12/02/2010

12-02-10 - Orphaned Tech Ideas

If you have a really good idea, you have to just go for it right away. Sometimes I have an idea, but I'm busy with something else, so I just write it down, and then try to come back to it later, but when you come back the excitement is gone. You have to pounce on that moment of inspiration.

That said, there are many things I'd like to do right now but probably have to just set aside and never come back to :

DXTC for lightmaps (and other non-photographic data). In particular there should be a way to preserve smooth data with much higher precision.

DXTC optimized for perceptual metrics. Should be easy, I'll probably do this.

cblib::hash_table entry currently always has {hash, key, data} , should change that to a functor with calls { hash(), key(), data() } so that user can choose to store them or not. (in many cases you don't need seperate key and data because the key is the data).

csv util suite. csv -> google chart, csv lsqr fit, csv eval, etc. basically matlab in command line utils that work on csv's. Would let me do processing from batch files and make html logs of compression runs and such.

Texture synthesis from examples. Fast enough for realtime so it can be used with SVT. Should be progressive. I believe this is the right way to do large world texturing. Texture synthesis from procedural/perlin noise stuff is too hard for artists to use, and doing fancy synthesis offline and then storing it ala Id just strikes me as profoundly silly.

Really good JPEG decoder. Maximum-likelihood decompression. Nosratinia and POCS. You can basically remove all blocking/ringing artifacts. This seems to me like a very useful and important piece of software and I'm surprised it doesn't exist.

Luma aided chroma upsample. Could be part of "Really good JPEG decoder" ; also useful for improving video decompression quality.

Finish lossy image comparison test and release the exe which autogens nice HTML reports.

2 comments:

Sam Martin said...

+1 for DXTC for lightmaps. I spent some time thinking about this a few years ago, but similarly didn't have enough time to make significant progress. They should be immensely compressible, particularly given a small amount of extra context info (such as chart boundaries).

However, I'd add the constraint that it should be possible to generate the compressed form efficiently - no brute force searching. The main drawback of DXT compression, at least from my point of view, is that compressing it and maintaining a high image quality takes too much time.

This actually sounds like a good masters or phd research project for someone.

cbloom said...

cblib::hash_table - {hash,key,data}

finally did this.

old rants