Slashdot Mirror
Brian Paul to join Precision Insight
physic writes "Brian Paul, the maintainer and original author
of the free OpenGL library called
Mesa.
will be joining Precision Insight to work on Linux/Mesa fulltime. Mesa
is best know to the linux gaming community as the library that allows Quake3 to run under linux on 3dfx, nVidia TNT2, and Matrox G200/400 video cards. "
So how long until a Tux Q3 skin comes out?
Hasn't he been working for PI for a couple of weeks now?
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
Its almost a month since 1.08 q3test has been released, and they still don't have a linux port. WTF?!?!?!??! I'm going threw quake3 withdrawl.
I used to use a penguin skin for CTF, but it stood out really well and I kept getting fragged.
Or maybe I'm just lousy. Hmm.
--
QDMerge 0.21!
how to invest, a novice's guide
Is this possible? I'd like to play quake1/2/3 in linux at a decent speed. IE: not the current GLX.. and don't really want to wait for the XF4.0 DRI stuff.. is anyone coding mesa for TNT1/2?
Hrm, last I checked Q3 wasn't exactly playable with Linux+TNT. What's going on with TNT/GL development these days? Will it be in XFree 4.0?
Go look at www.mesa3d.org -- this is not an implementation of OpenGL. That would require a hefty license, and every time someone like the author of this article makes that mistake, you could be bringing Brian one step closer to a lawsuit.
Um, so what's a brother gotta do to get q3test running with a Matrox Millenium G200 AGP?
I did download Mesa at one point, and glx, but then I gave up when it wanted me to replace some libraries and recompile X. It was, and still is, a bit over my head, and struck me as the type of thing I would screw up, in the process permanently hosing my X Window System.
Is there an easier way?
There has been lots of work for the Matrox G[24]00 cards recently. Matrox has released nearly all (if not totally all) of the specs for the cards (hundreds of pages worth) which makes programming for them even easier than the TNT cards (which release source but not the best in the way of specs). With some of the most recent code for X / GLX / AGP / Gx00 WARP and stuff, we are reaching pairity with Windows -- according to John Carmack, we have even better performance than Windows on Quake2demo2, and have about 90% of the Windows Quake3 demo speed. And we're improving all the time. So go for those G400 boards... they're darn fast and getting faster!
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
There's nothing better than doing exactly what you like to do and then getting recognition and finally, paid. Congratulations Brian for his excellent work on Mesa and for turning it into his own job.
Which is a better way to land a job with your hobby: Writing a development library or writing an app. Together with the guy who wrote Wine, we've seen two people this year land jobs coding their development tools for income but when we look at application programmers the closest was the XMMS programmers getting free soundcards from 4Front but no jobs. Is Linux supposed to be a development platform or what?
With all of this talk about mesa and OpenGL, what ever happened to the work being done for Permedia 2 cards (like Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro)? I thought Suse was doing something with it. Is PI now taking care of it with Xfree4.0?
I know Brian personally - we went to college together (name dropping at /. - heh!). He is a very talented individual. The smartest individual I know in regards to computer graphics. I wish him the best personally and professionally.
Now, I wonder what he did with all that code for the 3D object designing tool he made that was developed under SunOS (a 68020 machine!) for the Pixar that UW-Oshkosh had back in '89... =)
Yes, kiddies - Pixar use to make hardware! Boy do I feel old...
--
"All that is visible must grow and extend itself into the realm of the invisible."
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
If you've got skill, you can compensate for the lag (I used to be 28.8)
As long as you're connection isn't bursty its still the king. If it is bursty, well, the others suck pretty bad too...
For a while, Mac users have been able to use PC Voodoo2 cards with their Macs thanks to Mesa (except for Diamond's MonsterII cards AFAIK). Being a Mac owner and wishing for better 3D than my Rage128, I can certainly appreciate the work these guys did.
awwww yeah, john carmack is my personal jesus. the man CAN walk on water!
We showed Quake at SIGGRAPH because it was an easy thing to leave running as a demo, not because games are the only, or even the most important OpenGL application.
- |Daryll
I work on various unix workstations (including SGI, HP, Sun, and linux) and find that the commercial versions of unix have greater support for more visual classes than linux. I realize that linux has the "disadvantage" of trying to support a very wide range of graphic cards. I also realize that the lack of support (e.g., documentation) from various graphic card manufacturers makes things very difficult.
My X Window and OpenGL code sucks. I'm not a professional programmer but some low-life scientist that writes a lot of inefficient code; you know, cheese-ware full of holes. Giving me a wide range of available visual classes really helps. Pseudo-color overlay planes is also nice (coming soon in 4.0!).
My point is that I would really support anybody that makes my life easier. Writing code that has to take into account the availability of all the various visual classes and default depths is a real pain in the butt. I have to think that other ppl with legacy code would also want to have this. The economics of the problem also indicates that the cost of relatively cheap graphic cards easily offsets the cost of rewriting the programs.
I ask you to have some compassion for me as I have to use Motif.:-) OTOH, I'm not so proud to ask how I can better solve my problem. Nonetheless, congrats Brian; I'll start watching Precision Insight more.
Pixar used to be only a few blocks from my parents home when it was small in the early 90s. I never knew about they existed until toy story came out and became popular.
I would just like to take this opportunity to thank the guys at Precision Insight, SGI, and XFree for the great work they have been doing on the direct rendering infrastructure. I think this is one of the most exciting changes to X for linux, and after hearing the talks on the subject at linux expo, and talking directly to a few of the guys, I honestly believe they are doing a great job.
Daryll makes a good point above that people should realize this impacts not only game playing, but could create a larger general awareness of linux from larger ISVs, and the users of their products.
The latest news that Brian has joined PI has me thrilled. This was the exact right move. Congratulations to all involved in the project.
Eric
mesas biggest drawback is the lack of trim nurbs.
thats what will keep maya etc. off XF86-4
Everyone can say anything they want about 3dfx, about glide, and how much the TNT2 is a better card.
/dev/3dfx, works flawlessly with q3, and everything else.
All that matters is support, and right now if you run linux, your only REAL choice is a 3dfx. Gives you the nice
I'm the first to admit the TNT2 is a better card, but if the card is only "soft of" supported in mesa, X, etc, it's a moot point..Sit around and wait until it is? or get a 3dfx card, and enjoy what there is now?.
Linux world isn't like the Windows world, where you can simply compare hardware and get the best. You have to factor in the linux support as well. And what usually ends up happening is you end up with the 2nd or 3rd best, but with the 1st in linux support.
With SGI putting so much faith in Linux, it would be idiotic for them not to certify Mesa as open GL compliant. that is unless they want to re-implement openGL from the start with Linux. It wouldent suprise me it once Mesa is up to specs, and has desent hardware acceleration, that SGI would certify it for no fee. SGI is still a leader in graphics, and for them to deny the certification of a critical 3D API for the OS that they are betting on would be relatively stupid...
Congrats, Brian!
Does this mean Mesa is going to get more better faster? =)
--
Okay, I got Linux installed. So where's the free beer everyone keeps talking about??
According to John Carmack in a posting on the glx-dev mailing list, the Linux G200 driver is almost as fast as the Windows driver (this is with his special, experimental, tree; soon to be merged (WID)) and he expects to to exceed the speed of the Windows driver soon. I thus do not regret my purchase. The driver is a little buggy (I get some strange effects when I die in certain modes in q3test), but very usable and fast enough for my dual celery 300a (without SMP support in Mesa) and even better when I crank up to 450.
You can keep your binary driver while I bask in the glory and warm fuzzies of my rapidly developing OS driver.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Just as Mesa is a free re-implementation of the OpenGL API.
'Nuff said.
-E
(offering to put mesa through the certification for free...)
I remembering hearing at some point that quake 3 was multithreaded? Is it now, or will it be?(supposedly?) thanks
..I got him mixed up with you Daryll ;-) Thanks for the kick-ass work
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
That said, we did give Brian Paul access to the conformance tests for his own personal use, as an aid to improving Mesa.
There will be a great deal of OpenGL activity on Linux in the next few months, from SGI as well as others. Stay tuned. BTW, if anyone is thinking about going to the Open Source / Open Science conference at Brookhaven National Lab in October, I'll be speaking on OpenGL and Linux there (mostly a status update aimed at researchers, though).
Jon Leech
OpenGL Core Engineering
SGI
Brian,
;-)
Congratulations on the new job - I know Avid Technology will miss you. Thanks for putting so much effort into Mesa.
Both you and all at Precision Insight and SGI deserve a cheer for chasing high-end 3D.
Now, get cracking!
Pixar was the name of the computer Lucasfilm built (or had built?) to render, among other things, the Genesis sequence in Wrath of Khan, and the stained-glass knight in Young Sherlock Homes. They did a presentation about the computer at the "West Coast Computer Faire" in S.F. back in 84 or 85 (I'm not sure exactly).
:-)
Man was that awesome! Upwards of 1000x1000 resolution with a billion colors, all packed into a case barely bigger than a family refrigerator
chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
Really, why are you talking about Linux all the time in this article and comments? I mean, isn't this for the XFree86 platform, which accidently runs on top of Linux and _many_ other operating systems? -T
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
The second major obsticle was that 'go' used camera and lookat point notation while Renderman simply stored the transformation matrix and nothing else. This meant that it was possible to recreate the camera point and lookat *direction*, but not the exact lookat point. This was a problem because the editor used the lookat point as the point to swing around when rotating the camera, and thus if you loose this information, the scene swings wildly when you rotate the camera and looks more like a 'pan' than a rotate. The solution was to assume that the scene was 'near' the world's origin point, and thus when recreating the lookat point, you pick the point along the lookat vector that is closest to the origin. (Simple math - find the point along the lookat vector where you get zero for the dot product of the lookat vector and a vector from the origin to the lookat point. A dot product of zero indicates perpendicular vectors, so that must be the closest point to the origin.)
Anyway, the project passed on to someone else when I left (I can't remember his name, but I remember the face), and it was mostly working then and he was going to add new features to it to take advantage of Renderman features that were not in Go.
I hope that long-winded answer helps satisfy your curiosity. I didn't meet him in person up close, but from fiddling with his source code I'd agree with your notion that he's quite a 3D guru. Some of that math was pretty neat and there was some things where at first glance it seems the algorithms shouldn't have worked but they did anyway. (Further examination showed that Brian was just being more clever than I could handle.) That guy is pretty darn cool. I wish him the best of luck in his new job.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
SGI is backing the XF86-4.0/mesa thing. im pretty
sure they want it to run with that. its well known
that only a small portion of linux users use
xig or matrox. why would AW want to alienate them?
also, since games are already using mesa with acceleration, the conformance precedent is set.
maya is about $7k for complete and (i think)
$16k for unlimited.
the commercial implementation is significant.
the source of mesa has saved me alot
of time (and thus, my client alot of money)
i would certainly not want to be forced into
a non free (in speech sence) implementation.