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. "

Comments

Q3 on TNT?

[Booker]

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?

Re:Q3 on TNT?

[aheitner]

I've been running Q3A reasonably happily on my TNT 2 Ultra for a couple of weeks now. The machine is a Celeron 450a.

The GLX renderer isn't amazing -- I have to turn off lightmaps, and I run in 640x480 (haven't really messed w/higher res modes, the card may have plenty of fill to do them...). I'm still waiting for DRI to get full performance out of the board.

Nonetheless, q3 ought to run acceptably on even a TNT with a few more of the settings tuned down...

Re:Ehm

[Caballero]

No. We spoke to him over SIGGRAPH at the start of August. He took some time to think about it and visit our office in Steamboat Springs.

He did actually accept the offer a little over a week ago, but his start date isn't until October.

- |Daryll

Re:it is NOT an openGL library!

[Josh Turpen]

... you could be bringing Brian one step closer to a lawsuit.

With the way SGI is embracing Linux, I doubt it.

Re:So when the hell is............

[sterwill]

1.08 for Linux has been out for almost a month. Don't trust www.quake3arena.com, trust the archives.
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames/idstuff/quake3/lin ux/q3test-1.08-glibc-2.i386.tar.gz is dated Aug 11, 1999.

--

Re:Quake 3 under G200?

[Bill Currie]

1. Get Mesa 3.0 (cvs wan't working last I tried), compile, install.
2. Get latest cvs of glx. compile install.
3. replace link from libMesaGL.so.3 to libMesaGL.3.0 with link from libMesaGL.so.3 to libGL.1.0.
4. Make sure your X config has both glx.so in the modules list and a 640x480 setup (the latter got me for a while).
5. Run q3test.
6. If you're anything like me, get slaughtered:)

BTW: FAQ

Mesa has also been important to Macs

[webslacker]

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.

This isn't just Quake

[Caballero]

I also wanted to remind people that this isn't just about Quake. The work we're doing on OpenGL is about 3D graphics for Linux. Digital content creation, CAD/CAM/CAE, scientific visualization, medical imaging, and yes games.

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

Visual classes and other stuff

[craw]

This is slightly off-topic. But 1st let me thank all the ppl that have worked on the linux port of X11 and OpenGL. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, but I want more.:-)

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.

Linux support.

[Bill Currie]

True Linux support comes in the forms of vendors releasing specs for their chipsets so that open source drivers can be produced. This is why I bought a Matrox G200 (couldn't affort a G400) when I got my new computer: Matrox released the spec. Admittedly not all, but as things have been progressing, they've released more and more of the specs.

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.

Re:frame of reference

[Bill Currie]

Hehe, weeelll, wouldn't you agree that digital content creation, CAD/CAM/CAE, scientific visualization and medical imaging are all relevant to games? CAD is good for designing those models and maps; scientific visualisation helps you get things, especially SFX, to look right; medical imaging is to get body models anatomicly correct, especially post rocket):>; and digital content creation is, umm, the game itself(?).

Oh, I agree, video games drive the market (and don't tell me that those medical imaging systems don't get played with, who could resist playing with such a `toy'?), but the rest is very usefult for creating the games. They're also useful for affording to play the games.

OpenGL Conformance and Mesa

[Oddhack]

There's a common misconception being expressed in this thread. The conformance tests cannot be used to test an API or a collection of source code, because conformance is a property of the actual driver binary and hardware being used. It is highly unlikely that (for example) software Mesa, the Matrox driver based on Mesa, and the Nvidia driver based on Mesa will all have the same conformance test results. Thus it is literally impossible to say that "Mesa is conformant", only that a particular driver based on Mesa is conformant.

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

Re:Ignorance... :-/

[Caballero]

We're trying to make sure everything we do is as independent of OS as possible. There are some other folks that are trying to port it to BSD for example, and they made some good suggestions for things we can do to make their lives easier.

With that said, the customer demand right now is for Linux. The companies that are paying us to do the work are paying us to do Linux, and the vendors that want to write applications want to put them under Linux. So, the focus is still there.

- |Daryll

Congrats Brian!

[Izaak]

It is most cool that Brian can now work on Mesa as part of his job. This is a Good Thing for the community as well as him. I went to college with Brian, and he was cranking out kick-ass graphics code even way back then (over a decade ago)... he will do amazing things at PI, I am certain.

Thad