Hello! I want to share my idea about unusual vvvv usage.
I am not very experienced vvvv/gpu developer, and would greatly appreciate opinions about possibilities of the following idea:
Use vvvv as easy interface to GPU programming, and write (mostly in hlsl) “massively multiplayer web game” engine.
E.g. some cellular-based games, where userstate data stored (in textures&) and uploaded in 3d-card RAM. The userstates data could be 2D, 3D, or multi-D, and it seems that GPU will easy compute next gamestep very fast.
The most important thing is to use shader-oriented (vector and matrix) mathematics to compute specific game interactions and dependencies, where changed state of some user will reflect (and refract) in states of neighbours, territories, gameclans, dimensions and layers.
What do you think? I seem (dream) if this possible, many interesting unusual games with uncommon logic will be…
hello, for such a project you should understand exacly how data is handled and processed in the GPU, see this page. then i would programm shaders like Game Of Life or gregsns wave shader to get an idea how states/feedback can be used.
a major problem is, that the only data you get back from the GPU is a texture.
could you define where the gpu would be needed?
the cpu is a much more effective (and quicker) machine for the vast majority of game related tasks, apart from physics and graphics.
As such you’d be best off making most of the game in nodes and just doing the eye candy in shaders, or perhaps writing a shader for the most cpu intensive bits.
gpus aren’t very good at things like recursion, switches and loops when you’ve got a lot of stuff going on, and there’s very limited memory accesible by each ‘pixel’ of data, so you’d definitely have your work cut out trying to run general tasks on the gpu. See gpgpu for hints on doing work on the gpu that the gpu wasn’t designed for.
One last thing is that vvvv doesn’t really support multi-pass shaders (there are very simple workarounds but they limit the scope and performance).
