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thebookofshaders/09/notes.md

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nicolas

  • after line 23, i've added the following:

Once multiplied by 3, instead of ranging from 0 à 1 on the X and Y axes, st will range from 0 to 3 on X and Y axes. If we use st * 3.0 as such, its value will become greater than 1 and we won't be able to use it like we did so far ; it will not be normalised between 0 and 1 anymore. If we only use the fractional part, we will fall back to a normalised space as the values returned by fract() is alwys comprised between 0 and 1. Here's an example of the respective values of st, st * 3 and fract( st * 3 ).

first block
st = 0.00 | st * 3 = 0.00 | fract( st * 3 ) = 0.00
st = 0.10 | st * 3 = 0.30 | fract( st * 3 ) = 0.30
st = 0.20 | st * 3 = 0.60 | fract( st * 3 ) = 0.60
st = 0.30 | st * 3 = 0.90 | fract( st * 3 ) = 0.90
second block
st = 0.40 | st * 3 = 1.20 | fract( st * 3 ) = 0.20
st = 0.50 | st * 3 = 1.50 | fract( st * 3 ) = 0.50
st = 0.60 | st * 3 = 1.80 | fract( st * 3 ) = 0.80
third block
st = 0.70 | st * 3 = 2.10 | fract( st * 3 ) = 0.10
st = 0.80 | st * 3 = 2.40 | fract( st * 3 ) = 0.40
st = 0.90 | st * 3 = 2.70 | fract( st * 3 ) = 0.70
st = 1.00 | st * 3 = 3.00 | fract( st * 3 ) = 1.00

We can clearly see that on the first block, the value of st * 3 is the same as the value of fract( st * 3 ) but after the second block, st * 3 is greater than 1 and fract( st * 3 ) remains comprised between 0 and 1.

  • after line 70 I've added

In fact, a ternary operator is an if in disguise, the program is forced to branch and to evaluate both branches of the if / else which slows the execution down. In this case, we could write:

y = floor( mod( x, 2.0 ) );

which will also return 0 if the modulo's result is lower than 1 and 1 if the modulo's result is comprised between 1 & 2. The main difference being that it needs to load only one value in memory instead of 2 for a step() evaluation. We could even get rid of the floor by casting (transtyping) the modulo's result to int like so:

y = float( int( mod( x, 2.0 ) ) );

When casting a float to int, we drop the number after the floating point which is the same as calling the floor function, (beware to re-cast the result to float).