Slashdot Mirror

When I think of John Romero I think of the search for the Daikatana. Eventually we found the Daikatana but then we realized that we did not really want it in the first place.

This reminds me of a story back with quake 1.. the best link I could find was in the shugashack archives.

The basic idea is that you needed 250 kills on monitored servers in order to qualify for a tournament. Thresh was so well known, that whenever he joined a server, everyone else would leave, assuming that it would no longer be useful to stick around. In the end, he just got a bye.

So what?

I'm writing a game right now, and I've studied up on game architecture. Without exception, that realtime game you've been enjoying uses what's referred to as The Big Game Loop. The simplest form goes like this:

while (we want to keep playing)

{
if (it's time for a new frame){
readInputs();
performGameLogic();
renderScene();
}

}

In point of fact, John Carmack experimented with exactly this while developing Quake 3 Arena. You can read his results here. To summarize: he saw improvements of between 3% and 15%, and some levels were actually slower. Meanwhile it added complexity. So he scrapped it.

XBox 2's six-way SMP sounds lovely, but it strikes me as irrelevant for games. Maybe it'll be useful for other applications.

larry

p.s. Please pardon the formatting, but Slashdot doesn't support the pre tag. (Or, sadly, SGML character references.)

now they come up with some alleged interview with carmack

Uh, that's the finger.planetquake.com .plan archive. The same text's also here and here and here and ... well, you get the idea.

I think Carmack's working from an OpenGL 2.0 draft and providing input to help define it.

If you were paying attention to John Carmack you'd know what cards are already bringing it to life. Specifically the Geforce4 TI 4600, currently appears to be the Quake God's best reccomendation, though Radeon's 8500 series is rumored to be what was running the Doom III preview at the recent E3.

Reading over Carmack's finger, one can see that he is currently having the most success with NVidia drivers and the card will therefore not only be fast, but should support every feature he builds in.

I'm currently building my own system that is focused on Doom III. My best reccomendation for a graphics card is by Gainward; the GeForce 4 PowerPack! Ultra/750 XP Golden Sample. It retails for right around $350.00. However (as far as I know), it still holds the best benchmarks of the GeForce4 series.

There is something to be said about Carmack's opinion on ATI hardware (which is good overall), but for the sake of assuring your computer will be running Doom III perfectly I must stand by the opinion that the GeForce4 TI 4600 is what you need...

"The development/test platform is Windows 2000" for Doom 3.

Aside from the original .plan update from Carmack, there's been at least one official press release announcing Doom III before. This is just one of those "it's getting closer to release date so let's announce it again to make sure people haven't forgotten about us" press releases.

It's quite interesting, and he talks about ATI a lot with fair comparisons to Nvidia's offering. See it here

Well, to answer my own question and for anyone else who's interested, check out the following by Carmack:

John Carmack on dual CPU's

I guess the poster will have to wait a while for quake on a 4.4ghz computer. ;o)

Does anyone know if John Cash (ex-id) is working on this title?

That page has been slashdotted, Shack has all those screenshots too though:

Wolf2K Shots

But on what planet are devices 1-10 millimeters in size "smaller than the width of a human hair"?

You obviously havent seen this guy.

-----
If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed...

The article is a bit misleading, Several people got confirmation from Bubba after that article came out on cnet with word that 3dfx will not be bringing the V5-6000 to retail. Here's the story I posted about it a while ago with a quote from the same Bubba Wolford:

3dfx not bringing V5-6000 to retail


-Steve Gibson

In case you're getting the "server busy" message, check out ShugaSh ack's mirror.

Since it is no longer a private endeavor (VA Linux is a publicly traded company) shouldn't Slashdot be held to the same standards as other 'news' agencies?"

In one word: YES!!!

Right now, there's misspellings in the body text of stories, broken or mangled links, and a band of overzealous karma whores churning out stories by the minute. This seriously needs to be changed. No more frivolous "stories" (e.g.: "JonKatz is an idiot", etc) in the submission queue! Ban trolling as we know it! And give users the chance to edit their post once, as well as giving the admins the right to delete posts altogether. Personally, I think that any post moderated to -1 should be deleted, its post id being retained to fill the gap.

The only thing holding Slashdot back is the troll population. With them, Slashdot is on the same level as sCary's ShugaShack and another site which I'll leave unnamed (it ends in .cx).

(Personally I think this needs far more coverage than just a slashback, guys)

Apache has started that Voodoo Extreme (the link probably won't work :P) would return in full force in the coming days. They had already started to move before the plug was pulled. The VE staff are taking a few days vacation before they go back with their new host, who though unmentioned is receiving high praises.

By all accounts it sounds like GameFan was collapsing rapidly and it's amazing they lasted as long as they did. Something shady was going on with advertising revenue. Many people have stated that since moving to new hosts they've gotten almost 50% more click-through/hit revenue than what Gamefan was showing them.

What concerns me is that this is not going to be the last network to fall by any means. UGO and IGN BOTH sound like they're in for a very tough year, and to me this is going really raise questions about the profitability of internet-only content. Wired, CNN, WSJ, NYT, and hell even /., are all able to stay very much alive because of real world counterparts in other media (or just plain ol' big bucks hoping to diversify). Do the online portions, despite the large readership, actually provide profit at all? Would you pay for Blue's? sCary's?

Someone is going to have to come up with a better answer for online-only content distribution, and this year is going to prove it.

- Spiff

Want to see some proof of this slower performance claim? Go to a Windows machine with Quake3, and go to The ShugaShack. Download the 1.17 DLL files for Quake3 and place the DLL files in the \quake3\baseq3 directory (you'll see uix86.dll and qagamex86.dll, quake3.exe will use these instead of ui.qvm and qagame.qvm). Voila! A 15% performance gain! And all because the DLL files are already compiled, unlike the QVM files which are compiled at runtime (evidence: the console message saying "VM file qagame.qvm compiled to X bytes of code").

Before you arrogantly defend the putrid mug of steaming, flaming code, be sure to study its nature. Ever wonder why the DeCSS code was never written in Java? Want to know why XMMS uses .so files? That's right! RUNTIME PERFORMANCE! I believe that this should be the be-all end-all factor of programming.

These last few weeks have been really scary. It seems like the government and big corps are out to completly change the face of America and the world. They seem to want to totally take away freedoms that we, as Americans, take for granted.

For example, here's a headline from acbnews.com, today:

Request for More Inspection Powers

Here's a witch hunt by the government to ban violent games

here's Gove rnment Sites Get An F On Privacy

And then I find out from Wired.com that back in 1997, Clinton signed a law that makes it a federal felony to share software with friends or family. A FEDERAL FELONY to give my sister a copy of some software. Jeeze.

These are just from today!!!!

The last thing I want to hear from my kids (when I have them) is "Daddy, where where you when they took our freedom away?"

Many people don't realize that:

- There will be a keyboard and a mouse that you can attach to Dreamcast, they were shown at QuakeCon (here is a pic of the mouse and you can see the keyboard here).

- Sega does plan to release a "LAN adapter" that will allow LAN/DSL/cable modem connection, as stated in this interview.

Just wanted to clarify on that.

-jfedor

Many people don't realize that:

- There will be a keyboard and a mouse that you can attach to Dreamcast, they were shown at QuakeCon (here is a pic of the mouse and you can see the keyboard here).

- Sega does plan to release a "LAN adapter" that will allow LAN/DSL/cable modem connection, as stated in this interview.

Just wanted to clarify on that.

-jfedor

Ah, off to New York for Mac World. We've got a nice surprise there for everyone.

The suprise turned out to be the Q3A mission pack running under OS X & radeon. This is certainly the kind of thing that would have been incorporated into Steve Job's onstage dog-and-pony show, but since ATI managed to piss Steve off, Q3A also got relegated to the sidelines.

Bungie was bought by Microsoft but they sold their Trademarks Oni and Myth to Take2 Interactive. Take2 are owning Gathering of Developers (GOD) so GOD will work on new games from this two lines now.

Halo might not come to linux but Mac is not completely out of the question. Microsoft does support Macintosh quite well. There is Office, drivers for the Hardware and some games. If it is easy to port Halo to the Mac (because they are halfway there allready?) then it will happen. Halo 2 though - I think not!

the press release with info about take 2 can be found here

"Return to Wolfenstein" is already under developement by Gray Matter Studios (Ex Xatrix, developers of King Pin). Their homepage is empty but you can find screenshots here

What bothers me about the .plan is that Carmack is basically starting a fight with the other two owners of id. That cant be good - can it?
--

First off Apogee == 3DRealms. FYI, if you didn't know.

With that out of the way, I'd like to put some history behind this little legal crap that they put a page up to deal with.

A few years ago, (about 4 to 6, I don't quite remember) some dipshit took any and every 3DR/Apogee logo and their entire website design, all their graphics, etc. and basically created a pretty vulgar site out of it. To say the least the guys at 3DR were not too happy, especially since they spent a lot of time to create that site. After finding this site, 3DR went after the dude, and the guy got flamed by a whole lotta 3DR fanboys.

The guys at 3DR are a good bunch of guys, who are more likely to be found at a strip joint than in court. They are just trying to protect themselves from idiocy, but I think it's worded a bit wrong. No harm, no foul. I would also like to point out this post on Shugashack: http://www.shugashack.com/reply.y?id=20 4292.

I hope this clears things up. And remember, just cause someone doesn't like you, doesn't make them the enemy or a bad person.

Luv,
Brady

First off Apogee == 3DRealms. FYI, if you didn't know.

With that out of the way, I'd like to put some history behind this little legal crap that they put a page up to deal with.

A few years ago, (about 4 to 6, I don't quite remember) some dipshit took any and every 3DR/Apogee logo and their entire website design, all their graphics, etc. and basically created a pretty vulgar site out of it. To say the least the guys at 3DR were not too happy, especially since they spent a lot of time to create that site. After finding this site, 3DR went after the dude, and the guy got flamed by a whole lotta 3DR fanboys.

The guys at 3DR are a good bunch of guys, who are more likely to be found at a strip joint than in court. They are just trying to protect themselves from idiocy, but I think it's worded a bit wrong. No harm, no foul. I would also like to point out this post on Shugashack: http://www.shugashack.com/reply.y?id=20 4292.

I hope this clears things up. And remember, just cause someone doesn't like you, doesn't make them the enemy or a bad person.

Luv,
Brady

Their v5-6000 has four separate chips running in parallel... each with its own cooling fan. The board requires its own external power supply.

And if that isn't scary enough, Quantum 3D is building 8, 16, and 32 (THIRTY FRICKIN TWO) processor... well, "cards" isn't the right term: they are external rack mountable boxes. It uses 1600 WATTS.

URL: http://www.quantum3d.com/product%20pages/aalchemy3 .html

Thanks shugashack

go read the thread on the shugashack about what you have to do to get napster working. I believe it leaves some reg keys lying around even after install, and you have to manually remove them before reinstalling.


-Spazimodo

Fsck the millennium, we want it now.

As you can see here on sCary's Shuga Shack it may be delayed to 2001, but that's the 2001 fiscal year which begins April 1, 2000. Just a small correction.

As you can see here on sCary's Shuga Shack it may be delayed to 2001, but that's the 2001 fiscal year which begins April 1, 2000. Just a small correction.

The tool source and video compressor will be out next week. This will include source q3data, q3map, q3asm, q3radiant, our version of lcc and the executable for the video compressor.

Because sCary is a cool guy, he is helping to offer q3 for only $33.95. This is not a bad price to pay for such a high quality piece of fraggin software :)
Here's the link

hahaah... well uh, no these guys don't have lives... I post crap over that sCary's Shugashack and I've met half the "news" guys and nah, they don't have lives... and Blue has 3 guys posting =)

http://ww w.shugashack.com/extras/quake3_linux/index_files/e vilpenguin.jpg

open notepad, paste this into it: "192.246.40.56 authorize.idsoftware.com"
save the file as "hosts" with no extension.
to insure there is no file extension, place a " " around the file name when you do a save as.
place the file in your /windows/ directory.

From the Shugashack




Subj: Re: Letter to the editor from Subscriber James Gillespie,North Fort
Date: 10/12/1999 9:31:26 AM Eastern Daylight Time
From: fpcletters@zdnetonebox.com (FamilyPC Letters)
Reply-to: emily_friedlander@zd.com
To: JWGflorida@aol.com
Mr. Gillespie,

Thanks for bringing this error to our attention. It was a typo on an editor's part that through a series of edits,
made it to print. Watch for the correction in our January issue.

Thanks again,
Emily Friedlander



Even though, I must say that is really some shady reporting!

GeForce / TNT2Ultra / Voodoo3 Roundup [ Shugashack]
Guillemot GeForce256 3D Prophet Review [Ace's Hardware]
Guillemot GeFroce256 3D Prophet Review [Puissance PC]
nVidia GeForce 256: To Buy or Not to Buy [AnandTech]
Guillemot GeForce256 3D Prophet Review [GA-Source]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Review [3DGPU]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Review [Riva Extreme]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Preview [Thresh's FiringSquad]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Review [Riva3D]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Review [Planet Riva]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Benchmarks [Bjorn3D]
Guillemot GeForce256 3D Prophet Review [CGO]
Guillemot GeForce256 3D Prophet Review [Fast Graphics]
Creative GeForce256 Annihilator Benchmarks [3DHardware]

GeForce / TNT2Ultra / Voodoo3 Roundup [ Shugashack]
Guillemot GeForce256 3D Prophet Review [Ace's Hardware]
Guillemot GeFroce256 3D Prophet Review [Puissance PC]
nVidia GeForce 256: To Buy or Not to Buy [AnandTech]
Guillemot GeForce256 3D Prophet Review [GA-Source]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Review [3DGPU]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Review [Riva Extreme]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Preview [Thresh's FiringSquad]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Review [Riva3D]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Review [Planet Riva]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Benchmarks [Bjorn3D]
Guillemot GeForce256 3D Prophet Review [CGO]
Guillemot GeForce256 3D Prophet Review [Fast Graphics]
Creative GeForce256 Annihilator Benchmarks [3DHardware]

Anandtech GeForce 256 Review
Ace's Hardware GEForce 256 Review
RivaExtreme GeForce 256 DDR Review
The FiringSquad GeForce 256 DDR Review
GA Source Guillemot 3D Prophet Review
3DGPU Geforce 256 DDR Review
Fast Graphics Guillemot 3D Prophet Review
CGO GeForce 256 Preview
Shugashack GeForce, V3 and TNT2 benchmark roundup
Riva3D Full GeForce 256 DDR Review
GeForce 256 DDR Review at Planet Riva

Did an NDA expire today or something?

Just a couple quick links:

Anandtech GeForce 256 Review
Ace's Hardware GEForce 256 Review
RivaExtreme GeForce 256 DDR Review
The FiringSquad GeForce 256 DDR Review
GA Source Guillemot 3D Prophet Review
3DGPU Geforce 256 DDR Review
Fast Graphics Guillemot 3D Prophet Review
CGO GeForce 256 Preview
Shugashack GeForce, V3 and TNT2 benchmark roundup
Riva3D Full GeForce 256 DDR Review
GeForce 256 DDR Review at Planet Riva

Any others?

Yes, the G400 is quite a bit faster than TNT2 or Voodoo3, at 32b color depth and high resolutions. At lower resolutions, it doesn't do as well as those cards.

But if you can play Q3 smoothly at 1280x1024, why go back to 800x600? :)

My reference is the recent Q3T benchmarks of various video cards by Id. The original data can be found at Id, and here's some analysis done at Shugashack. (I don't completely agree with their analysis, but I might be confused about an issue or two. Like all analysis on the web, use it as background, but make up your own mind when you have the data. The G400 is definately damn fast on high res, high quality settings, though.)

John

Of course, how great the effect will be will depend partly on how well Linux Q3A sells. I think our duty is clear. :)

Supposedly, Intel has today discontinued the 300A without warning. I don't know how true it is, but I saw the story HERE, which had a link to HERE that has the story.

Make up your own comments on it.