The most advanced MySQL raytracer on the market

[skrebbel]

If you're unfamiliar with navigating the fabulous Pouet.net, the relevant background is in the so-called "infofile": https://www.pouet.net/prod_nfo.php?which=83222

(or click [nfo] in the right top)

[Reisen]

I really appreciate comments like this for the quick time save they offer. Thank you for this comment, it was the most useful in this post for me.

[deckar01]

> This is a raytracing engine contained in a single Mysql SELECT statement. In the beginning of the code there are a few parameters that can be modified. The scene can be specified using the @triangles and @squares parameters, but everything is explained in the comments. The whole query returns a bitmap file which can be written to the filesystem using the "INTO DUMPFILE" syntax at the end of the query, if mysql has filesystem write permissions.

> The raytracer supports shadows and reflections, which makes it, to my knowledge, the most advanced MySQL raytracer on the market right now.

https://demozoo.org/productions/268459/info/2923/

[TuringTest]

Isn't it the same code?

https://demozoo.org/productions/268459/

[benibela]

Fun fact:

The official XPath/XQuery test suite of the W3C contains an raytracer written in XQuery.

So most xml databases should support raytracing

[tpmx]

Now this is art! I think us geeks have finally hit upon the formula the high brow art people are used to. Now we just need to start a physical market so that:

a) demoscene creators can get rich

b) "art investors" can launder their money

[brokensegue]

the problem with "demoscene art" is that the final product is often only impressive if you know how it was done. really you want to display it in a way that shows off the mechanism. i guess quines don't have this problem.

[aasasd]

For better or worse, there's no scarcity in software. And thus, “we hackers do for love what others wouldn't do for money.”

[kebman]

Pushwagner printouts are sold for a ludicrous amount of money here in Oslo. No reason demo scene guys shouldn't be able to do that also.

[bane]

Anybody in North America who's interested in this kind of technical magic should consider attending one of the few demoscene parties (meetings/competitions) in the U.S. such as Demosplash [1]

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-GTf7b9PKk

If you are in Europe, especially Northern Europe, there's a ton of very well attended parties. There's even a few in Japan!

It's really for people who are extremely passionate about technology for technology's sake and like to show off a little.

[xemdetia]

This is actually a pretty neat mechanism that builds a string (including BMP magic number and header) and shoves it into a dump file, doing a ray trace per byte. I wish there was a commented/not collapsed version of it to better enjoy reading. Right now it's just a blob.

[bherrmann7]

"Released under the do whatever the fuck you want license. If you use it for commercial purposes, like rendering your Hollywood studio's new big animated A-Movie, please let me know at [email protected]. " -- https://demozoo.org/productions/268459/info/2923/

[QuercusMax]

Is there a "this is probably a bad idea; if you use this code I'm not responsible" license?

[james_s_tayler]

Is there a TL;DR legal entry for that? LMAO.

[chx]

Related: there's a codegolfing answer to draw the biohazard symbol -- in Microsoft SQL Server. It has graphics! For real. https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/191323/7733

[luismedel]

Clever (and unreadable) :-)

Here's another raytracer written in Linq (2007) https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/lukeh/2007/10/01/taking-lin...

[aitchnyu]

Now that PostGIS outputs pngs directly, we can imagine future databases handling 3d assets (select * from objects where can_fit_in(x);) and even rendering them.

https://postgis.net/docs/RT_ST_AsRaster.html

[v3nomsoup]

By the way, you can find all releases of that party here: https://demozoo.org/parties/3800/

Youtube captures of all events and competitions are here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1nWnZ0_fy8DvL13vfLD8...

And here's another production which is an insane tech-feat: https://demozoo.org/productions/268576/ Moving cubes with pathtracing, lighting and ambient sound in 64 bytes

[yellowapple]

Wherefore the fuck?

Though I'm suddenly curious if this can be done in other SQL engines, too.

[hultner]

Well, yes of course, there's probably an ripe untapped market there. Lot's of potential!

[Flockster]

This is nice. So this is one SELECT statement in which the triangles and/or spheres are defined, and the raytracing-engine is written. Then it calculates the Pixels and dumps them into a .bmp-file.

[mwexler]

It is surprising to discover that there is actually a market for multiple MySQL Raytracers, much less that this is the best of them. Clever stuff.

[sp332]

Here's one for SQLite https://observablehq.com/@pallada-92/sql-3d-engine

[jolmg]

Calling it "the most advanced [...] on the market" is probably tongue in cheek. Notice that this is being given away free and there is no mention of price anywhere.

[ivalm]

Did we break it? (site doesn't load for me)

[FridgeSeal]

Site just loads really slowly.

[pankajdoharey]

Ok so now I am curious if it could be done in other engines Cassandra,SPARQL ...

[jandrese]

Unrelated question: Is there an Ignobel for Computer Science?

[etaioinshrdlu]

I wonder if something like this might even be slightly practical using BigQuery or similar..

[nerpderp82]

UDFs are throttled, so to get max perf out of BQ one would need to make sure it was pure sql.

[m463]

So to accelerate this, do I need an SSD or a GPU or a DBA?

[PedroBatista]

Yes.

[ShteiLoups]

Many "cube"s, whatever they are

[erik_seaberg]

If you tesselate models down to triangles, you're going to want to persist them in a triplestore.