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Re: Contest status update


Wow.  I am just floored by what you guys have already done. Obviously, d2c
is maturing and providing some really powerful tools to those who know how
to use it. Hell, we should start a company that specializes in Dylan RAD
and tell our clients it takes a week to finish a project and that would
still give us four days to laze about :) Absolutely amazing. I'm looking
forward to the end of the contest. Keep it up guys! We all pulling for
you. 

brad

On Tue, 29 Aug 2000, Jeff Dubrule wrote:

> A brief status update on the efforts of the Dylan Hackers to kick
> booty in the ICFP 2000 programming contest
> (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/icfp/).
> 
> When we started out, Andreas and I took over the ray-tracing engine,
> and left Bruce to work on language engine.
> 
> Bruce used the d2c lexer as a starting point, and successfully
> produced a lexer for the language we had to work with.  In the
> process, he found (and fixed) a bug in the d2c lexer that made
> floating-point numbers with exponents (2.5e15) totally worthless...
> This has been fixed, not only for the contest code, but also for d2c
> :-)
> 
> After Andreas packed it in, I worked long into Saturday evening, and
> finally managed to render a white circle in the middle of a black
> background at about 7:30 Sunday morning.  After I woke up, later, I
> started work on planes (which were a lot easier) and the ability to
> draw more than one object at the same time...
> 
> Then, out of nowhere, in came Gabor Greif, who dropped a beautifully
> working compiler/interpreter combination right into our laps; it was a
> matter of an hour or two to bolt it onto the renderer, and in one
> swell foop, we could now render stuff from our very own test files.
> 
> Meanwhile, Bruce was not idle... he noticed that the performance of
> our matrix math, to put it bluntly, sucked.  A hand-unrolled rewrite
> to avoid all the GF dispatching later, and the renderer moved 40 times
> faster.
> 
> I returned to work shortly therafter and (rather quickly) got shadows
> working, after blundering headlong into the 'surface acne' problem,
> and ending up with an image that looked distinctly pointillistic...
> 
> It was at this time that we noticed that there were several weird
> visual artifacts, and after careful investigation, we found enough
> bugs in the (rewritten) vector/matrix stuff to warrant a rewrite.
> 
> After rewriting and shaking the bugs loose, we ended up with, wonder
> of wonders, something that not only worked, but duplicated the example
> images with near-pixel-perfect accuracy.  The 'near' part went away
> after we adjusted the rays to shoot through the center of each pixel,
> rather than the upper-left-corner.
> 
> Our current projects are:
> igor:  Make reflections work properly, then moving on to cones & cubes
> Bruce: Thinking about CSG stuff.
> Gabor: An simplifier and partial-evaluation system for the compiler.
> Andreas: Help us finish up later today.
> Eric: Better think of something to do so that he can get the free trip
>       to Montreal...
> 
> Feel free to join the fray!
> -igor, back to work...
>
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