[TML] New 3d computer simulation design

[Timothy Little]

On Sun, Dec 02, 2007 at 07:16:25PM -0800, shadow at shadowgard.com wrote:
> For example, based on per bit or byte charges, it's noticeably
> cheaper to use a limited character set (Baudot or ASCII) than to use
> something like unicode.

Not really, since they losslessly compress to identical sizes in cases
where the extended range is not used.  A restricted character set is a
form of lossy compression.

Of course, text itself is a form of lossy compression.  It's just one
that is applied by humans instead of computers, and it takes years to
be taught how to apply it effectively.


> Video gets interesting. 2 hours of high quality video (DVD) uses a
> bit over 4 gig. But you can get quite acceptable results in 1 gig.
> Below that you start getting *serious* digitization artifacts.

You can get picture quality better than many analog TV receptions in
about 150 MB per hour for typical TV content.  Certainly nowhere near
DVD quality, but better than most people watched 20 years ago.

But yes, quality does decrease pretty drastically with bitrate.


> 3d moving images will only be worse...

Probably not as much worse as it might seem at first.

You can nearly always only see the surfaces of objects, and so most of
the time you only need to add a bit more data for the sides/rear of
objects and add depth information.  Better yet, depth should compress
even better than surface appearance, and would drastically improve
motion estimation algorithms.  It would likely even greatly *reduce*
data used by video formats, since failure to distinguish and re-use
data from moving objects is by far the biggest cost in bandwidth.


- Tim