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97-452: Mod DB is a website that focuses on general video game modding . It was founded in 2002 by Scott "INtense!" Reismanis. As of September 2015, the Mod DB site has received over 604 million views, has more than 12,500 modifications registered, and has hosted more than 108 million downloads. A spin-off website, Indie DB , was launched in 2010 and focuses on indie games and news. Scott Reismanis,

194-407: A classic website , a five-page website or a brochure website are often static websites, because they present pre-defined, static information to the user. This may include information about a company and its products and services through text, photos, animations, audio/video, and navigation menus. Static websites may still use server side includes (SSI) as an editing convenience, such as sharing

291-517: A web site ) is one or more web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server . Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, education, commerce, entertainment, or social media . Hyperlinking between web pages guides the navigation of the site, which often starts with a home page . The most-visited sites are Google , YouTube , and Facebook . All publicly-accessible websites collectively constitute

388-406: A broad sense to describe "almost everything on computers that is not text or sound". Typically, the term computer graphics refers to several different things: Today, computer graphics is widespread. Such imagery is found in and on television, newspapers, weather reports, and in a variety of medical investigations and surgical procedures. A well-constructed graph can present complex statistics in

485-895: A common menu bar across many pages. As the site's behavior to the reader is still static, this is not considered a dynamic site. A dynamic website is one that changes or customizes itself frequently and automatically. Server-side dynamic pages are generated "on the fly" by computer code that produces the HTML (CSS are responsible for appearance and thus, are static files). There are a wide range of software systems, such as CGI , Java Servlets and Java Server Pages (JSP), Active Server Pages and ColdFusion (CFML) that are available to generate dynamic Web systems and dynamic sites . Various Web application frameworks and Web template systems are available for general-use programming languages like Perl , PHP , Python and Ruby to make it faster and easier to create complex dynamic websites. A site can display

582-416: A competitor to Valve 's Steam . The purpose of Mod DB is to list the mods, files, tutorials and information of any games that are capable of being modded with user-made content. Community involvement is strongly encouraged, and any game mod with a website is allowed to post a screenshot gallery, news, and requests for help. Scott's intentions, from the beginning, were to get the community heavily involved in

679-513: A critical and commercial success of nine-figure magnitude. The studio to invent the programmable shader would go on to have many animated hits, and its work on prerendered video animation is still considered an industry leader and research trail breaker. In video games, in 1992, Virtua Racing , running on the Sega Model 1 arcade system board , laid the foundations for fully 3D racing games and popularized real-time 3D polygonal graphics among

776-520: A discipline until the 1950s and the post- World War II period – during which time the discipline emerged from a combination of both pure university and laboratory academic research into more advanced computers and the United States military 's further development of technologies like radar , aviation , and rocketry developed during the war. New kinds of displays were needed to process the wealth of information resulting from such projects, leading to

873-463: A display scope image of a Disney cartoon character. Electronics pioneer Hewlett-Packard went public in 1957 after incorporating the decade prior, and established strong ties with Stanford University through its founders, who were alumni . This began the decades-long transformation of the southern San Francisco Bay Area into the world's leading computer technology hub – now known as Silicon Valley . The field of computer graphics developed with

970-423: A display scope. One of the first interactive video games to feature recognizable, interactive graphics – Tennis for Two – was created for an oscilloscope by William Higinbotham to entertain visitors in 1958 at Brookhaven National Laboratory and simulated a tennis match. In 1959, Douglas T. Ross , while working at MIT on transforming mathematic statements into computer generated 3D machine tool vectors, created

1067-548: A feature-length motion picture using computer graphics – a goal he would achieve two decades later after his founding role in Pixar . In the same class, Fred Parke created an animation of his wife's face. The two animations were included in the 1976 feature film Futureworld . As the UU computer graphics laboratory was attracting people from all over, John Warnock was another of those early pioneers; he later founded Adobe Systems and created

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1164-515: A form that is easier to understand and interpret. In the media "such graphs are used to illustrate papers, reports, theses", and other presentation material. Many tools have been developed to visualize data. Computer-generated imagery can be categorized into several different types: two dimensional (2D), three dimensional (3D), and animated graphics. As technology has improved, 3D computer graphics have become more common, but 2D computer graphics are still widely used. Computer graphics has emerged as

1261-593: A great deal of founding research to the field and taught several students who would grow to found several of the industry's most important companies – namely Pixar , Silicon Graphics , and Adobe Systems . Tom Stockham led the image processing group at UU which worked closely with the computer graphics lab. One of these students was Edwin Catmull . Catmull had just come from The Boeing Company and had been working on his degree in physics. Growing up on Disney , Catmull loved animation yet quickly discovered that he did not have

1358-447: A high-water mark for the field during the decade. The 1980s is also called the golden era of videogames ; millions-selling systems from Atari , Nintendo and Sega , among other companies, exposed computer graphics for the first time to a new, young, and impressionable audience – as did MS-DOS -based personal computers, Apple IIs , Macs , and Amigas , all of which also allowed users to program their own games if skilled enough. For

1455-405: A highly popular tool for computer graphics among graphic design studios and businesses. Modern computers, dating from the 1980s, often use graphical user interfaces (GUI) to present data and information with symbols, icons and pictures, rather than text. Graphics are one of the five key elements of multimedia technology. In the field of realistic rendering, Japan 's Osaka University developed

1552-474: A large series of static pages. Early websites had only text, and soon after, images. Web browser plug-ins were then used to add audio, video, and interactivity (such as for a rich Web application that mirrors the complexity of a desktop application like a word processor). Examples of such plug-ins are Microsoft Silverlight , Adobe Flash Player , Adobe Shockwave Player , and Java SE . HTML 5 includes provisions for audio and video without plugins. JavaScript

1649-406: A leading developer of graphics boards in this decade, creating a "duopoly" in the field which exists this day. CGI became ubiquitous in earnest during this era. Video games and CGI cinema had spread the reach of computer graphics to the mainstream by the late 1990s and continued to do so at an accelerated pace in the 2000s. CGI was also adopted en masse for television advertisements widely in

1746-417: A light pen, Sketchpad allowed one to draw simple shapes on the computer screen, save them and even recall them later. The light pen itself had a small photoelectric cell in its tip. This cell emitted an electronic pulse whenever it was placed in front of a computer screen and the screen's electron gun fired directly at it. By simply timing the electronic pulse with the current location of the electron gun, it

1843-955: A milestone confirmed by Netcraft in its October 2014 Web Server Survey and that Internet Live Stats was the first to announce—as attested by this tweet from the inventor of the World Wide Web himself, Tim Berners-Lee—the number of websites in the world have subsequently declined, reverting to a level below 1 billion. This is due to the monthly fluctuations in the count of inactive websites. The number of websites continued growing to over 1 billion by March 2016 and has continued growing since. Netcraft Web Server Survey in January 2020 reported that there are 1,295,973,827 websites and in April 2021 reported that there are 1,212,139,815 sites across 10,939,637 web-facing computers, and 264,469,666 unique domains. An estimated 85 percent of all websites are inactive. A static website

1940-459: A modding website. The website became defunct in December 2001, when its network was shut down after its hosting service, Playnet, filed for bankruptcy. Reismanis was motivated to start a new website by the difficulty of searching for mods on the then-dominant search engine, AltaVista , much less mods released to the public. He began Mod DB's development in January 2002, following IMDb 's structure in

2037-420: A model of a car, one could change the size of the tires without affecting the rest of the car. It could stretch the body of car without deforming the tires. The phrase "computer graphics" has been credited to William Fetter , a graphic designer for Boeing in 1960. Fetter in turn attributed it to Verne Hudson, also at Boeing. In 1961 another student at MIT, Steve Russell , created another important title in

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2134-407: A necessity for advanced work in the field, providing considerable complexity in manipulating pixels , vertices , and textures on a per-element basis, and countless possible effects. Their shader languages HLSL and GLSL are active fields of research and development. Physically based rendering or PBR, which implements many maps and performs advanced calculation to simulate real optic light flow,

2231-493: A permissive approach to what content is allowed on the website, but the types of content forbidden by its terms of use include pornographic, defamatory, and obscene content, as well as material that incites crime or hatred, violates intellectual property law under the terms of the copyright law of Australia and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act , or otherwise "brings [the website] into disrepute". Nevertheless,

2328-552: A revolution in the publishing world with his PostScript page description language. Adobe would go on later to create the industry standard photo editing software in Adobe Photoshop and a prominent movie industry special effects program in Adobe After Effects . James Clark was also there; he later founded Silicon Graphics , a maker of advanced rendering systems that would dominate the field of high-end graphics until

2425-565: A screen. It was the first consumer computer graphics product. David C. Evans was director of engineering at Bendix Corporation 's computer division from 1953 to 1962, after which he worked for the next five years as a visiting professor at Berkeley. There he continued his interest in computers and how they interfaced with people. In 1966, the University of Utah recruited Evans to form a computer science program, and computer graphics quickly became his primary interest. This new department would become

2522-458: A separate and very powerful chip is used in parallel processing with a CPU to optimize graphics. The decade also saw computer graphics applied to many additional professional markets, including location-based entertainment and education with the E&;S Digistar, vehicle design, vehicle simulation, and chemistry. The 1990s' highlight was the emergence of 3D modeling on a mass scale and an rise in

2619-432: A specialized barrel shifter circuit made from discrete chips to help their Intel 8080 microprocessor animate their framebuffer graphics. The 1980s began to see the commercialization of computer graphics. As the home computer proliferated, a subject which had previously been an academics-only discipline was adopted by a much larger audience, and the number of computer graphics developers increased significantly. In

2716-433: A square for example, they do not have to worry about drawing four lines perfectly to form the edges of the box. One can simply specify that they want to draw a box, and then specify the location and size of the box. The software will then construct a perfect box, with the right dimensions and at the right location. Another example is that Sutherland's software modeled objects – not just a picture of objects. In other words, with

2813-400: A sub-field of computer science which studies methods for digitally synthesizing and manipulating visual content. Over the past decade, other specialized fields have been developed like information visualization , and scientific visualization more concerned with "the visualization of three dimensional phenomena (architectural, meteorological, medical, biological , etc.), where the emphasis

2910-463: A suitably high-end system may simulate photorealism to the untrained eye. Texture mapping has matured into a multistage process with many layers; generally, it is not uncommon to implement texture mapping, bump mapping or isosurfaces or normal mapping , lighting maps including specular highlights and reflection techniques, and shadow volumes into one rendering engine using shaders , which are maturing considerably. Shaders are now very nearly

3007-484: A traditional 'best mod' winner. Notable winners include Garry's Mod for Half-Life 2 in 2005, Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat for Half-Life 2 in 2007, Black Mesa for Half-Life in 2012, and Brutal Doom for Doom in 2017. Similarly, Mod DB's Mod Hall of Fame retrospectively reviews mods and inducts what it judges to be the greatest mods of the year of their release. Inductees include PlayerUnknown's Battle Royale for ARMA 3 in 2014. Indie DB

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3104-524: A website developer from Melbourne , Australia, first pursued web development as a hobby, creating two websites dedicated to video games. Afterwards, he purchased the ChaosRealm.com domain and formed the Realm Network. The network comprised over twenty websites, one of which was Mod DB's predecessor, ModRealm. Launched in 1998, ModRealm was initially dedicated to Counter-Strike cheat codes before becoming

3201-584: A wider audience in the video game industry . The Sega Model 2 in 1993 and Sega Model 3 in 1996 subsequently pushed the boundaries of commercial, real-time 3D graphics. Back on the PC, Wolfenstein 3D , Doom and Quake , three of the first massively popular 3D first-person shooter games, were released by id Software to critical and popular acclaim during this decade using a rendering engine innovated primarily by John Carmack . The Sony PlayStation , Sega Saturn , and Nintendo 64 , among other consoles, sold in

3298-483: Is also built into most modern web browsers, and allows for website creators to send code to the web browser that instructs it how to interactively modify page content and communicate with the web server if needed. The browser's internal representation of the content is known as the Document Object Model (DOM). WebGL (Web Graphics Library) is a modern JavaScript API for rendering interactive 3D graphics without

3395-539: Is an active research area as well, along with advanced areas like ambient occlusion , subsurface scattering , Rayleigh scattering , photon mapping , ray-tracing and many others. Experiments into the processing power required to provide graphics in real time at ultra-high-resolution modes like 4K Ultra HD begun, though beyond reach of all but the highest-end hardware. In cinema, most animated movies are CGI now; many animated CGI films are made per year , but few, if any, attempt photorealism due to continuing fears of

3492-724: Is an offshoot of Mod DB launched in June 2010. It is dedicated to indie gaming and serves as a repository for those games. Like Mod DB, the website hosts an annual competition for the best indie game of the year, with the games being voted on in categories and overall. Also like Mod DB, the nominees are selected by the site's editors and voted on by its readers. Winners of the Indie of the Year Awards include Minecraft by Mojang in 2010, RimWorld by Ludeon Studios in 2016 and Ion Fury by Voidpoint in 2019. Website A website (also written as

3589-516: Is generally non-interactive. This type of website usually displays the same information to all visitors. Similar to handing out a printed brochure to customers or clients, a static website will generally provide consistent, standard information for an extended period of time. Although the website owner may make updates periodically, it is a manual process to edit the text, photos, and other content and may require basic website design skills and software. Simple forms or marketing examples of websites, such as

3686-493: Is on realistic renderings of volumes, surfaces, illumination sources, and so forth, perhaps with a dynamic (time) component". The precursor sciences to the development of modern computer graphics were the advances in electrical engineering , electronics , and television that took place during the first half of the twentieth century. Screens could display art since the Lumiere brothers ' use of mattes to create special effects for

3783-484: Is one that has Web pages stored on the server in the format that is sent to a client Web browser. It is primarily coded in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML); Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to control appearance beyond basic HTML. Images are commonly used to create the desired appearance and as part of the main content. Audio or video might also be considered "static" content if it plays automatically or

3880-488: The GPGPU technique to pass large amounts of data bidirectionally between a GPU and CPU was invented; speeding up analysis on many kinds of bioinformatics and molecular biology experiments. The technique has also been used for Bitcoin mining and has applications in computer vision . In the 2010s, CGI has been nearly ubiquitous in video, pre-rendered graphics are nearly scientifically photorealistic , and real-time graphics on

3977-573: The LINKS-1 Computer Graphics System , a supercomputer that used up to 257 Zilog Z8001 microprocessors , in 1982, for the purpose of rendering realistic 3D computer graphics . According to the Information Processing Society of Japan: "The core of 3D image rendering is calculating the luminance of each pixel making up a rendered surface from the given viewpoint, light source , and object position. The LINKS-1 system

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4074-931: The Web 2.0 community of sites and allow for interactivity between the site owner and site visitors or users. Static sites serve or capture information but do not allow engagement with the audience or users directly. Some websites are informational or produced by enthusiasts or for personal use or entertainment. Many websites do aim to make money using one or more business models, including: Computer graphics Some topics in computer graphics include user interface design , sprite graphics , rendering , ray tracing , geometry processing , computer animation , vector graphics , 3D modeling , shaders , GPU design, implicit surfaces , visualization , scientific computing , image processing , computational photography , scientific visualization , computational geometry and computer vision , among others. The overall methodology depends heavily on

4171-590: The World Wide Web . There are also private websites that can only be accessed on a private network , such as a company's internal website for its employees. Users can access websites on a range of devices, including desktops , laptops , tablets , and smartphones . The app used on these devices is called a web browser . The World Wide Web (WWW) was created in 1989 by the British CERN computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee . On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that

4268-466: The arcades , advances were made in commercial, real-time 3D graphics. In 1988, the first dedicated real-time 3D graphics boards were introduced for arcades, with the Namco System 21 and Taito Air System. On the professional side, Evans & Sutherland and SGI developed 3D raster graphics hardware that directly influenced the later single-chip graphics processing unit (GPU), a technology where

4365-673: The World Wide Web would be free to use for anyone, contributing to the immense growth of the Web. Before the introduction of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), other protocols such as File Transfer Protocol and the gopher protocol were used to retrieve individual files from a server. These protocols offer a simple directory structure in which the user navigates and where they choose files to download. Documents were most often presented as plain text files without formatting or were encoded in word processor formats. While "web site"

4462-569: The attitude of a satellite could be altered as it orbits the Earth. He created the animation on an IBM 7090 mainframe computer. Also at BTL, Ken Knowlton , Frank Sinden, Ruth A. Weiss and Michael Noll started working in the computer graphics field. Sinden created a film called Force, Mass and Motion illustrating Newton's laws of motion in operation. Around the same time, other scientists were creating computer graphics to illustrate their research. At Lawrence Radiation Laboratory , Nelson Max created

4559-557: The box office in this field. The Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within , released in 2001, was the first fully computer-generated feature film to use photorealistic CGI characters and be fully made with motion capture. The film was not a box-office success, however. Some commentators have suggested this may be partly because the lead CGI characters had facial features which fell into the " uncanny valley ". Other animated films like The Polar Express drew attention at this time as well. Star Wars also resurfaced with its prequel trilogy and

4656-437: The creation and development of the website. To this end, the most active members were chosen as moderators and administrators . The core staff generally remain the same, while lower positions are heavily rotated among trainee moderators, and administrator candidates. The site's staff mostly act as chaperones or librarians, keeping appropriate content available to the public and featuring the more exceptional content. Mod DB has

4753-407: The current state of a dialogue between users, monitor a changing situation, or provide information in some way personalized to the requirements of the individual user. For example, when the front page of a news site is requested, the code running on the webserver might combine stored HTML fragments with news stories retrieved from a database or another website via RSS to produce a page that includes

4850-587: The development of computer graphics as a discipline. Early projects like the Whirlwind and SAGE Projects introduced the CRT as a viable display and interaction interface and introduced the light pen as an input device . Douglas T. Ross of the Whirlwind SAGE system performed a personal experiment in which he wrote a small program that captured the movement of his finger and displayed its vector (his traced name) on

4947-453: The development of the Gouraud shading and Blinn–Phong shading models, allowing graphics to move beyond a "flat" look to a look more accurately portraying depth. Jim Blinn also innovated further in 1978 by introducing bump mapping , a technique for simulating uneven surfaces, and the predecessor to many more advanced kinds of mapping used today. The modern videogame arcade as is known today

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5044-497: The earliest films dating from 1895, but such displays were limited and not interactive. The first cathode ray tube , the Braun tube , was invented in 1897 – it in turn would permit the oscilloscope and the military control panel – the more direct precursors of the field, as they provided the first two-dimensional electronic displays that responded to programmatic or user input. Nevertheless, computer graphics remained relatively unknown as

5141-417: The early 1980s, metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) very-large-scale integration (VLSI) technology led to the availability of 16-bit central processing unit (CPU) microprocessors and the first graphics processing unit (GPU) chips, which began to revolutionize computer graphics, enabling high-resolution graphics for computer graphics terminals as well as personal computer (PC) systems. NEC 's μPD7220

5238-416: The early 1990s. A major advance in 3D computer graphics was created at UU by these early pioneers – hidden surface determination . In order to draw a representation of a 3D object on the screen, the computer must determine which surfaces are "behind" the object from the viewer's perspective, and thus should be "hidden" when the computer creates (or renders) the image. The 3D Core Graphics System (or Core )

5335-600: The early decade with occasional significant competing presence from ATI . As the decade progressed, even low-end machines usually contained a 3D-capable GPU of some kind as Nvidia and AMD both introduced low-priced chipsets and continued to dominate the market. Shaders which had been introduced in the 1980s to perform specialized processing on the GPU would by the end of the decade become supported on most consumer hardware, speeding up graphics considerably and allowing for greatly improved texture and shading in computer graphics via

5432-680: The effects continued to set a bar for CGI in film. In videogames , the Sony PlayStation 2 and 3 , the Microsoft Xbox line of consoles, and offerings from Nintendo such as the GameCube maintained a large following, as did the Windows PC . Marquee CGI-heavy titles like the series of Grand Theft Auto , Assassin's Creed , Final Fantasy , BioShock , Kingdom Hearts , Mirror's Edge and dozens of others continued to approach photorealism , grow

5529-450: The emergence of computer graphics hardware. Further advances in computing led to greater advancements in interactive computer graphics . In 1959, the TX-2 computer was developed at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory . The TX-2 integrated a number of new man-machine interfaces. A light pen could be used to draw sketches on the computer using Ivan Sutherland 's revolutionary Sketchpad software . Using

5626-446: The end of the decade, the GPU would begin its rise to the prominence it still enjoys today. The field began to see the first rendered graphics that could truly pass as photorealistic to the untrained eye (though they could not yet do so with a trained CGI artist) and 3D graphics became far more popular in gaming , multimedia , and animation . At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of

5723-485: The field of computer graphics. By 1973, the first annual SIGGRAPH conference was held, which has become one of the focuses of the organization. SIGGRAPH has grown in size and importance as the field of computer graphics has expanded over time. Subsequently, a number of breakthroughs in the field occurred at the University of Utah in the 1970s, which had hired Ivan Sutherland . He was paired with David C. Evans to teach an advanced computer graphics class, which contributed

5820-472: The films Flow of a Viscous Fluid and Propagation of Shock Waves in a Solid Form . Boeing Aircraft created a film called Vibration of an Aircraft . Also sometime in the early 1960s, automobiles would also provide a boost through the early work of Pierre Bézier at Renault , who used Paul de Casteljau 's curves – now called Bézier curves after Bézier's work in the field – to develop 3d modeling techniques for Renault car bodies. These curves would form

5917-489: The first ray casting algorithm, the first of a class of ray tracing -based rendering algorithms that have since become fundamental in achieving photorealism in graphics by modeling the paths that rays of light take from a light source, to surfaces in a scene, and into the camera. In 1969, the ACM initiated A Special Interest Group on Graphics ( SIGGRAPH ) which organizes conferences , graphics standards , and publications within

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6014-498: The first shaders – small programs designed specifically to do shading as a separate algorithm – were developed by Pixar , which had already spun off from Industrial Light & Magic as a separate entity – though the public would not see the results of such technological progress until the next decade. In the late 1980s, Silicon Graphics (SGI) computers were used to create some of the first fully computer-generated short films at Pixar , and Silicon Graphics machines were considered

6111-402: The foundation for much curve-modeling work in the field, as curves – unlike polygons – are mathematically complex entities to draw and model well. It was not long before major corporations started taking an interest in computer graphics. TRW , Lockheed-Georgia , General Electric and Sperry Rand are among the many companies that were getting started in computer graphics by the mid-1960s. IBM

6208-565: The history of video games , Spacewar! Written for the DEC PDP-1, Spacewar was an instant success and copies started flowing to other PDP-1 owners and eventually DEC got a copy. The engineers at DEC used it as a diagnostic program on every new PDP-1 before shipping it. The sales force picked up on this quickly enough and when installing new units, would run the "world's first video game" for their new customers. (Higginbotham's Tennis For Two had beaten Spacewar by almost three years, but it

6305-480: The intelligence in the workstation, rather than continuing to rely on central mainframe and minicomputers . Typical of the early move to high-resolution computer graphics, intelligent workstations for the computer-aided engineering market were the Orca 1000, 2000 and 3000 workstations, developed by Orcatech of Ottawa, a spin-off from Bell-Northern Research , and led by David Pearson, an early workstation pioneer. The Orca 3000

6402-399: The late 1990s and 2000s, and so became familiar to a massive audience. The continued rise and increasing sophistication of the graphics processing unit were crucial to this decade, and 3D rendering capabilities became a standard feature as 3D-graphics GPUs became considered a necessity for desktop computer makers to offer. The Nvidia GeForce line of graphics cards dominated the market in

6499-423: The later films of the original trilogy. Two other pieces of video would also outlast the era as historically relevant: Dire Straits ' iconic, near-fully-CGI video for their song " Money for Nothing " in 1985, which popularized CGI among music fans of that era, and a scene from Young Sherlock Holmes the same year featuring the first fully CGI character in a feature movie (an animated stained-glass knight ). In 1988,

6596-435: The latest information. Dynamic sites can be interactive by using HTML forms , storing and reading back browser cookies , or by creating a series of pages that reflect the previous history of clicks. Another example of dynamic content is when a retail website with a database of media products allows a user to input a search request, e.g. for the keyword Beatles . In response, the content of the Web page will spontaneously change

6693-685: The mid-1980s. In 1984, Hitachi released the ARTC HD63484, the first complementary MOS (CMOS) GPU. It was capable of displaying high-resolution in color mode and up to 4K resolution in monochrome mode, and it was used in a number of graphics cards and terminals during the late 1980s. In 1986, TI introduced the TMS34010 , the first fully programmable MOS graphics processor. Computer graphics terminals during this decade became increasingly intelligent, semi-standalone and standalone workstations. Graphics and application processing were increasingly migrated to

6790-572: The millions and popularized 3D graphics for home gamers. Certain late-1990s first-generation 3D titles became seen as influential in popularizing 3D graphics among console users, such as platform games Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time , and early 3D fighting games like Virtua Fighter , Battle Arena Toshinden , and Tekken . Technology and algorithms for rendering continued to improve greatly. In 1996, Krishnamurty and Levoy invented normal mapping – an improvement on Jim Blinn's bump mapping . 1999 saw Nvidia release

6887-439: The most important research centers in graphics for nearly a decade thereafter, eventually producing some of the most important pioneers in the field. There Sutherland perfected his HMD; twenty years later, NASA would re-discover his techniques in their virtual reality research. At Utah, Sutherland and Evans were highly sought after consultants by large companies, but they were frustrated at the lack of graphics hardware available at

6984-524: The nineties were created, in France, the very first computer graphics TV series: La Vie des bêtes by studio Mac Guff Ligne (1988), Les Fables Géométriques (1989–1991) by studio Fantôme, and Quarxs , the first HDTV computer graphics series by Maurice Benayoun and François Schuiten (studio Z-A production, 1990–1993). In film, Pixar began its serious commercial rise in this era under Edwin Catmull , with its first major film release, in 1995 – Toy Story –

7081-482: The process. The website was launched as Mod Database on 8 June of the same year. It differed from his earlier websites in that its articles were managed by the community, not only the website's founder. Mod DB rapidly expanded its viewership and database size. In 2006, the Mod DB team launched Addon DB, whose aim was to list additional content for games not applicable under the category of game modifications. This includes models, skins and maps. Just one year into service, it

7178-442: The quality of CGI generally. Home computers became able to take on rendering tasks that previously had been limited to workstations costing thousands of dollars; as 3D modelers became available for home systems, the popularity of Silicon Graphics workstations declined and powerful Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh machines running Autodesk products like 3D Studio or other home rendering software ascended in importance. By

7275-507: The seminal GeForce 256 , the first home video card billed as a graphics processing unit or GPU, which in its own words contained "integrated transform , lighting , triangle setup / clipping , and rendering engines". By the end of the decade, computers adopted common frameworks for graphics processing such as DirectX and OpenGL . Since then, computer graphics have only become more detailed and realistic, due to more powerful graphics hardware and 3D modeling software . AMD also became

7372-474: The talent for drawing. Now Catmull (along with many others) saw computers as the natural progression of animation and they wanted to be part of the revolution. The first computer animation that Catmull saw was his own. He created an animation of his hand opening and closing. He also pioneered texture mapping to paint textures on three-dimensional models in 1974, now considered one of the fundamental techniques in 3D modeling . It became one of his goals to produce

7469-543: The time, so they started formulating a plan to start their own company. In 1968, Dave Evans and Ivan Sutherland founded the first computer graphics hardware company, Evans & Sutherland . While Sutherland originally wanted the company to be located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Salt Lake City was instead chosen due to its proximity to the professors' research group at the University of Utah. Also in 1968 Arthur Appel described

7566-521: The underlying sciences of geometry , optics , physics , and perception . Computer graphics is responsible for displaying art and image data effectively and meaningfully to the consumer. It is also used for processing image data received from the physical world, such as photo and video content. Computer graphics development has had a significant impact on many types of media and has revolutionized animation , movies , advertising , and video games , in general. The term computer graphics has been used in

7663-522: The use of plug-ins. It allows interactive content such as 3D animations, visualizations and video explainers to presented users in the most intuitive way. A 2010-era trend in websites called "responsive design" has given the best viewing experience as it provides a device-based layout for users. These websites change their layout according to the device or mobile platform, thus giving a rich user experience. Websites can be divided into two broad categories—static and interactive. Interactive sites are part of

7760-549: The video game industry and impress, until that industry's revenues became comparable to those of movies. Microsoft made a decision to expose DirectX more easily to the independent developer world with the XNA program, but it was not a success. DirectX itself remained a commercial success, however. OpenGL continued to mature as well, and it and DirectX improved greatly; the second-generation shader languages HLSL and GLSL began to be popular in this decade. In scientific computing ,

7857-419: The way it looked before, and will then display a list of Beatles products like CDs, DVDs, and books. Dynamic HTML uses JavaScript code to instruct the Web browser how to interactively modify the page contents. One way to simulate a certain type of dynamic website while avoiding the performance loss of initiating the dynamic engine on a per-user or per-connection basis is to periodically automatically regenerate

7954-410: The website received mainstream media attention when in early 2011 it hosted School Shooter: North American Tour 2012 , a Half-Life 2 mod in which the player assumes the role of a school student with the goal of murdering as many people as possible before being stopped by police and SWAT members. The mod's premise led to a spate of mail accusing the website of being involved in the project, prompting

8051-570: The website to shut it down in March. Mod DB's Mod of the Year competition, the Golden Spanner awards, aim to set the industry standard in awarding inventive and high-quality mods. Mods are chosen via a community vote and are then reviewed by staff to produce the final list of winners. The competition aims to encourage all fields of modding, with different categories such as graphics and gameplay , as well as

8148-448: The widespread adoption of normal mapping , bump mapping , and a variety of other techniques allowing the simulation of a great amount of detail. Computer graphics used in films and video games gradually began to be realistic to the point of entering the uncanny valley . CGI movies proliferated, with traditional animated cartoon films like Ice Age and Madagascar as well as numerous Pixar offerings like Finding Nemo dominating

8245-418: The world's primary research center for computer graphics through the 1970s. Also, in 1966, Ivan Sutherland continued to innovate at MIT when he invented the first computer-controlled head-mounted display (HMD). It displayed two separate wireframe images, one for each eye. This allowed the viewer to see the computer scene in stereoscopic 3D . The heavy hardware required for supporting the display and tracker

8342-423: Was almost unknown outside of a research or academic setting.) At around the same time (1961–1962) in the University of Cambridge, Elizabeth Waldram wrote code to display radio-astronomy maps on a cathode ray tube. E. E. Zajac, a scientist at Bell Telephone Laboratory (BTL), created a film called "Simulation of a two-giro gravity attitude control system" in 1963. In this computer-generated film, Zajac showed how

8439-484: Was based on the 16-bit Motorola 68000 microprocessor and AMD bit-slice processors, and had Unix as its operating system. It was targeted squarely at the sophisticated end of the design engineering sector. Artists and graphic designers began to see the personal computer, particularly the Amiga and Macintosh , as a serious design tool, one that could save time and draw more accurately than other methods. The Macintosh remains

8536-409: Was birthed in the 1970s, with the first arcade games using real-time 2D sprite graphics. Pong in 1972 was one of the first hit arcade cabinet games. Speed Race in 1974 featured sprites moving along a vertically scrolling road. Gun Fight in 1975 featured human-looking animated characters, while Space Invaders in 1978 featured a large number of animated figures on screen; both used

8633-493: Was called the Sword of Damocles because of the potential danger if it were to fall upon the wearer. After receiving his Ph.D. from MIT, Sutherland became Director of Information Processing at ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), and later became a professor at Harvard. In 1967 Sutherland was recruited by Evans to join the computer science program at the University of Utah – a development which would turn that department into one of

8730-500: Was developed in 1986 – an important step towards implementing global illumination , which is necessary to pursue photorealism in computer graphics. The continuing popularity of Star Wars and other science fiction franchises were relevant in cinematic CGI at this time, as Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic became known as the "go-to" house by many other studios for topnotch computer graphics in film. Important advances in chroma keying ("bluescreening", etc.) were made for

8827-463: Was developed to realize an image rendering methodology in which each pixel could be parallel processed independently using ray tracing . By developing a new software methodology specifically for high-speed image rendering, LINKS-1 was able to rapidly render highly realistic images." The LINKS-1 was the world's most powerful computer , as of 1984. Also in the field of realistic rendering, the general rendering equation of David Immel and James Kajiya

8924-432: Was easy to pinpoint exactly where the pen was on the screen at any given moment. Once that was determined, the computer could then draw a cursor at that location. Sutherland seemed to find the perfect solution for many of the graphics problems he faced. Even today, many standards of computer graphics interfaces got their start with this early Sketchpad program. One example of this is in drawing constraints. If one wants to draw

9021-465: Was merged into Mod DB. Reismanis was an information technology consultant at Accenture and intended to keep Mod DB his hobby, but he left the firm to found DesuraNET as the website's hosting company, citing the expense of running the website and his recollection of IGN 's 2006 attempt to acquire it. Mod DB was integrated into DesuraNET's Desura , which was a digital distribution service that focused on indie games . The service opened in April 2010 as

9118-527: Was quick to respond to this interest by releasing the IBM 2250 graphics terminal, the first commercially available graphics computer. Ralph Baer , a supervising engineer at Sanders Associates , came up with a home video game in 1966 that was later licensed to Magnavox and called the Odyssey . While very simplistic, and requiring fairly inexpensive electronic parts, it allowed the player to move points of light around on

9215-560: Was the first GPU, fabricated on a fully integrated NMOS VLSI chip . It supported up to 1024x1024 resolution , and laid the foundations for the emerging PC graphics market. It was used in a number of graphics cards , and was licensed for clones such as the Intel 82720, the first of Intel's graphics processing units . MOS memory also became cheaper in the early 1980s, enabling the development of affordable framebuffer memory, notably video RAM (VRAM) introduced by Texas Instruments (TI) in

9312-522: Was the first graphical standard to be developed. A group of 25 experts of the ACM Special Interest Group SIGGRAPH developed this "conceptual framework". The specifications were published in 1977, and it became a foundation for many future developments in the field. Also in the 1970s, Henri Gouraud , Jim Blinn and Bui Tuong Phong contributed to the foundations of shading in CGI via

9409-845: Was the original spelling (sometimes capitalized "Web site", since "Web" is a proper noun when referring to the World Wide Web), this variant has become rarely used, and "website" has become the standard spelling. All major style guides, such as The Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook , have reflected this change. In February 2009, Netcraft , an Internet monitoring company that has tracked Web growth since 1995, reported that there were 215,675,903 websites with domain names and content on them in 2009, compared to just 19,732 websites in August 1995. After reaching 1 billion websites in September 2014,

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