Slashdot Mirror
Q3T on Mac First
Wyatt Earp
wrote in to tell us that macnn.com is
reporting that Q3T is coming out this weekend for Macs first,
then Linux and finally Windows according to
Zaphod's Plan.
According to Carmacks's Plan
OS X is nice but "MacOS still sucks."Update: 04/25 01:36 by J : It's gone live. Go swap them servers.
If Mesa works with 3Dfx on the Macintosh, some one (hopefully who has _used_ it) should tell them! Mesa is going to be used on Linux anyway, right?
The problems are mostly with the old MacOS. These go away with Mac OS X or PowerPC Linux.
What is Carmack going to say when the G4's hit the streets in a couple of months? Rumors have the AltiVec running multimedia 8x faster than the best PIII's, and at 1/5th the power consumption. People have seen Laptops with the Viao form factor with 500 MHz G4's in them....
Also, I like this bit about "No openGL Voodoo support on the Mac..." It's called Mesa, John. It's been out for years. Sure, Apple doesn't yet have 3Dfx GL support (I have yet to figure out why) but the Mac does.
He said "Voodoo cards are not currently supported by the [Apple] OpenGL driver". That's a big issue, because he has had to work with driver authors to ensure that Q3:A would run properly on their implementations. Carmack has put alot of effort into getting 3D games running well on MacOS, so I don't think you should bash him because he doesn't have the time to make sure that every OpenGL implementation will work correctly. Maybe you should complain about the fact that Apple and 3Dfx don't fully support their platforms instead of knocking someone who is trying help them out.
Carmack's article spends several pages ranting about the Mac OS, and it's lack of modern features when he KNOWS (and even states so) that these problems are going away (actually HAVE GONE AWAY) with the release of Mac OS X. It's a bunch of FUD that would confuse anyone not aware of the current state of development of the Mac OS.
His comments about the Mac OS only supporting Rage are wrong too - there are several sources of 3Dfx implementations for the Mac.
He also makes a lot of comments about Spec95 being a great benchmark. Flat out wrong. Spec95 is a worthless benchmark for gamers because is does nothing to address the system features important for running games.
You guys may think he is a God, but the fact is he does publish a lot of stuff that is NOT correct, or is highly misleading.
Carmack a genius? Can this guy do anything other than castles and nazis? Geez, give me 10 years and millions of dollars and I'll eventually get it right too. Doesn't make me a genius. How about trying something new, id?
I see no reason for X if you have a superior GUI already. I thought the only real reason people use X is for those who prefer using a GUI for some things rather than CLI. Even still, I don't even think that was what X was originally designed for.
You may end up missing a few things like... uhh. XGalaga and GIMP... but you will have photoshop (and I'm sure others will pop up as well) to do graphics on Mac OS X. There is no reason why the GIMP developers, or another team couldn't port GIMP to Mac OS X either, except for perhaps their pride.
There's pretty much equivalents or even superior equivalents to most apps made for X.
And if you for some reason like having different themes, there's (a) program(s), i believe, for Mac OS that makes everything appear like windows from other OSs among other things. I'm sure the program will be ported to Mac OS X with time. There was a nice Mac GUI site that focused on that stuff but the author shut it down recently.
Even still, Macs have LinuxPPC and YellowDog Linux on them. So if you can't get exactly everything you want, you just install both, or just one if you have no use for the other.
The developers of Mac OS X said they believed it would comply with POSIX standards but for some reason or another aren't getting it tested, at least not now anyway.
His comments about the Mac OS only supporting Rage are wrong too - there are several sources of 3Dfx implementations for the Mac.
He never said Mac OS only supports Rage, YOU are the one spreading pro-mac propaganda. His statement that all the old macs are standard with a rage chip is not FUD, thats the only claim he made about macs and Rage.
Mac people are silly.
According to www.macosrumors.com (if I remember correctly), OS X will be able to run an x-windows server, and windowmanagers like KDE.
Simon.
Actually, this is what Carmack said, if you would have bothered to read it:
"MacOS X nails all these problems, but thats still a ways away."
> I see no reason for X if you have a superior GUI already.
:(
Will the GUI in MacOS X allow running programs on remote network displays like X11? If not, then it's as bad as Windows for my needs
But my question is how close to UNIX is MacOS X?
very close MacOS X has a *BSD (darwin) core
Does it support X11 and UNIX98?
if you download extra software it supports X11.
I'm not shure about UNIX98
How easy is it to port Linux/UNIX applications to it?
Shouldn't be too hard considering it has a *BSD layer.
It is going to suupport POSIX gust not be regestered as such,
And what one person (God as some people seem to have created him out to be) is Truth. the Absolute. What other organized benchmarks have tested mean nothing because this one God says something else. In fact, since he said it matches the equivalent PII for games, that must also mean the PII is equal to the G3 in everything else too! "All the tests and testimonies are lies unless they work in my favor! "
X meaning ten.
It is a NeXT unix based OS.
So you have an OpenGL accelerator on your Linux box then?
Yeah, it's quite close, you can even kill the finder thingie and replace it with kde or some such. http://www.macosrumors.com/osx.html
It's old, but should be updated soon.
I hear about Glide being ported to Linux/PPC -- this may need 'architecture hack' work I'd reckon.
I also hear about FreeBSD/i386 Glide binaries but nothing seem to come of either.....
Dear ID developers,
what about using mesa+GGI in a future game? This may be more portable than glide in the long run.. check out
http://www.ggi-project.org
Why? What is the deal with Unix? It's nothing great. Its 30 years old. Why can't we let the past stay in the past, and move on. WinNT is based off Digital's VMS, Win95 is a big DOS application, and now MacOS has been downgraded to something 30 years old. I think the only people who have the right idea is Be for not building their operating system off of something thats 20-30 years old. Maybe that's why BeOS is 100x faster and more efficent than anything else. Linux is no where near ready for "primetime" no matter what you people say. If Be had more hardware support and more apps, it would be more than ready.
I love Macs too, but that's no reason to go around bashing Carmack for pointing out a fundamental design flaw in the MacOS architecture. I'm sure that MacOS 8.6 adds some nice new features and fixes some problems, but adding something like memory protection requires a complete rewrite. That's what the point of MacOS X is, but it's not out.
It's still as difficult to develop apps under 8.6 as it has been in the past.
Gotta love how you turn a comment about Mac OS into a flame about how "linux isn't ready for prime time".
Way to go.
The last game to have castles and nazis was Wolf3d, quite a few years ago. What Carmack does IS genius. What you fail to realize is the id Software games, from Carmacks perspective, are just deathmatch games (this is for certain with Q3A, as we know) and vehicles to sell licenses to his 3D engine.
To tell genius, you compare work of the man to the other work out at the same time, and EVERY ONE of Carmack's engines, from the sprite-based Doom engine to the true 3d Quake and Quake2 engine has been LEAPS AND BOUNDS above anything out at the time of its release.
Why try something new when the formula works, anyhow? I loved Doom, Doom2, Quake, Quake2, and I'm sure Q3A won't disappoint. That's like saying "Hey Linus, kernels are nice and such, but why don't you try something new!" it just doesn't make sense.
"closed source development cycle"?!! Have you been living in a cave?
there have been at least half a dozen articles on
Just because there's a negative comment about Linux doesn't make the message a troll. Contrary to popular belief, it seems, Linux is NOT ready for primetime, no matter what you might say.
I think Carmack's opinion _is_ worthwhile in your case. He's looking at the system from a developer's point of view, so what matters to him is how well suited the platform is for quickly writing software. That's why he used to do all his development on NeXT -- not because he thought there was a market for games on NeXT, but because it was an ideal development platform. When Carmack says that he hopes that he will be able to move all his development over to MacOS X in the future, it means he thinks the platform will stand up well on it's technical merits, and it's usability for high-powered developers. (Whether Apple will deliver is yet to be seen, of course)
I hate to break this to you but BeOS is loosely based on UNIX. It's about the same deal as NeXTStep/OpenStep/MacOSX that is a UNIXish kernel with a non X GUI on top of it.
Every id game since W3D has been a rehash of the same theme.
Why try something new when the formula works, anyhow?
Surely you don't really believe this?
That's like saying "Hey Linus, kernels are nice and such, but why don't you try something new!" it just doesn't make sense.
Alternately, you seem to be saying "Hell, everyone else is using Windows and they don't seem to mind it all that much. I guess we might as well stick to the formula. Gates is a genuis."
There's nothing wrong with commenting that Linux doesn't have all the features that it needs. It's a troll because in response to the comment "It is a NeXT unix based OS", you complained about MacOS being "downgraded" by adding unix like features, said that "Win95 is a big DOS application" (which is far from the truth), and that BeOS is "100x faster". That, my friend, is pure flamebait.
:P
----
"I'm just a lowlife" --rk.
I can assure you that your definition of genius is not univerally accepted. I would suggest that originally is a fundamental component of genius.
Ask anyone in the industry their opinion of Carmack and you'll get the exact same response
a.) I seriously doubt everyone in the industry would concur on anything, and
b.) I can't say that I'd care. Millions of people buy Michael Bolton albums. Kenny G wins Grammys. That doesn't make either man a genius.
The guy is incredibly talented at optimizing code
...which makes him a relatively talented programmer, not a genius.
Uh, they're using OpenGL, not glide specifically. Glide is just used by Mesa on 3DFX.
Mac OS X has not been released.
To tell genius, you compare work of the man to the other work out at the same time, and EVERY ONE of Carmack's engines,
from the sprite-based Doom engine to the true 3d Quake and Quake2 engine has been LEAPS AND BOUNDS above anything
out at the time of its release.
----
Ummm...you forgot Bungie.
I'm pretty sure that Pathways into Darkness was already out when Doom was released, and Doom's engine was no better than Pathway's engine (if not more primitive). Marathon was released within a few months (3, 6, 9??) of Doom, and was lightyears ahead.
I dusted off an old copy of Marathon of Christmas, and it's amazing what these guys did back in 1994 (1993?) without video acceleration. In addition, the physics model was spectacular. Doom was kinda fun, but seemed really primitive next to Marathon, both in plot and technology.
But there is a Windows version of GIMP, so a Macintosh version may well be developed.
And if he knew anything about BeOS, he'd have known it is based off of a UNIX based OS (BSD, if my memory serves me correctly).
Why not? I have 2 linux boxen... one with a classic voodoo and one with a voodoo 2...
FeeDBaCK
I know this. I was using X as a general term, rather than explaining every fine detail because then my point might get lost. And I was sure people would understand what I was saying anyway.
Are you nuts? You're saying that comparing the fastest hardware 3D on PCs to the bloody Rage Pro on Macs is FAIR? Geez...Where have you been, man? I've had my Voodoo2 for a while now, and it would kick the crap out of any Rage Pro piece of junk any day of the week, without even trying.
I'm sure that MacOS 8.6 adds some nice new features and fixes some problems, but adding something like memory protection requires a complete rewrite. That's what the point of MacOS X is, but it's not out.
The point which almost everyone misses about memory protection for MacOS 8.x is that it would throw out backwards compatibility completely. Any non-trivial app is required to access low memory or walk (and, in some cases, change) data structures maintained by the system... window lists, file control blocks, and whatnot.
The main reason why there's no true protected memory in 8.x is that Adobe, Microsoft and other large developers would scream - and users, too. Right now many games and apps from 1984/85 still run... if 8.6 came out with protected memory nothing, not a single released app would run.
Witness how everybody dug in their heels when Apple announced a migration to Yellow Box... so they were forced to introduce Carbon, which finally gets rid of the stuff that accesses system data... but then it sits on top of a new OS...
With some experience you can do sufficiently defensive programming so that the lack of protection doesn't slow down development too much. I crash about once a day while developing my stuff, but 3-4 times while browsing the Web (either Netscrape or Exploder crash...). I can understand that Carmack's not willing to slow down his stuff by checking nil pointers and such, but non-game developers shouldn't heed his comments too much.
Man we gotta get off this transistor thing. What dated technology.
The deal with UNIX is that in 30 years, people have figured out most of the stuff that you can screw up, and they have been fixed. The deal with Linux is that it is a new OS that rebuilt UNIX based on the design knowledge of 30 years, but without inheriting the code base, with all of its ugly hacks to fix those problems discoverd in 30 years.
Besides, once you strip away the pretty pictures, every OS has to do basically the same things. Why not base your system on proven technology?
Mac people are silly.
Linux people are commies.
Can't we all just get along?
Frankly, I don't know what everyone is complaining about - when it comes to certain things, like audio/multimedia development, the MacOS *still* can't be beat.
The Mac is great for doing things *OTHER* than coding. I use the OS that enables me to write music (in my case) intuitively and without even thinking about the fact that I'm using a computer. Try *that* with Windows or your bloated open source wares.
*CAUTION*
Now, call me a Mac-Nazi, but I honestly don't get this whole anti-Apple thing. As soon as anyone makes a comment in support of them (it seems), someone has to go and say its "pro-mac propaganda." You big bullies... all of you.
I'm thrilled that id is releasing Quake3 for Mac... We've put up with this second-hand shit for too long. And as far as Carmack is concerned, more power to him. He's just trying to help, I suppose.
What do you find more valuable: an OS in and of itself, or the PRODUCT which arises from it? You have to admit, people are still doing great things with the supposedly inferior Mac.
-ad
Pathways into Darkness's engine is basically on level of Wolfenstein 3D. Doom's technology was way ahead of that.
Marathon came out well after Doom did, and it's technology is virtually identical to Doom's. Although I don't know it's exact release date, keep in mind that Marathon II came out _after_ Quake did -- that's 2.5 years after the original Doom came out, and 1.5 years after Doom II!
Calling Doom primitive compared to Marathon is completely absurd.
If nothing else, someone should be able to hack mesa so that it runs in a different thread than the application, with stub methods to send commands into a queue. I don't know how fast this would be (probably a big lose on UP systems, but maybe a reasonable gain on SMP). Might not be as big a deal for hardware rendering anyway...
Carmack with Spec95?
or
Jobs with ByteMarks?
I've read a Mac person's take on the ByteMarks, and he didn't seem to think too highly of them.
He notices that the 603, 604, and G3 gave close results. He then tried the tests again with different memory configs and notices that the nubers didn't really change. He concluded that bytemarks are so small that they can live in the L1 cache.
Carmack apparently played around with having multiple processor support in Quake 3: Arena, but figured it didn't offer enough of an advantage. If you check his .plan file he has a pretty detailed description of what the issues are. You can dig it up on finger.planetquake.com if you're interested.
I thought the GGI project was using the venerable OpenGL (through Mesa) for their 3D needs. Id has always supported OpenGL so a Quake-GGI wouldn't be a big deal.
Pathways into Darkness's engine is basically on level of Wolfenstein 3D. Doom's technology was way ahead of that
:-). Also, the mar engine was much more polished. It's quite a pitty that at the time of it's release Mac hardware wasn't at all game freindly...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Harly.. PAthways was more of a D&D type thing. The monsters were intelligent and real bastards. You could go back and forth between levels pluss set the screen res to anything, random monsters, many special items (like a crystal that would freeze all monster on the screen) Trust me Pathways was very far ahead of anything. It's STILL a GREAT game now, not to mention bloody hard... PLus it ran perfectly on a machine as cruddy as an LCII (ie: 16Mhz 68020). Wolf 3-D on the other hand required an 68040 25Mhz.
The MArahton engine was better then doom's engine by quite a ways as well. Having made maps for both, Marathon's engine was so sweet. I loved having leveld rooms, ie: in Marathon you can put rooms on top of each other and EVEN IN THE SAME REAL SPACE. This allowed for the creation of some preatty confusing maps
Mar II is a nice engine and comes with a really good map making tool. Although I don't like the textures and game play in the game Mar II. Also the engine isn't that much more impressive then Mar I. It's got a nice vertical orinetation though.
Pathways kicks so much ass!
Pinky
Just because an OS has good software, that doesn't make an OS good. Just because the Mac has alot of good music software, that doesn't make it a technically good OS! That's what Carmack was dicussing -- the technical merits of MacOS.
However, the previous poster came along and started bashing Carmack for pointing out several technical deficiencies of MacOS. I think it's safe to say that he/she was spreading pro-mac propaganda by launching a personal attack on Carmack (saying that be publishes alot of incorrect or misleading information -- that comment was _completely_ baseless).
Of course, Mesa will run better than something that doesn't work at all (MiniGL under Q3:A). The point is that Mesa is highly unoptimal, as you see when comparing it to the performance of MiniGL (both with Q2).
All Carmack said was that a serious 3D gamer wouldn't play on a Mac, because the best performance available there doesn't even come close to the best performance on the Mac. What's unfair about it? He's comparing the best that one platform can currently do, to the best that another can.
Unfortunately, RagePro is the best chipset for which the Mac has good support. Live with it.
But NO.
The ATI 3D Rage Pro is 2 generations BEHIND the Rage 128. ATI's 3d products are like this:
3D Rage
3D Rage Pro (Macs are here)
3D Rage II/II+DVD (maybe here)
3D Rage 128 (this is the newest chip on PC's)
The Rage 128 is going to new Macs soon, but it's not in current Macs.
The comparison is still unfair.
In terms of 3D graphics technology, Pathways into Darkness's was based on a Wolf3D clone engine. It had a different style of play, of course, so you can't really compare them on that front.
Marathon II for the PC was released after Quake, but the Mac version came out much eariler. (Mac Marathon II was about Aug '95 and Quake was July '96)
check apple's website - new macs (not iMacs) come standard with the Rage 128, and have done so since before the rage 128 was available for the PC. Here's the link:
http://www.apple.com/powermac/specs.html
Know what you are talking about before you open your mouth.
Every Blue and White G3 comes stock with the Rage 128 - and they have since they debuted last January 5th.
Apple worked closely with ATI to ensure that they could ship them with the G3's before they were available for the PC. The drivers weren't perfect at first, althought they were good enough for most people. Updated drivers are available.
Geez, I gotta start playing some more games. I guess I'm not serious enough to have money to pay for all that yet.
Geez people, BeOS is not Unix based, it doesn't use the BSD kernel, it doesn't use the Mach "micro"kernel etc. The *ideas* behind the BeOS kernel may be Unix like but they wrote it and the window system themselves. The system is POSIX compliant so they use existing stuff like bash as their command line shell.
Personally I think BeOS is a bunch of crap, but get your facts straight first.
Wrong, every blue and white G3 comes with a 16 meg Rage 128 card. A bit better than a Rage Pro.
I wish he made it clear if he was refering to Mac OS 8.x (even then, 8.5 or 8.6?) or Mac OS X when he said "Mac OS still sucks." People I have been talking to on IRC take this as him saying Mac OS X sucks, even though that would contradict what he says about considering Mac OS X as a development platform.
It's annoying when people let their biases cloud rational thinking.
Of course there's a small chance they are right, but you wouldn't be able to tell whether they are right or not from the way he said it.
or you could get a opengl accelerated card, i think that would work.
OS X Server can do remote display to other machines running the same OS. It does this via Display Postscript. The screen is drawn using Postscript, which is sent to a Postscript interpreter called the WindowServer.
On OSX Server and the NeXT operating systems, you can have the stream of Postscript data sent to a WindowServer on a different computer for display.
This is going away, however. Apple is getting rid of Display Postscript for various reasons (Adobe wants to kill DPS, and Adobe charges a non-trivial license fee), and replacing it with something they're calling an enhanced Quickdraw.
Supposedly, they're going to keep remote display in mind while developing the new display architecture. Remote display probably won't be part of the OS, but third parties may be able to implement it. Just how this would work isn't known. Hopefully more details will be available at the Apple developer conference next month.
None of this is cast in stone.
It would be cool if the new display architecture made it possible to implement a gateway to/from X-Windows.
I don't believe this for a second. Linux is the preferred OS for old or even ancient hardware. You'd be a fool to buy the latest and greatest gizmos for a Linux based system because driver support will be severely limited.
Remember this is all just Carmack's personal opinion. I for one vastly prefer the MacOS API to the Windows API or *shudder* X Windows based APIs. Of course Yellow Box reigns supreme.
The reason for anti-mac is simple as it is obvious. The company Apple is just as bad as Microsoft, this is a fact, we have known this for years, only the mac users are to blind to see this becasue they are to lazy to learn a real OS (Read: any unix).
Apple has a long history of being a bad company, everyone knows it, its obvious there ASPL and shit is just a ploy.
Also, how about PerMedia? Are its 3D facilities supported by Mesa?
Yeah, I think the guy who wrote the ByteMarks a long time ago wrote about how he thought it was a ludicrous benchmark to use these days. That might have even been written in BYTE (before it finally completed the journey of going to hell).
Couldn't they do something like (shudder) Windows did? Namely, leave the same cooperative-multi environment, but make each process think it was the only one, in a virtual memory space.
I just checked the page, VNC supports Macintosh, too.
will be a Playstation 2 and anything fast enough to emulate it.
Why does Adobe want to ditch DPS? It sounds so cool. Are we going to see it changed to DPDF instead?
OK, maybe I'll invite them for a quick look at my superior Linux system running Q3 Test.
The only problem is, the last time I checked Linux GL was way slower than on windoze... So I'll be VERY surprised if Linux Q3A is faster than windoze (maybe even mac too =) I think linux is cool and I hope it beats windows, but I can name many reasons for quaking in windoze vs. linux
And how do you know every Mac user who is going to play q3test knows nothing about computers?
It's not like it's being sold at stores so any Joe Schmoe who sees it can pick it up. It can be assumed if they are aware of the beta, they are more likely to know more about the game and stuff related to it (different hardware options, etc etc etc).
You can't exactly assume every person using Linux now is a power user considering how much media exposure it's gotten over the past year. Maybe 2-3 years ago you could have made the comment since those using it were not using it because it's popular or had games.
I really don't think you can say all of those who use Linux (or even a majority) who are highly knowledgeable are going to even care about or play q3test.
Those dumb morons who can't even write their own name (as you seem to stereotype a Mac user as) have 2 distributions (?) of Linux available for the Macs.
Some people choose the OS/platform that is superior for their needs rather than choosing the one they think makes them look more intelligent or rebellious. Just because a company tries to actually make the computer easy for anyone to use doesn't make anyone who uses it inferior. "You program in C?!?! Hahaha, you know nothing... only intelligent people like me code in 0s and 1s!"
If a person has no need for Linux, or can get superior alternatives with another OS, it is smarter for them to choose the other OS. Likewise, if a person prefers Linux for whatever they need/do, they choose Linux. I don't think it's logical to assume almost every person who use Macs know nothing about their computers based on the fact it's made to be easier to use (although you do not mention this, this often gets drawn in when trying to argue a similar point as yours) or more computer illierate use another OS/platform than yours (in this case Linux). Which doesn't automatically mean a majority (of those testing q3test) know nothing about computers or software.
lets just say Mac OS sucks..
Win is having driver problems and getting them (MS) to get em certified
Give your G3 a run for it's money.. Q3Test is out..
http://www.quake3arena.com/q3test/index.html
I've seen virtual desktops on regular MacOS, so I'm sure someone will stick it in OSX.
Except the system your using will not be FREE (as in freedom!). You can bow down to Steve, I've got better things to do.
Perhaps. But prime time is boring. I usually sleep through it.
Everyone is yapping on about the amount of users, which, as far as I
saw, was mostly a secondary concern to them. The big thing was that
the Win version wasn't ready because of a bottleneck with Microsoft.
The advantage of Q3T on the Mac first is not so much users, as it
is that the platform serves as a good control for the other tests.
Had you read correctly, you would've seen that they wanted to catch
bugs with Q3T, not with hardware configuration. The Mac
fits that nicely. I didn't really see a lack of users cited for
releasing to Linux before Win32. For all we know, it's simply a
driver issue. That's what Zaphod/Carmack went on about.
Boy, now one can get a positive Score just by copy/pasting the very article in discussion.
How pathetic.
Doom was released in December 1993. DOOM II: Hell on Earth was released in Oct 1994. Marathon I was released in December 1994, but the demo had been floating around for a few months. Marathon II: Durandal was released in August 1995. Quake was released in 1996 (dates obtained from Bungie and Id's home pages).
Marathon's engine pushed more pixels, featured 16-bit color (24 bit option upgrade came out a month or two after the initial release). You could pivot up and down, left and right, run sideways, jump, swim (Mara II), etc. The physics model was far superior to what was in Doom.
The lighting effects and Alien (Nostramo?) like setting made the game look top-notch. Sorry, but Doom looked primitive to me. But maybe you're right: maybe Doom did come out significantly earlier.
Heck, Marathon inspired me to clock-chip my Centris 650 from 25 to 40mhz!!!
My, what a profoundly insightful opening salvo...
As far as pute technical programming merit, this man IS a genius
No, as far as pure technical programming merit is concerned, this man is a good programmer. Period. It seems to escape the understanding of some in this forum that advanced programming skill is not in and of itself indicative of genius. (The unrelenting torrent of praise showered on this guy by fawning teenage boys with moist underpants notwithstanding.) Given a decade to work exclusively on the same programming challenge, many professional programmers would be readily capable of acheiving this type of "genius" status. In fact, a great many programmers who happen to be far less inclined to self-promotion than the esteemed Mr. Carmac have done just that.
Until then, grow the hell up
I suspect you're offering this advice to someone much older than yourself, but I'll accept the complement, nonetheless.
This has been released already for windows....someone needs to get a real life when he says that it will be released for MACS first.. dream on
I'm not sure why Adobe wants to stop work on DPS. They're heavily into PDF, so perhaps they don't want to deal with the added complexity of the Postscript Interpreter anymore?
Apple's new imaging system for OS/X is supposed to use the PDF imaging model (not the PDF format, though that will be available as an file output format, I should think).
I guess that gets you Display PDF, so to speak. It should be quite a bit faster than DPS, even though DPS is pretty snappy on OpenStep. For most purposes, anyway.
Display Ghostscript isn't free for commercial use. Apple needs a free system, for use with a YellowBox runtime on Windows. Something lighter-weight than a full Postscript interpreter would be nice, too.
Also, as you noticed, it's Not Quite There Yet.
Anyway, there are benefits to moving away from an interpreted Postscript system. For one, speed.
For another, robustness: the achilles heel of NeXTSTEP is that, if the WindowServer goes down due to bad postscript, all your apps go down, because they all go through the WindowServer.
ftp://q3:q3@134.53.238.239//Gossamer_Shared/MacQ3T est.bin a c/MacQ3Test.bin m ac/MacQ3Test.bin
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/.4/idgames/idstuff/quake3/m
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames/idstuff/quake3/
ftp://208.166.41.43/other/MacQ3Test.bin
ftp://128.253.27.92/MacQ3Test.bin
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com//pub/idgames/idstuff/quake3/ma c/MacQ3Test.bin Q 3Test.bin
ftp://q3:q3@134.53.238.239//Gossamer_Shared/Mac
ftp://208.166.41.43/other/MacQ3Test.bin
My entire list:m ac/MacQ3Test.bin Q 3Test.bin n i le=MacQ3Test.bin Q 3Test.bin
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames/idstuff/quake3/
ftp://q3:q3@134.53.238.239//Gossamer_Shared/Mac
ftp://208.166.41.43/other/MacQ3Test.bin
ftp://128.253.27.92/MacQ3Test.bin
ftp://bootp.sls.usu.edu/quake3/mac/MacQ3Test.bi
http://www.quakecity.net/files.asp?dir=quake3&f
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake3/mac/Mac
save everyone some time and changei le=MacQ3Test.bin
http://www.quakecity.net/files.asp?dir=quake3&f
to
ftp://www.quakecity.net/quake3/MacQ3Test.bin
Not exactly. The other advantage with releasing
for MacOS is that the hardware is very similar.
Linux users will have very different hardware
setups. With the MacOS version they pretty
much only have to support a ATI video configuration.
That means they get a large pool of users with
similar hardware so if the hardware drivers are
working they can concentrate on getting the main
game code running.
But that sounds alot like the differences between Win9x and NT
NT will make some machines that have the ram and CPU go faster, while a system that is not up to it will crawl.
There is also a "BlueBox" for NT that runs 16-bit apps, so they get flakey
Mac and Linux are getting the Q3Test first because they feel that more problems will come from those operating systems, especially MacOS.
.plan it would have shown that MacOS is an inferior operating system with many technical difficulties to overcome to bring games to the Apple platform.
Obviously they're holding back on the Win32 test because they don't feel Windows will have the problems MacOS will.
It's pretty sad that the MacNuts take that as some victory over Wintel when if they had read Carmacks
Talk about getting exicited over nothing.
Utterly irrelevant. We can play it RIGHT NOW and you can't, loser. Deal with it.
Yeah I wish Windows was as shitty for a gaming platform as MacOS so I could be playing Q3TEST right now too!!!
:(
Oh well.
What the hell are you talking about? Can you not comprehend what you read? As the last person mentioned, he decided on this order because the Mac has a smaller userbase (by his assumptions) who will be able/want to play this demo and will find the more obvious bugs first and return them. So, instead of releasing it on all at the same time and getting 238942370489237 emails on the same few bugs, he figured it'd be wiser to go with what he felt was the smaller userbase and only get a small number of emails on the more obvious bugs. Then they'd correct those problems, release a touched up version and get feedback on less frequent/noticeable bugs.
Where are you getting that all the Mac users assume this is some sort of victory? I'm sure some would think it has to do with that, just as some would assume Linux has become more popular than Windows because the test for it is being released before the Windows version.
I think perhaps you read it that way because you were mad/jealous it isn't out for your OS but it's out for another OS(s)... so you want to see that it has to do with the others being inferior and that's why it's being released for those first. That, or you just can't read since his plan is in no way saying the same thing as you are saying it says.
He does say "Mac OS still sucks", and I'm assuming he means Mac OS 8.x (I'm sure it does, oh well)... because he also mentions he is considering using Mac OS X as a development platform.
3D Rage
3D Rage Pro (Macs are here)
3D Rage II/II+DVD (maybe here)
3D Rage 128 (this is the newest chip on PC's)
Assuming your list is in ascending order, the rage ii should be before the pro.
YES way, unfortunately.
;-). As you can see, there's a *vast* difference.
I run an SLI Voodoo II configuration on a Celeron 300A o/c to 464MHz and 128M RAM.
Quake II appears to be cpu-bound. I get the same framerate (54.5 fps or thereabouts) in 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768 under both FreeBSD (Linux emulation) and Linux native.
Compare this to around 85 fps in 640x480, 75 fps in 800x600 and 60 fps in 1024x768 under Windows (well over 100 fps in 640x480 with vsync disabled -- these scores are bound by the refresh rate of my monitor
I choose to play Quake II under FreeBSD rather than reboot into Windows. ~55 fps is very playable, but as far as performance goes -- Linux GL just isn't up to scratch (yet).
-jake
There's a leaked windows version of Q3A floating around. I've played it (if you can call it playing), and I wish I hadn't. It was painfully slow on SLI Voodoo II, though it did run ok on my friend's TNT.
;-)
Hopefully the *official* Q3A test will be a little more mature
I was playing it on a 350MHz blue G3 with a cable modem. My ping was ridiculously high 4-500 but it was still lots of fun. The graphics are great, especially the plumes from the rockets. When someone is standing still typing, a blue smiley face shows up on their face.
I wish the weapons had more of a punch, in Q2, I could take someone out with one blast of the db shotgun, here it seems to take much more effort.
Tomorrow, I'm going to MicroCenter and buying a two button mouse and extended USB keyboard. Now, I can finally get rid of that Windows box that I've held on to all this time.
you are a fool, to think that a PII 400Mhz with any, add-ons, can even hold a candle to a "stock"
G3. First off, you express your "TNT/Rage128"
graphics card, this a serious load, becuase some
of the most advanced graphics cards publicly available, are for only the Macintosh. and besides, if my memory serves me, the iMac, comes with
a 128 card. ummm how much money did you spend on your slow out-of-date computer?
Yeah, you're so smart. that must be the reason why..
By your logic, when Mac ports start showing up few months afterwards for other games it must be because Mac is a better platform..
Ah, but for how long?
Its a console, as in "not upgradable".
the Celeron, its a CPU from intel that costs from
60 to 160 buck depending on speed. The 400mhz
version can currently be had for 112 bucks.
The celeron is,clock for clock, excactly as fast
as a PII and even a PIII (excluding the currently
not used by any game SSE instructions, wich BTW
will be on the Celeron early next year).
Now how much is a 400mhz G3, or even a 300mhz?
My 300mhz Celeron (75 bucks in january) overclocks
just fine to 464mhz, and a not so stable 504mhz.
In the price performance area the Celeron clearly
rules the earth. Now lets all take a silent moment
and thank Intel...mmm
Intel Celeron. 400mhz is 112 bucks. Same CPU core as the PII. Go get some.
The G3 is a faster processor. But be real. The TNT/128 aren't like or supposed to be the $1000+ video cards for DV, and the like. And for the record, the Rage 128 is still sloer than the TNT. The Pentium II 400 is not out of date and don't even try the RISC vs. CISC bull I know, but that still means jack to the person cruising at 80-90 frames/sec on their PII with a TNT. Anyway, for RISC to be a real advantage, it must have the softare needed and tunes for it. You must kno by no that the Alpha choked under x86 applications. The Alpha being the only RISC-based processor that is really worth buying. You are the fool for thinking that any one technology is fully better than another, each current one has advantages. Try a little objectivity, it suits you.
Depends on the hardware. A top-of-the-line G3 beats any Intel hardware I've seen, but a pIII 500 MHz can certainly smoke an iMac (albeit for three times the price).
When are you Mac guys going to get it? A G3 may beat an Intel chip in integer performance for the same clock speed. But gamers care about the integer performance of a CPU about as much as they care about the 2D performance of a graphics card.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/server/. It's got every tasty drop of BSD inside, and though you'd get interface oddities (not the nice MacOS interface consistency that UNIX could use badly) I believe that you can use anything that BSD can handle.
The question is whether you're in that 99% or not. Apple used to be really brain-dead about games. They aren't now. I don't know whether you know this or not (I would guess not). Does Carmack have good points? Sure. Is he a little over-emphatic on OS X? Sure, he's slamming the standard MacOS only because he wants Apple to finally get his much-loved OS X out of the starting gate. Not to say I don't like OS X...it rocks. But you need to realize the context that he's speaking in...he's a rabid NeXT fan, and he's pushing OS X strongly over MacOS. And he *does* make great games. :-) Course, if anyone can get Apple moving, I'd bet Carmack could.
Not really. The core in Server and (Workstation?) is the same. It's the superficialities that will be changed. Hopefully, Apple won't stoop to M$ NT-style crippling of Workstation. But OS X is essentially superficialities over BSD. You could say that OS X shipped years ago, when BSD came out. :-)
There are smart Linux people out there. But the brainless ones are tons of fun to poke and watch go nuts. Sir, the point you're "refuting" stands. The OS programmers are the sole people to care if an OS is cool internally. What you can do with it is the important part. GIMP was a far bigger advancement for Linux than the 2.2 kernel was (with all due respect to Torvalds). I cannot see a single personal attack on Carmack in the post you're replying to. There is a thing such as anti-Mac propoganda as well.
The Celeron was Intel's answer to their cheaper competitors. It was introduced to undercut them. They probably make barely money off of their sales, and mainly exist to keep people from buying AMD and Cyrix CPUs.
He wasn't whining about 3dfx (not the lower case d) implementations. He was whining about the lack of OpenGL drivers on the Mac platform for 3dfx hardware.
:-), etc. I built a comperable system at Dell (I consider their machines to be resonably prices in the Intel world) and at Apple's store.
Fair enough.
And as far as Spec95 vs Bytemark, I'll never ever accept that a 233 MHz iMac beats a 400 MHz PII. That's just garbage. And when he was referring to speed, he was talking about the speed he got from his own benchmarks with the game he made.
I agree that the Bytemarks are pushing the envelope in Apple's favor. But you cannot begin to comprehend the difference between the PowerPC architecture and the x86 architecture. Look at AMD vs Intel. Pretty big speed differences between the two in specific areas, right? And the AMD chips are clones of Intel chips, with a few instructions added and a few changes made. Almost identical in structure. Now, you're comparing software designed for a different architecture, on a different endianess (is the PPC Q3T having to flip bytes left and right?) compiled with different compiler *families* (not even just a different compiler) on a different OS under a different tasking environment with different APIs on chips that have nothing to do with one another other than that they can both do things like floating point and integer math! Comparing clock speeds between the two is ludicrous. It's like comparing the RPMs on helicopter blades and vehicle tires to determine vehicle speed. And you have to admit that it's darn hard to optimize a program for two chips perfectly. I rather suspect Carmack knows the x86 more closely than the PPC, and that he did better work designing for the x86 chip. Put the top PPC optimizers on the project (he's got darn good x86 optimizers now), design Quake *4* from the ground up for the PPC, and I'll tell you that Q4 PPC would stomp Q4 x86 by far more than Q3 x86 stomps Q3 PPC.
The Rage Pro, on a gaming level, is a load of garbage. My old Voodoo1 has a better 3D feature list.
Agreed. So why is he doing the comparison on the Rage Pro? If he wants to compare a hard-core Mac gaming systemt to a hard-core PC gaming system, put a Rage 128 or Voodoo2 or something in (Admittedly, the lack of TNT2 for the Mac does suck.)
He says that MacOS's problems have gone away with OS X. But OS X isn't out. OS X _Server_ is out. That's not for everyone. That's not for Mac gamers. So as far as OS X goes, it's not here.
No. He's trying to push Apple into working on OS X faster. Take his OS X views into consideration.
Finally, as far as his equivalent machines go, consider the price of a loaded G3 vs a P2-400. The prices don't even compare, the G3 is priced way out there.
Macs are more expensive, but not *that* much more...and you get a lot of goodies, like a nicer case, cooler running, a choice of a MacOS-Linux rather than a Windoze-Linux machine
Mac (G3 blue case) PC (Dell)
300 Mhz G3 PPC/512k L2 cache 400 Mhz P2/512L2
64 MB SDRAM 64 MB SDRAM
6 GB Ultra ATA HD 6.4 GB UltraATA HD
-I didn't choose a monitor on either system...I'd rather get a Viewsonic or something nice at a good price from a 3rd party-
DVD and decoder DVD and decoder
10/100 Base-T Ethernet 10/100 Base-T Ethernet
No modem WinModem (Dell doesn't let you drop the modem!)
Internal speakers HK-195 speakers (throw-away...Dell doesn't let you drop them) I'd rather go Cambrige Soundworks or something.
On-board standard Mac sound Yamaha XG soundcard
Apple USB Keyboard Microsoft Natural
Apple USB Mouse Logitech Mouseman
Totals:
Mac: $1699 PC: $1336
Yeah, the PC is cheaper, but not by *that* much. This assumes you want a gaming system that you can upgrade well. If you aren't planning to expand your system, you can get an iMac, and then you're looking at *real* competition.
(Regardless of what you think, on average fully-optimized code, a 300 Mhz G3 is comperable to about a 400 Mhz P2 (though not way faster, as Apple likes to say)). Depends on exactly what you're doing, of course.
After a rant that long, I think it's fairly obvious that the Mac isn't quite the greatest gaming platform out there. Old Mac's can't do it (Rage Pro), upgraded old Mac's can't do it (no 3dfx OpenGL driver). The new Macs, while nice, are overpriced compared to their equivalent Wintel box. And finally, OS X is still not here (what a shame though, that Win98 is the gaming platform of choice for 9x boxes).
Old Macs can't compete? Neither can old PCs or any other old computer. The machines aren't that overpriced. Finally, I understand Win98 being the gaming platform of choice. The way Win xx gets performances is forgoing following proper memory protection, etc. If you ever made Linux into an equivalent gaming platform, it would look something like Win 2000 is supposed to. Sort of stable, most of the time, unless someone's playing a game that messes things up.
Maybe Windows is more popular than the Mac for gaming. However, the Mac grabs Linux by the throat, knocks it around, and beats the snot out of it in the gaming arena. I like Linux, but I'm happy with gaming remaining it its infancy. Just the other day, I d/led a "demo" (you know, graphics demo) from Freshmeat. It was sorry compared to what an elderly DOS machine or the Mac could do, yet Linux people were raving about it. Linux just isn't a great 3d gaming platform. That's OK -- Linux protects you from dying all over. I like stability, and I'll take it over Windoze graphics performance any day. Just don't expect to be playing 3d games (or playing DVD, or using USB joysticks) on the same level as Windows users any time soon.
Maybe if we get modularized graphics drivers that don't have to be compiled into the X server, just maybe we'll see more driver support for 3d cards under Linux.
I am not a fan of X-windows. Linux itself is elegant. X-windows only rules the day because there's no better alternative. It has many of the disadvantages of the Windoze/MacOS GUI without many advantages. Remote control of programs...how often do you actually *do* this? Shared memory helps, but what we really need is a new GUI architecture on Linux. (and yes, you're right, I'm complaining and don't plan to fix the problem myself).
Does OS X run on an Intel platform? Don't you have to get a PPC platform?
Jeez, there's a lot of nasty replies to this. Stop and think for a moment, people. I spit in the face of anyone who is using Linux right now and slamming Mac gaming, because no matter how bad the Mac, Linux gaming is a hundred, a thousand times worse. Could this change in the future? Sure. Is the Mac currently better than Linux for gaming? Yup.
It wasn't just for that. He's trying to emphasize to Apple (observe his past NeXT leanings) OS X over OS 8.5. He's trying to get them to drop 8.5 like a hot potato and get OS X on the burner.
I gotta say, I pretty much agree with his motives, if not his method of doing so. It's not fair to slam 8.5 to try to get OS X out.
I dono. Admittedly, after a while on the Mac I did try to program under Windows. I quickly got annoyed, swore off Windows, and went to program in Linux. Still, MFC is C++ oriented. I'd like to see a standard class library under the Mac.
The Mac's real asset is its UI, not its API!
You could say MacOS sucks. I think about 10 million people that use and love the MacOS (i.e. millions more than use Linux) would disagree, however.
Sigh. And none of it matters without good hardware support. They could make up their own 3D engine, for all I care. I mean, if you're Linux and not Voodoo (like me), you're pretty much outa luck. I wish XFree86 would have a modularized driver system (so you don't have to recompile to use a new card...just drop in the driver). There might be more hardware vendors interested in Linux then.
no, it does not allow you to play on win32, just serve games for macs
ftp://128.253.27.92/q3test_server_win32_x86.zip
more mirrors
Supposedly anyways . . .
must have openGL card
ftp://128.253.27.92/e21pr0_demo.exe
more info
68k not 800x0.
ppc can run 68k stuf.
PII 400 with TNT and "add-ons" can run neck and neck with the top of the line G3, and for less money if you build it yourself. That goes for PIIIs also, the PIII is not significantly faster than the PII. The most bang for the buck is the Celeron in the normal or overclocked variety. I prefer G3 but you can get a good inexpensive gaming rig using Intel.
I don't really think that the most "ADVANCED" graphics cards are avialable for the Mac, ATI is pretty generic in the PC world, not quite as bad as S3. Graphics cards for the mac are good, but not stunning. PC's have 2X AGP and soon 4X AGP. The PC has better game APIs than the Mac, hopefully with the adoption of OpenGL this may change, John Carmack seems to think so.
The newest iMac does come with a Rage Pro Turbo, which is pretty good. I am not sure if it is 128 bit.
rage pro isn't even close to the fastest mac card.
the rage 128 is *alot* faster!
wrong, rage 128
All blue an white g3's come with rage 128.
Mac OS X will have both a procedural API (Carbon, similar to the old MacOS API) and the best OO API in the world (YellowBox). You'll be able to code native apps in plain C, ObjC, Java and C++ (via PowerPlant which will be Carbonized). So it's not just the UI that will rock.
Anyone who is developing under and OS that is missing a key feature like proper memory management will affected by that. No matter how much great software there is available for MacOS, it will still be a big hassle to develop under. Having Gimp available doesn't make it easier to develop under Linux, and that's what Carmack was dicussing -- developer, not user issues. .plan archives to see what I mean). I consider that a personal attack, because it's an attempt to make him look like a liar.
As for the personal attack I was referring to, the second poster said that "he does publish a lot of stuff that is NOT correct, or is highly misleading". That is completely baseless; Carmack is one of the most trusted people in the gaming industry. The arguments that she/he presents to support the claim that Carmack is not trustworthy are refuted in other posts (with the exception the Spec95 comment; but that was taken out of context also -- read his
I do!
Correct me if I'm wrong but I heard that MacOS 8.6 supports SMP.
Sorry if this seems out of place but...
I never touched my mothers iMac before, but as q3test is for Mac as of now I dl'd it and installed it there. On startup it says "cannot find OpenGL" (or similar). I've been looking around for these OpenGL drivers but couldn't find them. Could anyone please post the URL?
Thanxs in advance and sorry again.
The most advance graphics cards publicly available only work with an SGI Onyx2 Infinite Reality.
That doesn't sound too bad then, because PDF is in many ways just a different representation of PostScript (yes, I know it has a lot of other features). I just hope for Apple's sake that it isn't as sickeningly slow as Acrobrat.
(I wrote "Have you heard...")
Enough for what?
You obviously dont have one of these yourself, i suggest you look up benchmarks on some game/hardware site, (like tomshardware or sharkyextreme), you will find that for ALL games (and as I understand, most other applications except for heavy duty databases and servers and such)128kb of full-speed on die cache is enough and allows the Celeron to perform within a couple of percent of the PII and PIII on current non-SSE games/applications. And until the SSE instructions are used in games it will remain completly equal. And also, 0.18 micron Celerons with SSE and 100mhz FSB (not that the current 66mhz FSB limits the Celeron in any way in games) are due early next year.
Yes the Celeron is Intels attempt to regain/keep control over the growing sub 1000 dollar pc market wich AMD/Cyrix virtually created in 97/98. So you object to the fact that because of competition real fast prosessors are now real cheap...well by all means, if you have money to burn. I prefer not to pay more than i have to.
That Intel now sees Cyrix and AMD as real competititon means I dont have to.
Wake up all ye Celeron doubters, for it is indeed a processor with balls of silicon!!!
Yes, go on, sell your soul and get more power for less. You can regret it in the afterlife (when AMD and Cyrix go bust that is).
Yes a cat did get my tounge. It was not a pleasent expirience, im drooling blood on my keyboard rigth now.
(ever try posting an empty post, do and you will get it)
Yes, Carmack does not know how to benchmark computers properly. That is a well known fact in the Dallas development community. We try to keep it from the public, but sometimes the little rascal posts some nonsense in his .plan before anyone can stop him.
He can code though, which (belive me) is the only reason this man still has a job!
Undercutting like this is only something very large, poweful corporations can do (well, unless you want to go out of business by trying to undercut them back). Remember Microsoft? This is one of their strategies of killing their competetion.
You think it's for your benefit now, but when AMD and Cyrix no longer exist, or have the money to keep up with advances because everyone went to Intel...what do you think will happen then? If you're all for helping to make monopolies, go with it. I could understand if you're barely making it and all you can afford is the Celerons, but I highly doubt you, or most of those who use Celerons and visit these pages are poor. Especially those that have computers capable of running the latest 3d first person shooter.
Sometimes consumer ethics are needed for capitalism to work for the best. The problem is most consumers are stupid and help certain monopolies (or close to) to develop when they could have been prevented with wiser consuming/purchasing.
> For another, robustness: the achilles heel of
> NeXTSTEP is that, if the WindowServer goes down
> due to bad postscript, all your apps go down,
> because they all go through the WindowServer.
The same is true if your X server crashes due to bad X requests...
I think Display PostScript is a cool idea together with X11, especially for writing cool publishing applications...
There were two tests - the one with the PIII 500 vs G3 400 was a sort of follow up, i guess, done by some PC Mag or some other. The G3 still beat or tied the PIII on most stuff. Then again, a G3 400 is more expensive than a PIII 500... but you get what you pay for.
So i should give Intel more money by bying a more expensive processor from them??
Oh, I get it, you think i should buy an AMD, well excuse me, I prefer a CPU that can actually do floating point maths faster than i can in my head.
Its all lost on you americans, isnt it.
The client version of OS X due later this year is supposed to be significantly different from the current "Server" version at both the core and superficial levels:
OS X Server 1.0:
* Mach 2.5++ / BSD 4.4 kernel
* "Blue Box" compatability environment for MacOS programs (runs a copy of MacOS 8.x in a virtual machine)
* GUI which is clearly a quick hack (combines superficial look&feel of MacOS with NeXT-like icons and interface, not very coherent yet)
OS X Client (and future versions of Server):
* New kernel. Possibly Mach 3.0 / BSD 4.4, possibly partially based on Apple's NuKernel which was developed for Copland.
* Carbon API for easy porting of MacOS apps to OS X
* Transparent MacOS compatability environment instead of emulate-in-a-box
* New GUI, presumably closer to traditional MacOS in look&feel and ease-of-use.
You could not jump in Marathon. In fact, none of the Marathon games support jumping, except in the sense of falling off ledges.
As to physics model superiority, neither was superior to the other. They both simulated vertical & horizontal acceleration. They just had different parameters (Marthon has very low gravity), and somewhat different rules (like how in Marathon you can completely change your direction of travel in midair).
Also, the Doom engine is capable of look up/down, but id chose not to use it in the game. With both engines it's very easy to do -- it's just a matter of allowing some viewport parameters to change; the engine doesn't have to change at all. The reasoning behind Doom not having it was that id wanted extremely fast-paced deathmatch play, so they wanted to cut down on control complexity in any way possible. They decided to cut look up/down as part of this, and added a vertical auto-aim to compensate. Marathon has a much different game play pace and deathmatch style, and no auto-aiming, so look up/down is appropriate for it.
Spent the last 2 hours playing it on my G3/266. It's very nice. The graphics really do live up to the hype in my opinion. Playing over a DSL line is very nice (but 300-500 ping on the server they are running). When you put it into 32-bit graphics mode everything looks SOOOooo purty! The lens flares, blasts, explosions, etc, all look amazing. The game moves fast unless you've got 4 or 5 people in the same room all using Plasma Guns on each other -- then the frame rate drops a bit. I suppose it would run faster in 16-bit gfx mode, but I want those textures to look smooth like silk! Get it. It's very very cool. Although the 22 meg download is misleading -- you also need to get the 6.5 meg OpenGL files as well. But it's worth it: I can go to work on Monday and rub a certain persons' nose in the fact that I have Q3 and he hasn't even seen it yet.
Theres is Display Ghostscript, I got it from the gnome cvs by accident.
It wasnt too fast, and was quite buggy when i tried it, a few months ago
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Is there any place one can find an unbiased review of OSX? I've yet to hear anything yet asides from Mac evangelists praising it to the hilt (which I don't trust) or anti-mac people saying that it's a piece of shit (ditto). Is such a thing even possible?
I fully trust Carmack's opinion, but he's looking at the system from the point of gaming, and that's not all I'm interested in. I'm mainly interested in how it sizes up as a Unix. I want to know its technical merits. I'm kind of interested in the GUI also, but GUI appreciation is such a subjective thing that I don't think reading about is a worthwhile expense of time. I'm especially uninterested in marketing, though :)
Other than that, I have to give Id software props, though. Anyone that supports linux is cool. Just a word of advice: ditch the Windows FTP server.
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
> I see no reason for X if you have a superior GUI already.
Because X isn't a GUI. fvwm2 is a GUI. Enlightenment is a GUI. Windowmaker is a GUI. X is a graphics transport protocol. There's no reason the Mac GUI couldn't make use of X, keep all of its famed "ease of use", and be network-transparent, too.
And that last is the real reason to have X. We're living in a networked world, and it's only going to become more so. In that world, the ability to sit in front of one machine and work with another as if it was right there is going to be increasingly valuable. Unix, between the power and easy remote use of its command shell and the network-transparency of X, has had this ability for many years. MacOS and Windows don't. As a result, MacOS and Windows are stuck in client-server or host-terminal relationships, rather than the much more powerful "one network, one computer" model Unix gets closer to with every increase in network bandwidth.
Do you seriously think linux has a larger userbase than Macs have?
I will say this, though- it's likely that linux has a user base with significantly more Quake-running capacity, because that level of CPU power is really pretty significant, and the Mac userbase has a substantial weighting towards housewives, Joe Sixpack et all who don't neccessarily have a machine that's recent.
I think linux users are to some extent more likely than average Mac users to have a machine recent enough to run Quake. This isn't at all the same thing as claiming the group (in general) is a bigger group.
How would you like it if something came out for Linux first and then NT, and all the comments were 'Of course, it's that way because Linux is insignificant, so they get the bugs out with the small group and then move on to the real group, NT'?
Sorry, it's just irritating. This is EXACTLY the same attitude that has most of the world considering Linux too geeky and insignificant to matter. All things matter, and Macs are not as small a group as you think (just as, in talking to Mac folks, I would say that Linux was not as small a group as they thought). OK?
Those lucky bastards will get Q3T first.
Only the beta test, if i read correctly. The retail versions will be released simultaneously i believe.
But then Carmack continues to say that Mac hardware is not as fast as Wintel.
Depends on the hardware. A top-of-the-line G3 beats any Intel hardware I've seen, but a pIII 500 MHz can certainly smoke an iMac (albeit for three times the price).
Then he says that he might consider MacOS X as his development machine. And last he says 'MacOS still suck'. And not a word about Linux, *sob*.
MacOS X, according to the people I know who use it, is quite good as a development environment. Lots of nifty utilities and IDEs that are better than their Windows counterparts (and don't even exist for Linux). However, I've never used it myself, so I can't really say. I do all my programming in real-mode (16-bit) DOS...
But my question is how close to UNIX is MacOS X?
Well, the kernel is basically BSD, so it's quite similar. Think of it as a modifed BSD with a much better GUI than X11.
Does it support X11 and UNIX98?
Not sure about X11. It might, but why would you want it to, when the MacOS GUI is much better?
As for UNIX98, it's not UNIX98 branded, to the best of my knowledge, but then again, neither is Linux or FreeBSD.
How easy is it to port Linux/UNIX applications to it?
Shouldn't be too hard, since the kernel is the same. Of course, if you want to port from X to the MacOS GUI, that could entail some work.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Where exactly are you going to find that top-of-the-line Ultrasparc or Alpha EV7 for $3000 again?
Unsubstantiated comments such as "Apple is really shit" are completely worthless. I could say "Linux is shit," but that doesn't make any more sense than your rant did. If i said "Linux is shit because the only hardware OpenGL support is has is through Mesa which relies on proprietary closed-source 3dfx Glide drivers," then I'd make more sense.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yes, all (new) G3s are shipped standard with a Rage 128, which is two generations newer technology than the Rage Pro Carmack was using in his comparison. The Rage 128 is comparable to a Voodoo2, so the Mac is more than good enough to run Quake3 quite nicely.
So, basically, yes, there is a higher performance 3d solution for the Mac that you (and apparently Carmack) were unaware of.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
When are you Mac guys going to get it?
Interesting assumption. I'm not a Mac guy. My two computers are an Intel Pentium II 266 MHz and a WinChip C6 200 MHz.
I just happen to agree that G3s are amazing processors.
Why do you x86 zealots immediately jump to the assumption that anybody who says something good about the Mac must be a Mac zealot? I'm not even a Mac user, much less a Mac zealot.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Posted by Nr9:
i have heard that the client version is completely different from the server other than BSD and mach roots, i think it has a different mach kernel
Only Mac OS X Server has been released. The client has yet to be shipped, and will differ from Server in significant ways.
--
Get your fresh, hot kernels right here!
There are probably still more Macs around than Linux machines, but probably not by all that much.
On actively used machines, Linux may already have the edge. That's not to knock the Mac; it's just that Linux is all the rage these days. Of the people I know who are active computer users (including non-geeks), probably a third to a half of them are planning to experiment with Linux in the not-too-distant future.
I think there's a fairly simple explanation for this: Linux will run on the hardware they already have. They can't try MacOS without buying a new machine, if they currently have an x86 machine.
Who knows what might have happened if Apple had turned themselves into a software company a few years back...
--
Get your fresh, hot kernels right here!
Porting XFree86 and KDE to Darwin would make a nice project.
TedC
Uhh, you must not have been here very long. You get 1 point by default if you are posting from an account instead of anonymously.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
errrk? Q3Test has JUST been released, and so far, only for the Mac. (Linux next, then Windows.) I don't know what you're talking about, but you must be thinking of something else - Q3Test is NOT yet available for Windows.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
'Linux is no where near ready for "primetime" no matter what you people say.'
;-)
But of course. Must be an illusion. Look, Quake 3: Arena will be released for Mac, Windows, Linux. At the same time, full-blown retail packages, advertisement and stuff. Linux is right there, in the middle, between Apple and Microsoft. Think about that.
Oops, my mistake, I forgot: Troll can't think - only flame...
-- Eavy (: Linux Is Not UniX
It just seems like yesterday that they released the original Quake and I was hooked. Now Quake 3 is coming along nicely.
How time flies. Good work, Carmack, et al!
I don't think we'll be seeing LinuxPPC binaries any time soon. The reason: Glide hasn't been ported to LinuxPPC yet, so even though we have Mesa we don't have any hardware 3D acceleration.
What ever happened to the Glide port anyway? I keep hearing about one in the works, but no information on the status.
Well, I still see a lot of anti-Mac FUD here, but at least he's toning down a bit. I'd be quite surprised, however, if he actually trook the time to properly optimize the Mac version of Quake3. Oh, and he seems to have been testing a Voodoo2 (or Voodoo3 even?) on the PC vs. a Rage Pro on a beige G3; you call that fair? Also, I like this bit about "No openGL Voodoo support on the Mac..." It's called Mesa, John. It's been out for years. Sure, Apple doesn't yet have 3Dfx GL support (I have yet to figure out why) but the Mac does.
But hey, he's improving, at least. His anti-Mac rants aren't totally inaccurate anymore. And hell, he's giving Q3Test to Mac users first.
Then I could have Quake twice before all of the Windows people. :)
...assuming that they make a Linux/PPC binary.
Unfortunately, such binaries tend to be a bit thin on the ground.
.. which means that in the eyes of a commercial
company linux has a larger user base than Mac.
We seem to be getting somewhere...
Actually, Carmack is not spreading FUD and he never has. It's just that some Mac Evangelists can't take critizism.
And if the Mesa GL is the same as on Linux, I wish you luck in getting the same performance as 3dfx GL.
Yes, the teasing of the Windows lusers has begun.
I love it. Yes! Yes! Some days are better than others.
OK, maybe I'll invite them for a quick look at my superior Linux system running Q3 Test.
Don't think so. For Q2 they used the 3dfx minigl. As stated above, the Q3 demands more features so maybe they must use Mesa for Linux. Goosh, my PPro 200 will crawl.
;-)
Guess I have to buy a new one.
A machine with Mac OS X and Linux would be awesome, but that will be too expensive for me. A PII 450 is more what my budget allows me.
Those lucky bastards will get Q3T first. But then Carmack continues to say that Mac hardware is not as fast as Wintel. Then he says that he might consider MacOS X as his development machine. And last he says 'MacOS still suck'. And not a word about Linux, *sob*.
But my question is how close to UNIX is MacOS X? Does it support X11 and UNIX98? How easy is it to port Linux/UNIX applications to it?
Can somebody enlighten me, maybe with an URL?
Thanks.
;-) No X and that is worse.
Here's the information that I found about it:
A. Mac OS X Server is built on UNIX technologies, implementing most of the POSIX APIs,
which makes it easy to port UNIX applications, particularly those from a BSD heritage. The
main exception is applications with a graphical user interface, because Mac OS X Server
doesn't include the X Window System UI toolkits. Mac OS X Server is built around a graphical
interface, unlike traditional UNIX systems that rely on the command line. However, Mac OS X
Server cannot be called a UNIX operating system, as it does not fully comply with the POSIX
and X/OPEN specifications required for use of the UNIX trademark.
------------
No big deal that it can't call itself UNIX. Linux can't either.
Not sure about X11. It might, but why would you want it to, when the MacOS GUI is much better?
Possibly because there are lots of X11 apps out there that could be ported a lot easier if you didn't have to remake the GUI?
/El Niño
While there's a downside to the "why" this is going Mac and Linux first, this is still overall a good thing for platform diversity. I'll be waiting in line to buy mine.
:-D
It's good that John has come around on Apple (notice I did not say "...MacOS"), and especially the future of the platform, MacOS X. I couldn't imagine ANY game programmer saying nice things about gaming under the ever-changing, four-year late "Cairo" oops I mean Windows 2K (Linux is gonna KILL Wintel for games when all PC's are force-preloaded with that flying pig).
There's sucky things about the MacOS, and I can draw upon time spent behind Wintel, Linux, BeOS, Solaris, and my old reliable GEM/Atari ST system. I have a list of complaints with each platform.. just I'm most comfortable with the Mac list which consistently gets shorter every day..
I think I'm gonna take a day out of work when I get my hands on Quake...
Lately, the media has taken to quoting Slashdot posts, which I take as evidence the media usually know nothing about the subject they report (or else they would have caught on YEARS before and we'd see quotes from USENET as well).
:-D
:(
:-D
Anyways, my point of this message is a full 50% of the posts don't even make a 1, how disappointing. I don't see how ANYONE, except the most closed minded of folk, could find something wong with this story. iD software is helping Apple only in the sense that they are shining a painful light on the problems with the OS. Some people will never be satisfied anyways, because the OS is tied to the hardware, it's not fully open source, or they're jealous it has more than a "man page" for help.
I'm sure none of these people are listening anyways,but until something like Linux is all things to all people, people are going to want computers like the Mac (and Windows, although I've known people who just bought a PC without "trying anything else"
I'm somewhat reminded of the local Operation rescue folk... they speaking up for what they believe in (shudder), but they do nothing constructive. I've never seen one of those dirtbags sign up as a Big Brother/Sister or foster parent, but they're more than ready to throw eggs, write down license plates or take pictures and put them on the web. Do something constructive, like reverse-engineer QuickTime for Linux.
I never thought I'd support Slashdot censoring I mean moderating posts. *sigh*
Oops! :) Somehow my filtering got reset to 1. Normally I keep it at 0 to not miss AC posts.
:-/
There was a lot of useless platform bashing however.
The thing is, how many gamers have that "top of the line" machine? Most current gamers (Win) don't have a P3 and Voodoo3 card. ;-)
As a Mac gamer to Winhozed gamers: HA!
It's nice to see Carmack considering OS X for his development. He's been saying that for a long time. It's obvious (to me) that he doesn't care much for development on NT (duh!). I know he has a bunch of SGI boxes he uses as well. How close is OS X to UNIX? Well, the kernal is basically BSD, if that helps any....
iirc, the MiniGL (which gets better performance in exchange for only supporting a fraction of the total OpenGL calls) for 3dfx isn't enough for what carmack wants for q3a, so the benifits of win3dfxGL over mesa aren't that great when both have full(er) GL support.
Somebody get our flag back!
Then I could have Quake twice before all of the Windows people. :)
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -- Oscar Wilde
They are releasing Linux and Mac first because there's a dearth of users for those platforms. That just makes my day :-)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/
it uses bsd with a mach kernel
OTOH, with the source for the lower layers of Darwin and several flavors of xfree86-on-PPC-unix running around, a port of X should be a relatively simple project (compared, say, to the OS/2 port, which dealt with an OS very unlike Unix and had to rely on official documentation instead of being able to look at OS code).
-----------------
ObQuake: Is that the new simulation of surviving the Big One in L.A.?
No? What's it like, then?
What's Doom?
Oh. I didn't like Wolfenstein all that much. Who in the world wants to play a real-time shooting game, when you can go down to the shooting range and empty a real 9mm?
Movielike action? Don't you have any imagination? Bet you even prefered Baldur's Gate to ADVENT, didn't ya?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
> No big deal that it can't call itself UNIX. Linux can't either. ;-) No X and that is worse.
No, but Linux can call itself POSIX. It's even been certified to that effect now. And the X/Open standard doesn't mean it doesn't have X11 -- X/Open is the organization that owns the Unix trademark (now initial-cap only, I believe) and certifies systems (for an exhorbitant fee) as Unix compliant. The latest spec is Unix 98, and I don't know of any implementations that are fully compliant with it.
That's the lovely thing about standards. So many to choose from.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I've heard of forward thinking but this is ridiculous. Q3 is being ported for MacOS 8, not MacOS X. MacOS 8 does not now nor will it ever have the features that will be added Real Soon Now. iMacs do not currently ship with OS X. Not surprisingly, as Carmack has a product to ship for the installed base, not the one that will ship Real Soon Now, he bashes what he has to work with now.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
The "driver" is the X-server. And there's no reason why you can't just "drop in" an X-server for your card once someone writes one. And I don't see how this is hurting our vendor support. Our main problem with 3d support is that the card makers don't think we're a large enough market to worry about. The more games start showing up on linux, the more they will change their tune ...
- Put in a good vide card ( such as a TNT ) $100- extra
- Double the size of the HD ( maybe another $100- or so )
- Double the memory
... maybe another $100-
You get the idea. Of course, if the extra $460 went the other way, you could have an U2W SCSI machine. Oh, btw, bundled monitors are ridiculously cheap with the Dell machines, and their monitors are pretty good ( the AG grille monitors are basically Sonys with a different sticker )ABout the X-window system: the "remote control" thing is used *very often* in network environments. It might not sound important to the home user who just uses dialup connections, but if your machine is on a T1 network, the "remote-ability" of the Xwindow system is extremely useful.
-- Donovan
lets just say that currently under wine linux
beats win32 on speed/stability.
why? linux is better at running windows then windows even in its alpha-pre stable restarting wine every 15 minutes state.
id like to see how the mac holds up. too bad the
only thing i own from apple is a old mac IIfx
that doesnt have a mouse or keyboard and a odd scsi interface which has prevented the m68k and *bsd camps from adding it to the list of ports.
Anyone know of a Xserver for mac os 6.x?
This says nothing about when Quake 3 will come out, just that q3test is coming out for macs, then linux, then windows. It's just a beta thing. You start out with a small group (macs) so you can find the big bugs, move to a bigger one (linux) so you can find the medium sized bugs and then onto the big group (windows) so you can get all the teeny tiny bugs out. Very logical. If they started out with windows, they'd have a hard time sorting through all the bug reports, matching similar ones, etc.
--"In dreams begin responsibilities" - Delmore Schwartz
Please don't call X 'X-windows'. Its not. You can call it X, X11, X Window System, ect. Once you start calling it X-windows you start to think of it as a GUI. It is not and thinking of it that way forgets its power. And thinking of KDE or GNOME as a windowmanager forgets their power also. X is more or less a system to let graphical programs to interact on a UNIX system albiet network or not. If you run a window manager or only a simple xterm does not matter. If it pleases you, you could call your xterm your GUI. KDE or GNOME are just systems and programs to free the window managers from having to provide 'ease of use' settings or the like. They also expand upon the power of X in some ways.
The problem of whether or not macos X will be able to run an X server goes around the point. Windows NT can also run an X terminal. And you can load all of your great window managers or desktop environments inside that. But why would you want to run a X server the equivalent of twice with the second one being the only one that can actually do anything that X is designed for? The GUI for MacOS X should have been seperated into seperate window manager and desktop environment pieces and run under X. If this would have been done the 'equivalent' GUI for MacOS X would have been more powerful by an order of magnitude. But of course this would have allowed any person who has an X server to run an equivalent MacOS X system-like GUI at any computer he wanted as long as he could connect. Windows NT could have done the same thing. But then again who would be making the money writing the seperate slower buggy (X has been thoroughly tested) software to do the same thing in a more restrained environment. Its a poor decision, as I doubt Apple will be the one making the money from that.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
Frankly, I don't know what everyone is complaining about - when it comes to certain things, like audio/multimedia development, the MacOS *still* can't be beat.
The MacOS has nothing special in it that allows multimedia to work better or worse. Other software does that that you buy from someone else other than Apple most of the time. I don't see how you can complement the OS on that. If you are saying that its a better OS for audio development, maybe. I don't have much experience in music. A better OS in 2-d development? Nah, Macs and Windows are fairly balanced (Linux has gimp, but thats still coming along... a little more powerful that Photoshop in some areas like scripting and a little less in others). A better OS in 3-d development. Bah! What do you think the SGI's running IRIX are for?
The Mac is great for doing things *OTHER* than coding. I use the OS that enables me to write music (in my case) intuitively and without even thinking about the fact that I'm using a computer. Try *that* with Windows or your bloated open source wares.
And when you are writing music, you are not effectively coding? How does the OS affect your damn intuition. Why is it that you right brain people always claim intuition and because of that you no longer need to have ANY sort of justification. Is it that clear in your heads that you can't share it with the rest of us? Try this for once, 'rationalization'. If you don't want to think you are using a computer, then use a piece of paper. All the greats of music did it, why not you. Or is your intuition helped by the damn rational and mechanical electrical computer?
Bloated open source wares? Bah! I doubt you've ever even used Linux. I can boot a fully operational system WITH network support with a single floppy. How bloated can that be?
*CAUTION*
Now, call me a Mac-Nazi, but I honestly don't get this whole anti-Apple thing. As soon as anyone makes a comment in support of them (it seems), someone has to go and say its "pro-mac propaganda." You big bullies... all of you.
It SHOULD be obvious. You are holding up your technically inferior OS and claiming it is better because YOU do your work on it. Its not anti-Apple. Its anti-crap computer software.
I'm thrilled that id is releasing Quake3 for Mac... We've put up with this second-hand shit for too long. And as far as Carmack is concerned, more power to him. He's just trying to help, I suppose.
What do you find more valuable: an OS in and of itself, or the PRODUCT which arises from it? You have to admit, people are still doing great things with the supposedly inferior Mac.
It is inferior and there is no doubt about that. You may say that you have a stunning 400 Mhz G3 that flattens a Pentium II. It doesn't change the fact that its an apple. I could run my Linux system on an Ultrasparc and then we'd see how your G3 would compete. Or perhaps you might want to compare the G4 to the Alpha EV7 coming out. Apple is really shit, hardware and software, as is Intel and Microsoft shit too. But you can't claim that Linux is bloated shit as you did above. Its also nice that even though intel is shit, there are alternatives for Linux, including Macs.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
Hmm, I'm pretty sure it was a G3/300 vs a P2 400. I know the PII was a hundred megahertz faster (or at least, that's what they say) than the G3. I remember doing a little news blurb on my web site about that article... and yes, PC World did it as well. Or was it PC MAgazine? One of the two.
---- My Design, Code, Ruby on Rails blog: http://www.slash7.com/
They are releasing Windows last. That juts makes my day :-)
Romans 10:9-10
I see it on their FTP server but it's totally bogged down... Anyone mirroring it??
RateVegas.com - Vegas Reviews
You can see an announcement of a secure-HTTP plugin for OmniWeb at http://www.omnigroup. com/MailArchive/OmniWeb-l/1999/0185.html.
:-)
And the keyboard commands might seem weird, but you can certainly do everything from the keyboard - because the keyboard commands are exactly the same as Lynx.
(Or at least a very early version of Lynx from several years ago - I don't think we've checked to make sure it still corresponds any time lately.)
My understanding was that the Blue Box (MacOS subsystem) really wasn't officially supported under OS X Server. One reason for this is that they have not merged the networking yet, which means you need two IP addresses, one each for Blue and Yellow.
It would also be difficult to see how VirtualPC would be able to work under OS/X at all because all of the hardware is virtualized in the Blue Box. (Virtual PC appears to talk directly to the SCSI and Network hardware using emulated drivers.) I think this is why there's been talk of a "Red Box", which would provide emulation services under OS X.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
It's actually more similar to the comparison between OS/2 and Win3.1.
The Win16 subsystem in NT (WOW - Windows on Windows) works by mapping Win16 and DOS API calls to the Win32 equivalent. Thus Win16 programs get Preemptive MT and Memory Protection under NT. I think this is similar to how WINE works - by mapping Win* calls to the Unix/X equivs.
MacOS X runs the MacOS subsystem (Blue Box) by virtualizing the hardware and "booting" the authentic MacOS. Thus, no modern features between MacOS programs, although the Blue Box probably couldn't take down the OS. Similar to how OS/2 ran DOS and Win16 programs.
The announced Carbon subsystem (subset of MacOS APIs) will work in a manner similar to WOW, if I understand correctly.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Don't forget that 99% of the game market is running Windows 9x and MacOS, which means no SMP support in the OS. Adding SMP support for the 1% running Linux or NT might not have been worth the cost.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I had a IIfx for a long time. There have been X servers for the mac for a long time (from Apple and others), so an old version should run OK on System 6.08.
You could also install A/UX (Apple 68K Unix) on that machine, which includes an XServer. (But using it precludes using the MacOS interface.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Maybe it does, but Mac SMP hardware is pretty damn obscure and expensive (9500/MP and Daystar Clones only as far as I know.).
Of that 1% running NT or Linux, how many actually have SMP machines?
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't apple do just that when they went from a 800x0 architecture to the PPC?
brett
b
No, that is not what he said.
They are releasing the Mac port first because there is a smaller userbase. This lets them track global bugs easier than a Windows release would. It is easier to go through 1000 bug reports than 100000. They then fix all these bugs and release the windows version.
Q.
I don't see any confusion. Everyone is talking about Q3T: Q3 Test.
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
Why is it not fair to compare a Voodoo3 on PC to Rage Pro on G3? The statement he made is that the highest end performance 3D you can get on a mac is lower than the highest end performance 3D available on pc. That is exactly what he said. Is there some higher performance 3d solution for tha mac that we're unaware of?
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
Is the Rage Pro 3D used on Macs the same chipset as the Rage 128 in PCs? Cuz if so, the performance on a Rage128 is comparable to a TNT, which is also very similar to a voodoo2 (depending on the exact demands of the app), and it's especially fast in 32bit color.
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
"He can code though, which (belive me) is the only reason this man still has a job!"
That, and the fact that he owns the company.
Do you trust Carmack's beliefs, as a developer, geek, and genius?
He evidently likes the NeXTStep environment, and sees MacOSX/Server as a very good thing. He seems to think the performance is fine, it's graphical capabilities good, and the OS itself not a hindrance.
Honestly, I believe it will be a better OS than MacOS. That's easy to believe, right?
I also think it will be better than Win9x, on it's Unix heritage. User Interface is always a preference thing, so as always, YMMV, but I've always liked the MacUI over the WinUI anyhow.
I also think it will be better than WinNT, thought it may be very close, because of it's Unix heritage and because of it's descendence from NeXTStep. Ditto as above on the UI.
Did you want to compare it to Linux?
It may very well suffer on several accounts, as it is a product of a closed source development cycle, but then again it is a Unix. It's look and feel and UI will be much more mature and advanced than Linux's, but again tastes vary, so that may not matter. It has access to more hardware than Linux right now, though that may be changing soon with everyone jumping on the Linux bandwagon.
Unless Apple screws up horrendously, in marketing(they do have the VW Beetle guy on their side, however), MacOSX should be a big hit this year, as compared to WinNT5/Win2k. It is also quite a bit more mature than Linux in many(not all) ways, and best of all, it's designed to pass the Mom test too.
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
My usage of the term 'closed source development' is intended to reflect the fact that Apple's MacOSX did not nor does not use the massively distributed parallel development and debugging model that is, for example, Linux. It may be based off of open source products and in the future will be open source, but right now the MacOSX is definitely been closed source development
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Well, this is a message to those who have Macs and are lucky enough to have played the test.
How is it? Does it live up to hype? Anyone grabbing screenshots to show us particularly neat and cool things? Any reviews or something?
I hope this little post manages to be seen through all the noise in this channel.
Sigh
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Well, I can say that for a test, it lives up to its name.
:)
Q3T contains two maps, one indoors and one sort of in space. There's no single player mode for the Test, so really you have to hop on a id server. Which isn't a bad thing - I got to frag Tim Willits a few times.
The maps look good, although I was getting a sub-par frame rate - the system requirements are through the roof for this one. Also, I was using generic GL drivers (despite what was said elsewhere, there is NO SOFTWARE RENDERING FOR Q3. Must be GL compatable.), so that probably had a lot to do with it.
The networking would've been fine but the server was on the same machine as the FTP server, so everyone's ping was at about 500. Still, it played alright.
It's looking good, outside the astronomical system requirements.
What he tried to do was set one processor to make OpenGL calls and the other to handle the rest of the game (networking, physics etc).
:)
He did get something like a 15-20% speed improvement, but both processors were so bogged down communicating that it wasn't practical.
Now, if everybody had quad processor boxes, you could have one processor do the OpenGL calls, one processor to handle the rest of the game, one for overhead the the last to keep your network going.
I will say this, though- it's likely that linux has a user base with significantly more Quake-running capacity, because that level of CPU power is really pretty significant
I would think it would be just the opposite because Unix can get so much more out of the hardware than any other operating system. i.e. a 486 Linux box I use regularly is about as responsive as an old 601 PowerMac with sys 8.1.
I'm thinking about getting some older PC's (say 120 mhz) at some point and installing Linux and FreeBSD on them.
I know he ment 8.x, but you are right, he should have made it clear. The part that I objected to was the putting down of Apples hardware seemingly to keep Windows PC users from going ape shit.
id also probably has a decent guesstimate of how many downloads of the test for each os too. (they can look at the download rates for the linux ports for quake2 and the mac sales for quake.
A large part of the discrepancy is due to Mac users feeling shafted by getting charged $50 for a year old game. All the data files are identical, so they could have gotten them from a PC friend (or just bought the PC version), download the Mac demo, enter the regiserted code, and save themselves $30.
AFAIK it is already possible to kill the GUI and use X Windows under OSXS, you'd just have to do it yourself as Apple doesn't inlcude it on the CD's.
If you can't, I would expect a commercial or free OS version would be available soon.
I'm also hoping that OSXS supports virtual consols and desktops.
Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't apple do just that when they went from a 800x0 architecture to the PPC?
Actually it was the 68k line, not the 808x's from Intel. And PowerPC machines have 100% compatibiltiy with programs made for 68k processors; in fact, its probably the most sucecessful technology transition, ever.
ow, I don't know about a PIII with programs written to take advantage of the new instructions.
A Mac magazine and (I belive) PC world did some testing with P3 enhanced Photoshop filters and the G3 (400) still whumped the P3 (500).
What makes me laugh is that Carmack says a 400Mhz G3 = 400Mhz P2, as far as CPU is concerned.
Using Spec for benchmarking Mac's and PC's is as bad as Bytemarks. I hope that wasn't what he was using.
"There is no reason why the GIMP developers, or another team couldn't port GIMP to Mac OS X either, except for perhaps their pride."
Not their pride, most of them would have no reason to, because they won't be using OS X. That doesn't mean someone else won't port it though.
Why does being based on something that is 30-years old automatically make something bad. Look at those horrible bicycles, they're over a hundred years old. The plane's over 90-years old.
And how many 400Mhz G3s do you think are you there? Bet you didn't think about that.
What makes me laugh is that Carmack says a 400Mhz G3 = 400Mhz P2, as far as CPU is concerned. That goes against Steve Jobs' propaganda that a 300Mhz G3 = 400Mhz P2.
Oh yes, and most serious gamers on PC DO have a P2-400 and TNT/Rage128, which just as good as the best G3 out there.
You're right, but not only does it go against the propaganda, it goes against the facts (which are not as rosy as Steve Jobs says, either). The PowerPC chip is a true RISC chip, and for certain applications, it will absolutely destroy ANY Pentium or variant. The 400MHz G3 RIPS through RC5, for instance. It all depends on the application, but in general, a G3 will beat a PII MHz for MHz. Now, I don't know about a PIII with programs written to take advantage of the new instructions. That changes the playing field a lot. The PIII probably comes into parity with the G3, which is why it would be accurate to say that a 500MHz PIII beats a 400MHz G3. But of course, the G4 comes out soon, which should reverse the tables again...
Yes, and what I've heard is that Mac OS X is, in fact, 99.9% POSIX compliant. Apple made the decision not to spend the money on certification because it would have raised cost to the customers on dubious justification.
AC posts start at 0. That's why you see so many of the comments as being moderated down. Only 3 comments in this discussion have gone below 0.
My god!!! You mean you actually read the article first instead of just coming to the message board and spewing OS-War crap?
:P
You are to be commended.
But is it Mac -> Linux -> Win because of install base, or varying hardware? Is Linux bigger than Mac already? On the desktop, I mean?
I thought they were doing it the way they are because the Macs have a fairly homogenous hardware setup (and a smaller install base). Linux is next, because it has all those different motherboard/processor + card combos to sift through when fixing bugs, then Wind'oh!s because (this is the point Microlackies don't get) all the companies write drivers for them from the get-go, so anything that works with Intel is available to them. That would make it a nightmare for initial bugtracking, I'd think.
Seems like a really sensible release scheme to me, too. I would assume once the bugs get hammered out, all the final releases would be boxed and shipped at the same time.
--
Okay, I got Linux installed. So where's the free beer everyone keeps talking about??
This isn't the game or even the demo. This is a beta test only. They are only fishing for bugs with this release.
The demo and the final game release will obviously come out on all 3 simultaneously.
The only reason they're releasing to mac, linux, and win in that order is that they want to start with a smaller number of users to control the volume of bug reports.
There seems to be some confusion.... This is the Q3Test, a beta version id releases to test the graphics engine. Just like the QTest they released before the original Quake.
He wasn't whining about 3dfx (not the lower case d) implementations. He was whining about the lack of OpenGL drivers on the Mac platform for 3dfx hardware.
And as far as Spec95 vs Bytemark, I'll never ever accept that a 233 MHz iMac beats a 400 MHz PII. That's just garbage. And when he was referring to speed, he was talking about the speed he got from his own benchmarks with the game he made.
The Rage Pro, on a gaming level, is a load of garbage. My old Voodoo1 has a better 3D feature list.
He says that MacOS's problems have gone away with OS X. But OS X isn't out. OS X _Server_ is out. That's not for everyone. That's not for Mac gamers. So as far as OS X goes, it's not here.
Finally, as far as his equivalent machines go, consider the price of a loaded G3 vs a P2-400. The prices don't even compare, the G3 is priced way out there.
After a rant that long, I think it's fairly obvious that the Mac isn't quite the greatest gaming platform out there. Old Mac's can't do it (Rage Pro), upgraded old Mac's can't do it (no 3dfx OpenGL driver). The new Macs, while nice, are overpriced compared to their equivalent Wintel box. And finally, OS X is still not here (what a shame though, that Win98 is the gaming platform of choice for 9x boxes).
>Carmack a genius? Can this guy do anything other than castles and nazis?
Are you just dumb or what? As far as pute technical programming merit, this man IS a genius. If you've ever heard him lecture at game development conferences, you'd see it for yourself.
Until then, grow the hell up.
Who needs mature opening salvos? (;
Seriously though, I think you're giving the man too little credit. It's easy enough to say 'Yeah, if you give me eternity, I'll do better..' when there ARE people in the industry who've been there just as long. So why aren't there more genius' (is that the plural of genius? hmm).
And honestly, if you'd care to redifine a certain genre of gaming (in this case, first person shooters) every few years, be my guest. Until then, I'd like you to do more then FUD the man.
And as for the greatest, that's still Brian Hook. But only because he's outspoken.
Uh...GL slower on Linux? NO way. On my Voodoo2 I get something like 5-6 fps faster on Linux than on Windows....using the MiniGL from Q2 of course. If I was using the MesaGL Linux vs full ICD Windows, I'm pretty sure MesaGL would whoop on 3dfx's ICD.
Is this new version a "MacOS X-Server"? Like an X-server for mac? Or is it just X meaning ten? I get confused.
owen
It's fun to see how many people actually respond to a troll this blatant...Let's conserve bandwidth, people.
Carmack dicussed the problems in detail a while back. You can read about it here.
stalker@foo:~$ finger johnc@idsoftware.com
- -------------------------------
:-)
[idsoftware.com]
Welcome to id Software's Finger Service V1.5!
Name: John Carmack
Email: johnc@idsoftware.com
Description: Programmer
Project: Quake Arena
Last Updated: 04/24/1999 01:34:03 (Central Standard Time)
-----------------------------------------------
4/24/99
-------
We are finally closing in on the first release of Q3test.
As you have probably heard by now, the first release in going to be the mac
version, probably followed by the linux version, and only then the
windows version.
Some of you are busy getting all bent out of shape about this.
We want to get a lot of people playing with the test to find bugs and
offer well thought out suggestions, but there are classes of bugs and
suggestions that emerge in each order of magnitude of exposed testers.
If a given bug is going to show up when a thousand people have looked
at it, but we had released it to a hundred thousand people, then we are
going to have a lot of duplication to wade through.
The mac testers will find some obvious problems.
We will fix them.
The later releases will be better.
Even if we had the windows distribution ready to go right now, I would
still seriously consider releasing one of the mac or linux versions first
because it will make our tracking a lot easier.
The holdup on the windows side are the issues with updated driver
distribution. The game itself doesn't have any holdups.
We could do a windows release for just, say, voodoo2 owners and get some
of the benefit of a controlled release, but it wouldn't really work out,
because everyone would figure out that it can be made to (almost) work
on lots of other cards by tweaking some values. That type of feedback
would not be useful, because we KNOW that there are problems with most
of the current drivers. We have been working with all of the vendors
for the past year to get them all straightened out.
Glsetup is going to be slick -- just run it and it will Do The Right Thing
for your video configuration.
We hope it will be done soon, but there are factors out of our direct
control involved.
Don't be spiteful. This is just the beginning of the testing and
release process.
One conspiracy theory suggests that Apple is somehow getting us to do this.
What we have "gotten" from Apple is a few development machines. No
cash payoff. No bundling deal. No marketing contract.
I am looking at this long term. I want to see OS X become a top notch
platform for graphics development. I think highly of the NEXTSTEP heritage
and I might move my development from NT if it turns out well. There is a
lot of groundwork that needs to be laid with apple for this to happen,
and my working on the mac right now is part of that. Plus a lot of
complaining to various apple engineers and executives.
To be clear:
At this time, there is no mac that is as fast for gaming (or just
about anything, actually) as a pentium III with a top of the line 3D card.
Period. I have been misquoted by some mac evangelists as saying otherwise.
The new (blue and white) G3 systems are very good systems in many ways, and
make a perfectly good gaming platform. However, a high end wintel machine
just has more horsepower on both the CPU and the 3D card.
A 400 mhz G3 performs about the same as a 400 mhz PII if they aren't fill
rate limited, where the faster cards on the PC will give about a 25%
advantage. A 500 mhz PIII with an appropriate card in 30% faster than
the best mac you can buy.
The multi colored iMacs, old G3 desktops, and powerbooks can play Quake3,
but the RagePro 3D acceleration defines the absolute bottom end of our
supported platforms. A serious gamer will not be satisfied with it.
Voodoo cards are not currently supported by the OpenGL driver, which is
very unfortunate because many serious mac gamers own voodoo cards. I
hope Apple and 3dfx will be able to correct this soon, but I certainly
understand Apple's prioritization -- obviously, good support for the OEM
video options is of primary importance.
The voodoo performance will still lag the windows platform by some amount,
but some strides have been made in that area recently, so I expect good
performance,
Gaming is not a reason to buy a mac, but Apple is taking steps so that
it may not be a reason to avoid a mac if you have other reasons for wanting
one.
MacOS still sucks.
KDE isn't a window manager.
:)
KDE is a desktop environment that has a default window manager (unlike Gnome) called kwm.
Just my 2 cents
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Originality != genius. Id creates these types of games because they LIKE them. So do we, apparently. Ask anyone in the industry their opinion of Carmack and you'll get the exact same response. The guy is incredibly talented at optimizing code (look at the amount of STUFF in the original quake and look at what kind of hardware it ran on).
You should check out 8.6, which is about to be released. Apple's doing a good job of making MacOS 8 pretty damn good, actually, even with all the shitty legacy code lying around. I love Macs but I agree that MacOS is pretty bad, in terms of the lowlevel stuff.. But 8.5 and 8.6 are really quite good.
But hey, he's improving, at least. His anti-Mac rants aren't totally inaccurate anymore. And hell, he's giving Q3Test to Mac users first.
you mac people should consider yourselves lucky that Apple is willing to listen to Carmack on how to make Macs a better gaming platform (Carmack has been doing that since NeXt got acquired). I love how Mac evangelists brand anything negative about their beloved macs as FUD. If you can refute any of Carmack's claims (I doubt that 99% of you out there knows what he's talking about in his .plan files), then stfu. thank you.
There seems to be a great problem for some of you to make a difference between MacOS X Server that is available now and MacOS X that is planed to replace MacOS (and maybe the Server also) then it is released.
Everybody knows ordinary MacOS sux, apple realised this a long time ago and started a project called Copland, but failed after several(6 i think) years of slow development and bought NeXT instead. So MacOS has in reality been cancelled a long time ago, and now it is being developed just as a bridge to MacOS X that will totally replace it(I know apple don't say it this way, but thats what will happend).
As to MacOS X Server, it is quite good, but not good enough to replace MacOS, the interface is not as clean as MacOS and the "emulation" of MacOS appz is done by a separate application. MacOS X will fix all this and also add a new API to make the transition from Mac to MacOS X easy -- carbon.
Maybe not 100% correct but essensially what will happened...
De lyckliga slavarna är frihetens bittraste fiender, legalisera!!!
But is it Mac -> Linux -> Win because of install base, or varying hardware? Is Linux bigger than Mac already? On the desktop, I mean?
i imagine that the number of linux users who will be interested/have-machines-capable of running the test is greater than the number of mac users falling into that category. (this isnt a slam on mac.)
id also probably has a decent guesstimate of how many downloads of the test for each os too. (they can look at the download rates for the linux ports for quake2 and the mac sales for quake...though i'm sure the mac number would need to be adjusted upwards considering the increase in sales from the imac)
probably your other guess is a good one too...i would think it'd be easier to find non-hardware specific bugs in the apple version.
Seems like a really sensible release scheme to me, too. I would assume once the bugs get hammered out, all the final releases would be boxed and shipped at the same time.
every reference i can recall from anyone at id stated that all 3 versions would be released simultaneously.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
yes it has
I would love to see the new Quake 3 come out for Linux before windows. It really shows the the OS. is gaining acceptance in the Gaming industry. I quote OBI "You've taken your first step into a larger world." While I know this is not the first game to come out for Linux. It is very big for linux. I have never seen a game for linux being sold in a box as Quake 3 will. I belive they are doing the right thing with relaseing it in a box for linux.
I dont think Carmack has time to be playing silly little games in /etc or flucking around in the console with vi...
I hear you. The name game at Apple must have gotten wild. They mean "Mac OS 10 Server." It's a server OS with all the goodies like Apache and WebObjects. Mac OS X (10) Client will be the one that almost all mac users will buy, and Apple will load on their consumer machines.
If this is any indication, I have the last beta of 8.6. I went from about a crash a day ( NetQuake and IE ), to no crashes in a week. I've had probably the best experiance with 8.6 out of any Mac OS. It's much better than it was, but as we all know, it could be better. And, soon as OS X client is released, it will be.
try
www.xappeal.org
The celeron is a piece of junk. They just took a PII and took out all the L2 cache . . .
They put some of it back in when they realized the chip couldn't run anymore, but it still doesn't have enough.
MacOS X does support remote-hosted programs, but the remote host has to be running MacOS X, too. (actually, OpenStep and NeXTSTEP would probably work, too.)
There will be X servers for MacOS X. NeXTSTEP certainly had one.
As far as remote-hosted Windows, there's always VNC, which will let you view and interact with your Windows 95/98/NT (or Linux) box on another machine, be it Windows or Linux. It even has a client written as a Java applet. It doesn't support multiple logins or anything for Windows -- just interacting as if you were at the console. It is GPLed.
Just a couple of minor notes on this, in the hopes of lowering people who are not familiar with what is going on with MacOS X don't get confused:
- The system puppybane is describing is MacOS X Server. This is why everything is very network-operator-oriented.
- The lack of support of PowerBooks is also readily explained by the server emphasis.
- One big thing currently missing is 3d accelerator support.
- Another thing currently missing is support for VirtualPC under the Blue Box.
- Most of the applications that come with MacOS X Server have OpenStep/NeXTSTEP UIs, which followed a different UI model than Macs.
I was a NeXTSTEP/Intel user, and I am *very* impressed with what Apple has done with the code it got from NeXT. Though it is still work-in-progress, they have merged the two interfaces better than I would have expected.The bluebox (Mac OS 8.5 running as an application under MacOS X) is amazing -- IME, As long as you aren't hitting swap, most applications run faster and more reliably under the Bluebox than they do under vanilla MacOS.
It's alpha, and doesn't support their fastest redraw mode. It also has a tendancy to crash.
However, it is really cool to be able to use my Linux box's nice keyboard and mouse instead of the annoying hockey-puck and keyboard the G3 came with.
The new G3s have Rage128 cards in them, which are almost (slightly lower clock) as good as the TNT and Voodoo2 cards for PCs. The old G3s and the iMacs run the shitty Pro (but so do some PCs).
Carmack even says this in the text, if you bothered reading it before going all "Maceristic" about any critism of the promised OS.
Also, all Quake3 benchmarks id have realesed from Quake3 show that the game is almost totally reliant on processors, not card fillrate, for performance, even on the highest level PCs....
The rational behind not going with Linux as a controle platform was that because of its varying and configurable nature (a good thing in general) it is harder for id to know what bugs are in there software and peoples setups.
Mac is one OS, one set of hardware, and one company.
The obvious downside is that most Linux users would probably be good at reporting the conditions of crashes and bugs, while the average mac use will write: "It does not work on my blueberry Mac but it does on my friends strawberry, fix it!"
Mac OS X Server has BSD at its heart, but it also has a modified Mach 2.5 kernel and a whole bunch of NeXT conventions sitting over it. The most obvious differences from *nix to me are the directories which are named differently (my user directories are in /Local/Users/), and the tendency to call root 'Administrator'. Most of the important directories are named with capitals. The system was clearly designed to be navigated primarily through the GUI.
The OS does not include an X Server, as it uses its own Graphics scheme (currently based around Display Postscript, though that will change by the end of the year). It would be really nice if there was an X server. If you happen to be running the i386 distribution of Rhapsody DR2, you can download one from ftp.next.peak.org. Unfortunately for me, there is not currently one availiable for the PPC AFAIK. Sigh.
As for porting, anything that doesn't use X should not be a big problem. Directory stucturing is slightly different, and most of the differences are linked to look the same. With the help of a freely-downloadable patch, I was able to compile ssh to run within minutes (Well, there was a problem with install, which stopped it from installing sshd, so I had to figure that out, and manually copy that, but otherwise...). Hope some of that was useful.
Well, I can try. First, I would like to note that I am a Mac User, but I really like the power/stability of Unix. However, here is my attempt at a fair review of the OS I have been using constantly for about a week now (note: if Apple tells you 2-4 weeks for delivery, expect delivery on the 28th day :} ) I may put up a longer, more detailed one later, when I put off some assignment or another.
The installation was a snap, even on my non-supported PowerBook G3. Everything installed properly and once it was properly configured, the computer booted up in less than half the time it takes my MacOS partition to boot up. Before I configured it, it kept trying to get my network info off a system called NetInfo, which I had never heard of until this came out. I could be wrong, but it seems a bit silly to automatically try to get information from a scheme used by an OS which came out a month ago. But it was easy to switch over to bootP, and I have seen instructions on how to use DHCP.
Since I started up, for the past week, I have only had the OS crash twice--both times involved Apple's Blue Box, usually when I tried to exit it. Users of VM ware may have experienced similar things (I know my roommate has). Of course, one week is not a very long amount of time for testing.
It took me a bit to get used to the UI. IMHO, it has a ways to go, but it is very functional. It does have a problem with ignoring some of my settings, like Icon view instead of NeXT columns. Once I got past trying to convince it to remember that setting, and decided I actually liked the columns view better anyway, I was able to move on.
Moving files and directories around can be a bit strange. Sometimes, it lets you move it, other times, you copy it, and sometimes it defaults to linking. All of these can be overridden with modifier keys, and I imagine that the defaults have to do with partitioning/permissions, but it was confusing, and irritating when I tried to move a large file, and it copied it instead. Of course, all of this can also be done with the command line.
I keep hearing that this OS is very fast on other computers, but currently I have not seen it. I suspect that it doesn't like sharing the HD with a 2gig Mac partition, and I think it wants more than 64MB of RAM. I plan on ordering a 128MB SIMM, so we'll see if that helps. The biggest speed problems are all in loading software, and opening menus. I often get the feeling that I'm not expected to use the Apple menu, because it takes a second to open until it is either cached, or placed in physical memory. Or maybe my G3 266 just can't handle the load...
Configuring users is where I was really happy. Permissions, shell settings, passwords, whether or not the user should be able to log in remotely--all can be done from within network manager. The only thing which makes it strange is the obvious design slant toward people running a network. I am not, so many of the settings just aren't useful to me. Others probably have other opinions (inevitably). It seems easy to set up a network with, though it is focussed at Macintosh style network schemes (NetBooting and NetInfo). I'd like to try NetBoot, but I think my campus network admins would not appreciate the bandwidth it is supposed to take (Apple recommends a 100 baseT ethernet connection). Any user can open the Network Administration panel, but in order to change anything, one has to authenticate. So configuration is easy.
Once I got the system set up (this took me a total of maybe an hour, from the beginning of installation), I went to download some more software (games & stuff), by checking out Stepwise.com, and moving to ftp.peak.next.org. There isn't all that much there right now, but I am confident that things will swiftly be ported over. As it is, I got myself a handful of games (at one point, I would like to try to run Windows on Virtual PC on the BlueBox, and try to play some PC games...)
As a mac user, I was most pleased by the availiability of Quake2 for MacOS X Server, which OmniGroup ported a while back. OmniGroup also makes the only (AFAIK) web browser for OS X Server. Actually, this was the biggest problem, and one of the 2 reasons I am currently booted into MacOS. While their webbrowser is execellent, it is still beta, and missing a very important feature for me--secure http. I need that to sign up for my classes for next semester, and to check my account. It also means I can't log in to the Apple Developer web-site. However, I will note that I think OmniWeb is one of the nicest browsers out there, with a very nice interface. They do things a bit differently than Netscape, though, which caused me some confusion at first (pressing the down arrow goes down the list of all the hyperlinks on the page. You could navigate the whole page with arrow keys and return, but I expected it to just scroll down.
The other reason I'm back on Mac is because even dimmed, my Powerbook's monitor throws off enough light to see well in my room at night, and OS X Server does not support certain controls on the Powerbook. There is no sleep mode, there is no power management, and I cant dim the display so there is no backlighting. The biggest part of that is that I have to log out and shutdown before I take the Powerbook anywhere, or it will overheat with it's top shut. But that's why Apple doesn't support the Powerbooks with OS X Server (OS X most likely will).
The next thing I did was to look for the much-vaunted developer stuff--Interface Builder and Project Builder. These, along with the API, where and are the reason there are still devoted NeXT developers out there. I couldn't find them, because Apple put them on the CD labelled WebObjects for Developers. But I found them, and now I understand why NeXT had their following. Those tools are amazing. I know very little about the API (I haven't had time yet), but Project builder is one of the nicest development environments I've seen. Users of Microsoft's Visual development suites will find it familiar, since MS based those on Interface Builder and Project Builder. Every function call/declaration is availiable for viewing with a few clicks, and if you ever scroll by, and see a function that you don't know the meaning of (even/especially Yellow Box functions), you can just open the find panel with a click, paste in the name, and tell it to find the definition, or all references to the function. If it is a Yellow Box function, it will also list a little book next to the declaration, clicking on which takes you to an html file (opened inside Project builder) which explains the use of that function. Apple also includes help files on using the tools.
All in all, I'm happy with my purchase (of course, I got it for $99 through Apple Developer Connection) I hope other developers start to port things over. I would like to take a crack at getting one of the PPC X Servers running on this thing. Anyway, being as it is day, and I'm done checking my student account, I will go boot back into it now.
shows how little you know about Carmack, oh brainless one. He's a UNIX fan.
I don't see much in either .plan about problems with linux. They have to have some issues, like driver/ glide issues, something.
ALSO: Is this damn game multithreaded or not? The general opinion was on yes, then the Man porting glide to linux says no. And will there be any way around it no q3a or glide smp support? Pmesa?
grr
d
...
8.5 still sucks, there's no debating that, but veronica(8.6) has supposedly improved upon an assload of things like multitasking, memory protection, better g3 support, etc..
i hope veronica doesn't suck as hard at least..