LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Sprites: Miscellaneous
built 276 days ago
[A] shader for point sprites must have a pixel shader that accepts a texture coordinate. On Xbox 360, these are specified by the special SPRITETEXCOORD semantic. On Windows-based computers, any texture coordinate such as TEXCOORD0 will suffice. The pixel shader returns the color of the texel at that coordinate in the texture being used to draw the sprite.
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On these two systems, there's almost always the problem of running out of sprites - The 8 sprites on C64 are definitely not enough for anything involving many characters, and on NES, constructing anything large enough eats up lots of sprites. The problem is solved (though not in very programmer-friendly way) by using raster interrupts: Once the sprite has been drawn, you change the sprite pointers in memory, and the system thinks it hasn't yet drawn the sprite on this scanline and starts over again. This often works pretty well, but it sometimes gets a bit out of hand, particularly in quickly written and hastily produced games (I think TMNT games sprite-bugged a lot on both C64 and NES!) - but sometimes this bugs in even high-profile releases (The squashers in Mega Man 2 Dr. Wily levels with their chains magically appearing in walls...)
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Yahoo uses CSS sprites on its home page to improve performance. The first set of icons is displayed in the "Check your mail status" section on the right of Yahoo.com! (see Figure 3).
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The closest the sprites can claim to come to any of this is the existence of the Sunspark bloodline with its distinctive physical features and symbolic nobility. In truth, the Sunspark live just as other sprites do, though they have produced more great leaders (in the Sprite sense of the term) than any other bloodline in recent history. The ability of sprites not only to subsist but to thrive on what the land gives them has enabled them to live for millenia in a state of near total personal freedom that no other race or civilization can hope to rival. This, in turn, has enabled them as a race to focus on things other than survival, such as art, pleasure, wit, and physical grace.
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Several theories have been proposed for the generation of sprites. Common for them all are that free electrons somehow are created and accelerated in the electric field to energies that allow collisional excitation of atmospheric neutral constituents. They can be categorized according to the energy of the free electrons driving the process. It ranges from a few eV needed for excitation of 1st positive bands, over a few tens of eV needed to create classical avalanche ionization, to relativistic energies, where the breakdown electric field threshold is a factor 10 smaller than for classical breakdown [for extensive discussion and references, see: LEHTINEN THESIS].
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Nanaki has made available a series of sprites for general public use. However, please give credit to Nanaki if they are used. Click on the thumbnail to see pics of the sprites. The collection of bitmaps and a text file are available here.
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