in real time ?

The main problem will be to find complex visuals that are appealing enough to justify the effort.

or is the regular network latency too penalizing ?

make a (distributed computing) demo about it.

well, i guess you need precalc on a demoparty.... what if the network suddenly breaks down? :P unstable connections?

besides it could use the screens to make a side megascreen effect like at the latest assembly :D

It has been done, hasn't it? At some assembly party.

Nice idea. I suppose the easier way is making everybody to download the full demo, and one computer controlling the renderings. Raytracing looks the easier way to do it. Problems would arise from heterogeneous hardware configurations and lag... But I'm sure it would be really nice to try it in a big party.

As Calexico points out, it would be hard to find good suited visuals... It might be used for some global illumination for highly complex scenes... but... for complex scenes the kd-tree generation is a problem, so it doesn't look to be easily distributable if the scene has big changes. By other hand, if the scene is too static, it should be too boring...

I suppose that if you can get a low resolution version of a demo in realtime, let say 150x100 pixels, it might be rendered in high resolution with the distributed computer version... would it deserve the effort?

yeh, assembly had a scroller etc on those gamer screens

Mesure the power of all the clients available.
Calculate wich client will render witch frame (recalculate every X seconds)
client 1 frame 1
client 2 frame 2
clent 1 frame 3
client 3 frame 4
etc

Send out needed information every X seconds.

orrr something like that :D

whatever happened to that 'p2p'-renderfarm idea that some bloke once had.. read about it.. looks like my scepsis turn out right :)

HD Tom Thumbs and Staying Pictures please!

If this means I can't download porn during the demo compo, forget about it.

not an expert but a realtime version of tomthumb sounds fairly possible on modern hardware to me.

Assembly did a proper distributed rendering thing, not just the megascreen, in 2007 I think... IIRC, it was linked to that multiplayer Asteroid game. In the end it didn't work due to unspecified "technical problems", and they ended up showing a previously rendered version instead.

I think there was a "megascroll" over 4 or 5 Amstrad CPC screens in some BYTE party (maybe BYTE`96, i'm not sure). Each of them was synced with another one in a different way, for exemple one machine would beep and another one would sample the sound with a microphone and start his animation when detecting the beep, one would flash his screen so another one with a video digitizer would then dettect the luminosity change, and so on...

yes. in 2000 or so. I wanted to do it in Java so all systems could run it. The network seemed the limiting factor to me at that time...

the most approaching working project seems to be Electric Sheep 'screensaver' :)

It shouldn't be too hard to adapt a raytracer to do it...

it has been done.. about ten years ago at the "computer night" in paderborn, germany.

they had 512 machines in a cluster and raytracing was one of the example applications. i have seen it on telly back then and i was NOT impressed by the visual outcome of the raytracing, but the setup rocked hard.

i didn't bother do look for a video, but here are a written report in english language and a picture:

heh, let's replace povray by... heaven7 ;D