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CLICK HERE FOR UP TO DATE NEWS
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GameSpy v1.01
It's later than this, but I don't want to tell you guys how freaky my schedule is. :) Small bug in version 1.0 of GameSpy, so here ya go.
October 4 GameSpy 1.01 Available
We have released version 1.01 of GameSpy 3d. This release fixes a bug that prohibited new users from registering their software. We couldn't have that now could we? ;) To reiterate: If you installed your version of GameSpy over a registered QuakeSpy, you don't need to download this version.
Hexen2 Verite Patch
For all you guys out there still using Verite' based 3D cards, you are in luck. The patch for Hexen2 has been released, here is your copy. Check out the other info:
This release of VH2 will only work with the version 1.09, full retail release of Hexen II. If you have the Hexen II demo, you will need to wait a few days for the next release of the demo from Activision. That will be followed shortly (within just a few days) by a VH2 beta release that will support it.
Code Red
A new TC for Quake that was released a couple of days ago but I failed to mention, Code Red. This nifty package includes new weapons, sounds and all that other stuff that belongs in a TC.
GameSpy Released
No, I don't sleep. Here ya go, GameSpy version1.0 as promised. Got good ol' Hexen2 support and some nifty other refinements as well. Team Gamespy is rockin as always. :) Check out www.quakespy.com and soon www.gamespy.com for more info.
TheFrag
www.thefrag.com has been reworked a bit and has had a bunch of new information added that everyone who is attending will want to check out. As rumored earlier, there will be tournament machines provided on a seperate network to provide the most professional and well run Quake tournament ever.
Q2 Shots
PC Gamer has come out with a few more shots of Quake2 for you guys to look at.. with the delay of Half-Life now, I guess Q2 will be all alone in the market for a bit.
Unreal Info
Billy over at www.voodooextreme.com emailed me that they have a bunch of new info on Unreal including the number of players that will be supported in deathmatches and all other kinds of neet stuff that apparently I dont want to see in email. :)
.plan Wagon
Rick Johnson of Raven updated his .plan asking for a bt of input, dig it:
With the patch out, I'll be able to start work on H2World on Tuesday (Monday, Steve Stringer is coming here to visit, probably wants to get some additional supplies for his sheep). So with that, let's have a contest for the following areas:
1. Client App Icon
2. Server App Icon
3. Better name than Hexen2World
4. Changes to the background console image to reflect the new name
Winners will receive, ummmm, their contribution included in the release and a hug from Chaos.
Jedi Knight
Just thought I should mention this, I took the time to really look at Jedi Knight (20 megs) tonight and planned on checking it out only for 15min or so, but instead found myself enveloped in the demo for 3 hours until I finished it! Despite the somewhat dated engine and lower poly characters, the game is incredibly fun in single player mode. It has been a LONG time since I actually played a game that I enjoyed for it's single player value, Jedi is one of those few. :)
Make sure and check that demo out this weekend, that light saber is just too much fun. Oh, and deathmatch is pretty neet too.
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Hexen2 Patch
Here it is, the patch for Hexen2 to fix some of the bugs that have popped up since the release, Rick Johnson updated his .plan with a bit of info on it as well.
New command line parameter for the GL version:
glh2 -scale2d
The new version defaults to the non-scaled console / interface. To put it back to the original way, use the above command.
Official scripting source code and other utilities will be released very soon.
Bond, Steve Bond
Should have mentioned this earlier but forgot or something, Inside3D will be doing an interview with Steve Bond of Valve Software soon and is looking for some suggestions on questions to ask him. Steve is te stud behind that AI in Half-Life that we hear so much about.
Hexen2 Rankings
Telefragged has a cool new feature on their page that is parsing the Hexen2 servers and analyzing them for the "best players on the net" or something like that. So if you are a competetive Hexen2 player, make sure and check out the page to find out just who your competetion is. :)
Rocket Jumping Lives
Looks like rocket jumping is here to stay and has made it's way into Jedi Knight. Snagged this bit of info from Blue's page:
"...yes, Rocket Jumping is alive and well in Jedi Knight. The "Rocket Launcher" is found on the very first area you start in. You can get to it by jumping on top of the generator like thing that the first character you see is working on, and jumping across to the ledge on the other side."
Of course some other guy posted a rebuttle, but personally I love shooting projectiles between my legs.
Solaris Fix
If you are of that rare breed of people who play Quake on a Solaris (bastards! all of you!) Ken Alverson has sent out a fix that addresses the map size bug.
Sin Files
PC Games has gotten a hold of the levelord once again and posted a few new screenshots of Sin while they are at it. (The top 2 shots) News like this proves to be a bit complex for Prophet, he's kinda slow sometimes. Poor guy, I feel his pain.
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SciTech MGL v4.0
The new library is out! Probably not very useful to you if you aren't a programmer, but it's big news if you are. -Prophet
SciTech MGL 4.0 Released
SciTech has released the SciTech MGL 4.0 graphics library, free of charge,
with full source code! This is the same library that was used to develop titles like WinQuake, Hexen II and others. SciTech MGL 4.0 has many new features including the Game Framework for easy game creation, full OpenGL support for 3D acceleration, a sprite library for managing hardware and software sprites, transparent support for stereo glasses, hardware triple buffering and many others. Find out more!
GameSpy v1.0
Keep an eye on the www.gamespy.com website today, they are planning on the big release of version 1.0 finally. There is full Hexen2 support along with Quake support in this version. For those of you who didnt know, GameSpy is the application formerly known as QuakeSpy.
Half-Life Monster
OGR has posted their weekly monster from Valve's Half-Life. They got themselves a BullChicken this week, which is well, interesting looking to say the least.
Ion Interview
Gamers-Zone has posted their own interview with members of the Ion Storm staff on their website.
GibStats For Hexen2
GibStats, one of the more popular frag log parsers out there has been updated with Hexen2 support.
You can display matches as graphs!, player/player matrix (doom style), ranking, direct player vs player compare, single player analysis, highscore summary and clan tables. All these displays can besorted (ascending and descending) by kills, deaths, frags, suicides,skill, efficiency, relative frags and maps played. The data to be displayed can be limited to a map, a set of maps (game), all maps, the last x kills, the last x maps or one specific map name. GibStats supports normal DM Quake, PainKeep, CTF (Threewave), CTF (Thunderwalker), TeamFortress, Superheroes, Future vs Fantasy and Hexen 2. Data may be exported to HTML. The individual player data may be searched with via CGI. Client and server (not with all functions) logs can be used. All data except the scores is editable.
AirQuake
A new map has been posted on the AirQuake homepage for you guys to enjoy. AirQuake is a badass TC / PC whatever that you get to uh, fly around and stuff. There is also a new screenshot of the bomber there as well. -Prophet
Moves
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Half-Life Delayed
Just got this press release from Gabe Newell of Valve Software, bad news guys.
Greetings from Eric Twelker at Sierra!
Just want to update you on an important development:
First and foremost, Half-Life's release date (originally slated for mid-November) is slipping. Though I can't offer a new ship date until late next week, it will most likely slide into a 1Q98 ship. Also note that a playable demo (on CD and downloadable) will be available approx. 30 days prior to the release of the final product.
We are all extremely excited about Half-Life and are confident that this small delay will be worth the wait for action game fans! I'll get back to you within the next 10 days on the revised ship date.
In the meantime, you may want to review........
THE TOP TEN REASONS WHY HALF-LIFE IS DELAYED:
10. We resisted Ultima Online but got sucked into Oprah's bookclub
9. Wasted 300 development hours catapulting sheep
8. Gabe and Mike learned scheduling at Microsoft
7. We're having problems making it year 2000 compatible
6. El Nino
5. Redoing the models so they all have ponytails
4. Wedge put his eye out with his new pellet machine gun
3. Spending too much time on our .plan files
2. Everything is finished; just waiting on the "Bill Gates Mansion" level
AND THE NUMBER ONE REASON THAT HALF-LIFE IS DELAYED........
1. Forgot to add mandatory Satanic references
Half-Shots
A couple more Half-Life websites have opened. Both of them also scored some exclusive screenshots as well, so make sure and check out these two sites, thanks Jaspur (My personal favorite Half-Life site) for the news.
Jedi Knight Demo
Here you go, the Jedi Knight Demo. This is the sequel to Dark Forces, set in the coolbeans Star Wars universe. True 3d, with light sabers, laser guns, force powers and all that jazz. Thanks Blue for the word first.
Check out the Lucas Jedi Page for more info. Download Sites:
Keep in mind, this is a 20meg demo, and you also need DirectX 5.0 installed. (If you have a 3dfx card, you are in luck, there is direct3d support) Oh, and if you remotely link to the ritual.com file I will remotely kick your ass. The demo hosted on this page is only for people who view my page. Send them to this url, not the file.
Linkage
Weekly section has been updated. Check out good ol' wack ass links.
Unreal Preview
There is yet another preview of Unreal posted, this time by the boys over at Hyper@active. Here is a quote from the preview (Ripped oh so blatently from Voodoo Extreme)
Some of the features of Unreal are: the highly detailed polygonal characters, dynamic lighting and shadows, special enhancements for the Intel PentiumĘ MMX technology, the only question we must ask of Unreal is does it support 3Dfx?
Mac Shadow Warrior
Here is the Mac version of Shadow Warrior (12.6 megs). You need a Power Mac to run this demo. Check out the MacSoft page for more info. -Prophet.
Malice Shot
www.frag.com has gotten a hold of an exclusive shot of QA's Malice TC. It's a chick and stuff.
Zer Texture Wad
A texture wad containing all the original textures from Testament of the Destroyer has been posted on Quake Workshop with the permission of the Zer team.
QuArK
Here is version4.0 of the Quake Army Knife editing utility. This version supports Hexen2 a bit but not fully yet. You can now edit the
.plan Wagon
Seveal .plan updates by people in the past 24 hours, here be a list:
Quake related! Woo-hoo! Okay, nothing special, other than to say that we talked to NVidia today and they showed us an early early early version of their ICD for Win95. Very impressive, given the short amount of time they've been working on it.
Wanted to make sure that everyone who reads the latest issue of Next
Generation disregards their lack of fact finding. They say in their 'Alpha' section that Quake II is due out in Spring 1988 (which technically could be as late as April or May), which is incorrect. As we've been saying all along, Quake II will be out this year :)
Onethumb has carried the day and walked off with American's coveted leather "id" jacket. Yet that victory aside, the talent and creativity exhibited by the Quake community are simply awesome. If you haven't yet been to see the LOSING entries in American's Quake 2 logo contest (at http://www.redwood.stomped.com/tokay/entries.html), you're missing a true gallery of art (and this is speaking as a professional illustrator). If the judging guidelines had been other than simply the largest logo, it would have been a far more difficult contest to adjudicate. Many of the pieces went substantially beyond simply scaling up a logo and turned into powerful pieces of artwork that may indeed contribute to the wealth of the human experience. Way to go folks. I'm impressed. Some of you ought to consider careers as artists. And Don, congratulations (both on winning the contest and on the new job. By the way, did you clean up the ballfield when you were done?).
Virtus Press Release
Here is a press release I got from Blue's page from which in turn is from the guys at Virtus:
Today Virtus is releasing VICI (pronounced "vee-chee", latin for "I conquered"), also known as the Virtus Integrated Compiler Interface. VICI is a stand alone application that is a Windows95 implementation of the Quake compilers. You make setting options for the compile by easily clicking check boxes, then minimize it and get it out of your hair, err...
desktop.
We're releasing it as a free, unsupported alpha release. However, we are looking for bug reports. If you encounter problems in the interface or application, please send email to deathmatchmaker@virtus.com with a subject of "VICI - Whatever".
Get it at the website: http://www.deathmatchmaker.com under the news items or "Demo + Archive" section. We hope you enjoy this as much as we have!
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Jedi Knight Demo Tomorrow
Word has come out straight from LucasArts themselves in this press release that I got 15 copies of from various sources, thanks guys!
JEDI KNIGHT: DARK FORCES II DEMO READIED FOR DOWNLOAD
LucasArts has announced that the playable demo of JEDI KNIGHT:
DARK FORCES II is expected to be available for download on Thursday, Oct. 2, 1997 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. The demo is approximately 20MB and includes one single and one multiplayer level. This demo requires Windows 95 and a minimum Pentium 90-based computer. It also requires DirectX 5.0 (available on the LucasArts Web site). Visit http://www.lucasarts.com for more information.
and of course I will have that demo here asap tomorrow morning. (I'll even get up early!)
Contest Winner
The results of Tokay's Quake2 logo contest have been posted on Redw00d's page. Actually just the 1st place winner for now, the 2nd and 3rd place guys will be named shortly by Red and Mr. McGee. Check out this link to see all the entries.
Joe Tells All
One of the newer members here at Ritual, Joe Selinske our project manager has done an interview with Ultimate SiN.
QSBN
Monty has updated the QSBN page with info on the delay of GameSpy till this friday as well as a screenshot of the new version with the nifty new icons. Check it out.
Richard's Story
Don't know if all of you guys caught Levelord's story time the other day but I figured now was a good time to mention it, we just went back to speedzone the other day and it was funny just looking at all the guys with headsets now.
Q2 Music
Saw on Blue's that Sonic Mayhem has announced that they have finished all the audio tracks to be included with Quake2's full version. Of course another artist has done the "theme song" for Quake2, but these guys did everything else, which was a tall order.
Cool Images
The Ion Storm Daikatana section has been updated with this super cool animation of one of the characters that you can expect to see in Daikatana. It looks pretty damn cool to me. Personally I dig flying enemies. Secondly, Lithium, from Preystation and SiN CiTY sent out this nifty picture of the Duke Nukem action figure. Pretty big hands there buddy, where you gonna put those? You know what they say about guys with big hands right?
Kenn Hoeksra Interview
Billy Wilson, in his undying quest to flood the world with interviews has posted yet another one on VooDoo Extreme, this time he got a hold of Kenn Hoeksra of Raven Software. Kenn is a member of the Take No Prisoners team.
Preview / Review City
Good Grief, talk about an assload of previews and reviews, today must be a record day, check out this list:
TreeBSP V1.61
Here is the new version of TreeBSP, which is supposed to work better on machines with less memory. As some of you may know if you hit that certain bsp size when compiling a map the times it takes to compile can increase exponentially. Check out the Treehouse homepage for more info.
wQBSP for Linux
Saw over on PlanetQuake that Ken Alverson has released his port of wQBSP for Linux over at The Forge. The win32 version of his wQBSP is probably the most populare one out there, so if you are a Linux user make sure and grab it.
T3 Tournament
If you guys havent been paying attention, ClanRing has started the T3 tournament a while ago and it is in full swing now. make sure and check out http://t3.mpog.com to keep track of your favorite clan. (In case you are wondering, the clan I am a member of did not enter, kinda a bummer, I really wanted to play)
Modem?
www.frag.com has a new article posted talking about which modems are best to buy for all you Quake players. I remember some dude emailing me a little while ago ranting about the Cardinal modem that he is using and how much better it was, even more than the old reliable USR modems. Go check it out.
More Interviews
After you read that interview with the Raven dude (up above) check out all these interviews as well:
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.plan Wagon
Paul Steed, model dude at id Software lays down the law on what the deal is with the weapons to be in Quake2, as well as a little FAQ, dig it:
I've been getting a lot of inquiries about the weapons so since I animated them I thought I could add a little illumination to this subject. Forgive the redundancy if someone has already clarified any of the following issues on one of the news sites. I stay away from the browser since Danni's Hard Drive is just above Redwood's (sorry red) so in order to save myself from being lost in mindless surfing, I miss out on all the late breaking, pulse-pounding, orgasm-inducing tidbits about the world according to Quake. These are the following weapons I've animated for the little game we've been working on for the past oh, 354 days or so...
- blaster
- shotgun
- super shotgun
- chain gun
- hyper blaster
- flare gun
- hand grenade
- rail gun
- rocket launcher
- grenade launcher
- BFG
- Disintigrator (ALTHOUGH Kevin says this may be questionable making it into the final cut) Some other weapons that have been discussed but I have not seen or animated are:
- mines
- sticky bombs
- a low-yield, hand-carried, tactical thermonuclear bomb
Some other weapon factoids you may be unwilling to wade through a FAQ to obtain are:
- weapons can be customized to be on the left or right
- view model weapons are between 250 and 400 faces
- weapons seen in the world are no more than 200 faces
- the shotgun drum doesn't actually do a full rotation. I just move it a little and then move it back
- the rocket launcher will still carry 3 missiles on the rack even when empty (call me a tease)
- the rocket shells and grenades being fed into the chambers of those respective weapons are not really different shells and are tricks ala the pseudo-rotating shotgun drum
- the chain gun and hyper blaster have overspin and one rotates clockwise and the other counter-clockwise
- when creating the weapons I built them as usual and then viewed them through a 90 degree field of view camera viewport
in order to account for any view warp. This occasionally required me to deform the weapons in order to compensate for our
wacky FOV (i.e. squash them in a bit)
- the decision to make our weapons look more conventional as opposed to looking like some quisinart(sp) or toaster oven was because we wanted you to be able to realize it was in fact a weapon you were holding in your hands
- no melee weapon was made because we wanted to piss people off, although the mission pack may have such a weapon if
we get enough bitching about the lack of that feature
- yes the weapons animation ARE a bitch to do and to make look 'right', that's probably one of the reasons why I'm actually PAID to do what I do
- no people or defenseless animals were harmed in the creation and/or animations of the Quake2 weapon
- finally YEP you guessed it I am tired of questions about the weapons
I Made a BooBoo
Gah.. silly me, I snagged that Malice movie from Blue's page earlier today not even noticing the words "exclusive" written right next to it. So well, I suck. Apologies to Mr. Heaslip for my ineptitude. Blue was gracious enough to let me slide and just leave the file here locally but you have to go to his page now and hit reload 15 times for my sin. I will submit myself to a public flogging during The Frag where I will meet up with Blue once again. (and Redw00d!)
Oh, and yea.. that GLDoom shot is fake. Duh. If you guys are going to see any screenshots of GLDoom, it will be released on this page.
Zanshin
Mr. Zanshin has updated the Dojo on news of his court case dealing with the GLQuake driver he was working on. He seems to have time during court battles though to work on 3d card reviews as well. Check out his review of the Riva 128 while you are there.
Jedi FAQ
With the release of Jedi Knight getting ever closer, (Can you feel it?!) OGR has poseted a mailbag forum type section talking about, well, Jedi Knight. Most anything that you would ask can be answered in there.
Malice Movie
Here is a 5+ meg movie of QA's Malice TC that should be going gold for pressing and release sometime soon. They show off those parachutes that are way cool and the cold bustin a cap in someone with the sideways held pistol. (Ala Unreal)
Releases
Couple of new versions of popular patches have been released..
Ultimate Sin
The site formerly known as Elite Games Sin has moved to everyone's new favorite Brutality web space. Along with the move there has been a release of a new version of the Sin FAQ.
Oh, and to answer Blue's question, SiN or Sin? Uh.. I dunno?
Unreal Preview
Thanks Billy for the word that Astrocreeps website has a pretty good preview of Unreal posted just recently.
Hollenshead Interview
I couldn't get to this page, but apparently there is an interview with Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id Software at http://jade.zeal.net/~sanjai/
Rocketa Arena Demos
The demos of the final matches of the first ever rocket arena tournament have been released. Here they are:
Speaking of which, this weeks demos (To be posted shortly) are of myself and the LPB arena champion Kornelia going at it. She pretty much kicks my ass, oh well.
.plan Wagon
Nelno, the AI man over at Ion Storm has updated his .plan talking about the progress of Daikatana and exactly what they are up to over there recently.Here is his opening statement which you may enjoy:
I figured it's high time someone updated about what's going on with Daikatana. Well, here it is:
I've spent the last few months working on anything and everything imaginable, but for the most part I've been cramming monsters into the DLL code, first for E3, then for our Eidos milestone, then for ECTS, and now for our second Eidos milestone. INCOMING: Milestones suck. Deadlines are a good thing, but stuffing content in just to have content is a waste of everyone's time and talent.END TRANSMISSION
Quake2 at CompUSA
Chris has sent word that you can already order copies of the yet to be released Quake2 CD's from CompUSA's website. I guess they know something we don't? heh.
Ferrari
Little note that the next issue of Street Power magazine will be featuring John Carmack's 1,000 horsepower Ferrari. Here is a link, thanks capsule.Entitled, "edge of doom"
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Coming Out...
Ok.. well, been getting asked this question for quite a long time now, and have been secretive about what I do to keep my clan appetite quenched. Well I've been a member of Clan MegaHurtZ with several friends and have been playing under another name for the past 3 months now.
We are a fairly competetive clan (I'm one of the weaker players on the team) so if you are a serious clan and want to play us, Come to 3DNet (irc.3dnet.net) and join the #megahurtz channel. We play just about nightly.
If you aren't familiar with irc (then you don't belong in a clan!) you can email mhz@gibbed.com
Oh, and dont you even DARE think about emailing me asking to join.
Interviews
Zer Transparency
That hot little TC that everyone is playing as of late has a transparency patch out now. Grab it from the QuakeDeck. as always. http://quakedeck.allgames.com
Hmm...
Was just thinking about this, how come nobody has modified a couple of Arena servers to be 3 or 4 way? The last man standing deal is always fun. I personally would love 3 man. That way if you know some dude is a badass the other 2 guys will gun for him first.. and you can make deals with other players.. etc etc.. would add a whole new level of uh, stuff to Arena.. Of course if there were only 2 people left on the server then it would just drop to 2 player mode though.
Contest Ends
American McGee's contest has ended. He was looking for the largest possible Quake2 symbol someone could make.
QuMa v1.5
Now with Hexen2 support, QuMa version 1.5 be out on da homepage. Thanks Hanif.
Tourney Winners
Hm.. looks like Kornelia won another tournament, and OrangE-CE as well, and this time it wasn't all female. Warzone hosted that Arena tournament that I mentioned last week over the weekend and OrangE-CE won the HPB division, homegirl won the lpb. I bet you wanna piece of her at The Frag now huh?
Suckage
As always, the suckage has been updated. I lost friday's updates somewhere during rehashing the entire server.. Quite upsetting. I'll get something neeto worked in there before the end of the day though. Anyone remember what I had posted? heh.
Max Payne
The boys at Remedy have updated their Max Payne section, and 3DR has updated their news talking about the cooperative project as well. There have been a couple of screenshots released as well, Thanks to www.preystation.com for the news:
Jedi Stuff
AVault has fired up their own Jedi Knight coverage with an extensive article including new screenshots and info. It's a pretty good read so make sure and check it out. This game will be cool.
Don't think I mentioned this the other day, there is a Hexen2 Review posted their as well.
Hey, and also don't forget to check out the Jedi News Network page. It's a cooperative effort between a buttload of webmasters from different websites.
Oh, and another thing, I know nothing about the release date of the Jedi Knight online demo. No.. really... :)
More Log Parsers
Keith Reid has jumped into the Quake .log file parser arena with his own entry. A very simple one that outputs the standard who killed who table format like the good ol' Doom demo analyzers from back in the day. Check his homepage and grab it. Only 11k.
The CTF Project
Wow, looks like all the big boys in the CTF community have gotten together to make the ultimate in CTF expansion projects. Check out part of the email I got from DaKoTa:
The new episode from Clan Xenocide, Xeno CTF, will be a collection of professional-quality levels done by some of the biggest names in the industry. Jim Molinets, president of Rogue Entertainment, is finishing work on the re-invention of the Xenocide Flag Academy, the level that we have used as our user interface on the XFA. Christian "Disruptor" Antkow of id Software has also provided a custom CTF level that is currently being completed by Dale "Midiguy" Bertheola. We also anticipate receiving at least two more custom CTF levels designed by professionals. A few of the best level designers from the CTF community have agreed to provide new levels, including John "Tattoo" Schultz and Anthony J. Distler. Also, we are currently working on combining the levels from Xeno CTF with an excellent level paks begun by the Expert Quake design team. To these levels, we will add new player skins, originally created by Jacob "Gooseman" Jaeggli, of Fantasy Quake: Rise of the Phoenix, and then revised by Chris Bolin, from the Book of Skins, PainKeep, and many other projects. The server patch for Xeno CTF will be identical to Threewave CTF except that it will support the new skins.
Check out DaKoTa's Frontline News for more updates and info.
Zoid on Linux GLQuake
Saw on Operation 3.D.F.X. that Zoid posted to 3dfx.glide.linux about the GL version of Quake.
As many people know, I'm working on the Unix ports for id software.
I'm working on GLQuake for Linux, now that Linux GLIDE is available. I have gotten it running using MesaGL on top of Linux GLIDE. There are a number of issues that I need to address and I was looking for some input.
- Right now, texture management with MesaGL over GLIDE isn't very nice. In fact, you can't even load a level in GLQuake without cutting the textures down pretty severely with gl_picmip. Also, after two or three levels you still run out of texture memory anyway (since GLQuake never frees textures, it just shares them between levels) and it bombs out. Is there any work to improve texture handling in MesaGL in the near future? Ideally, it should just be like the 3DFX opengl32.dll miniport in that it automatically handles moving textures in and out of the card based on the demands of the current rendering scene. Until this is fixed, GLQuake under Linux really isn't usuable. Quake2 doesn't have this problem, as it frees textures between levels, but the current fxMesa implementation never 'frees' textures out of the card, so you still run out of texture memory.
- Keyboard and mouse handling are an issue. After looking at this, looks like the best way is to use X11 for both inputs. Keyboard is pretty standard under X (just create a window and start reading keyboard events), but mouse is rather ugly. Essentially, you keep having to warp the pointer to the middle of the window after reading its position change. I'm wondering if there's a better way. Ideally, I'd want to steal the mouse from X entirely and read it directly to get precise inputs from the mouse itself. I've considering ripping the code out from gpm/svgalib to do this. Any one have thoughts on this? Is there a mode in X11 where I can just grab the pointer and read it's changes directly? This also gets ugly if you have window managers that change focus based on mouse position. If you whip the mouse fast enough before GLQuake has a chance to warp it back to the middle of the window, you can end up changing focus to another application and all hell breaks lose.
- Performance under MesaGL over GLIDE is pretty slow. I get around 12fps at 640x480 with a "timedemo demo2", and that's even after mipping down all the textures. This is much less than the Win32 opengl32.dll miniport where I get around 24fps with standard settings (no funky tweaks). I'm not sure
where the performance is lost. I'll have to do some more testing and profiling to find out where. Just for your info, I'm using my bottom of the line Pentium 100 for testing which explains the rather low numbers.
I'd like input on these issues and hope to provide a working GLQuake for Linux as soon as its feasible.
/// Zoid.
3D Card Article
Doh, shoulda linked this one a couple of days ago, it's a gigantic article over on GameSpot talking about just about every 3d card you can think of and how cool / not cool each one is. Just gimme a VooDoo2 damn it.
Gibson Damn It.
Jeeze.. got yet 2 more emails about this one yesterday.. Litttle clarification, my name is pronounced GIBson, not Jib.. leave me alone already, it's not my fault!
Site Stuff
Some changes and movements...
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Copyright Steven M. Gibson |
