I haven't used AT&T long distance in years. I currently use Sprint here at school, and back home my parents use MCI/Worldcom. Both of them provide decent & curious service, and don't call bitching you out trying to switch to another service.
The funny thing is that even back in the day when I _had_ AT&T they still called asking me if I wanted to switch! My reaction would be....uhm morons...I use you already, are you that stupid?
Any company that can't keep track of its own customers has serious problems.
I've seen the trailer for this, and I have to admit it looks beautiful. Even though, part of me is itching to say that it still doesn't look completely real.
The fact is that CGI movies shouldn't look real. There is a certain magic that CGI can create in a film that makes it look...perhaps more than real... CGI can allow things to look real enough, but then allow us to go beyond what is actually possible, and then take us there.
That is what I'm looking forward to about Final Fantasy. A movie that doesnt even pretend to be a cartoon, and a film that will take us past where reality has ever gone.
The fact that I said "mozilla installer" was an oversight.
I do understand the difference between the two, I just would have preferred an option to disable that "feature" I don't take very kindly that Netscape put an icon for itself on my desktop either without asking.
In that case, IE probably uses between 20-30mb itself...but at least 1/2 of that is being shared with the rest of the system. I think the biggest problem Netscape6 has (at least on the Windows side, this wouldn't affect Mac or Unix users), is that its using all of its own libraries for rendering and whatnot.
Netscape pre6.x (i.e., 4.x, 3.x, etc.) used the Native Windwows libraries, which let it also share a good portion of its memory usage to the system..but now it has to generate all of that itself, and that causes a dramatic increase in memory usage. Many people may find themselves in a bind when their system runs slow as crap under NS 6.
On the other hand...this could all just be attributed to debug code thats eating up memory. Lets hope so.
Ok.... I'll admit it. I griped previously about the AOL on desktop thing...but what we really carea bout here is the browser.
Big selling point---the "Modern" skin looks much better. Its very smooth and doesn't clash with every other program I'm running. Many people will like it just because it looks good.
The stability is much improved, and its faster than Internet Explorer 5.5 in loading and in downloading web pages. One thing I noticed....I'm just sitting at Slashdot typing this right now, and Netscape 6 is using 34 MB of memory! That's a bit excessive, 2-3x what IE5 uses.
Overall...I think PR3 is a huge improvement over PR2...and could be the best Netscape release to date. I'm actually looking forward to the final release now...as long as they cut down on the memory usage.
Ok ok...I can deal with most things, but when I saw the Mozilla "installer" (i.e., downloader) picking up a package called "AOL On Desktop"--aod.xpi, I promptly became suspicious. I deleted the file before the Netscape Installer could install that.xpi, but then the installer crashed. How beautiful. They give you no choice on whether you want that or not. Looks like Netscape is doing the Real(tm) thing for us.
Wouldn't this be a bit dangerous---seeing the properties of Mercury? Its bad enough that they use Liquid Mercury in some thermometers, but the amount required for a mirror of this size could be a huge environmental health hazard if anything ever happened.
If it weren't for that fact, I'd be all for it. I have no problem with cheap telescopes...but they need to be safe enough not to worry about killing the entire population of the town its located in.
I think Katz and others carry a good point...the world of politics does not carry as much clout as it once did, and there are so many of us who believe that things need to change. But I do not believe this will happen just yet.
Katz seems to imply that the reason politics will not work anymore is because the issues they are discussing don't matter anymore...that the community of the net and the technology is making all of it irrelevant.
But for millions of people...not just Americans (U.S.), but for people all over the world, there are still issues that need to be solved, and they do not involve the internet. To many of us, these are tired, old issues, but to many, including the young, they are very important. I am of course referring to the issues such as Abortion, Gun Control, and all of those things that we cringe when we hear a politician mention.
The issue is that right now most people still want to think they have a say in this, so they elect the "conservative" or "liberal" candidate whome might do what they think is right...but in the end, we get exactly the same thing.
Throughout this election year, I, as well as others, have seen the candidates and thought...who picked these guys? Do they really have what we want at heart? All I've seen is a pissing match to see who can get the "highest office in the land". Nothing more.
Democratic politics was designed to be a way for the people to say what they needed to live in the world they wanted. But the United States is no longer this way. We exist in a place where companies, special interests, and possibly above all, other politicians, decide who we vote for and who runs our government. These groups are NOT the people...as much as they'd like to pretend they are.
But politics as we know it...such as it is...will not end yet. It will not end until those that Katz mentioned, the ones controlling these groups--the boomers, the corpratists, etc. are long gone. Then we will have a time for the people who have known freedom--through the net perhaps, and who do believe that the other issues are perhaps irrelevant, and the change will take place. I know I await that day.
But until then, we have to deal with what we have. This election is probably the most important one we will face in the forseeable future. For technology/net related issues, who is elected will determine the de-facto law that all cases(such as copyright and IP) will be based on. Hopefully, the right choice will be made.
This is the second part of the article, posted today.
--
Voodoo Extremist Chris Rhinehart; Human Head Studios -- From what I've read, Doom3 is intended to have a strong single-player experience. What do you anticipate to be the biggest design hurdles to overcome while creating Doom3, as opposed to designing a title intended primarly for multiplayer?
John Carmack -- We sort of went into Q3 thinking that the multi-player only focus was going to make the game design easier. It turned out that the lack of any good unifying concept left the level designers and artists without a good focal point, and there was more meandering around that we cared for. The hardest thing is deciding what to focus on, because DOOM meant different things to different people. We have decided to make the single player game story experience the primary focus, but many people would argue that DOOM was more about the multi-player.
Voodoo Extreme -- When do you think computers will become fast enough so that developers can dump BSP based VSD algorithms for more flexible ones?
John Carmack -- I think this has been mis-characterized for a long time - None of the Quake games have had what I would call a "BSP based VSD algorithm". The visibility associated with quake is a cluster to cluster potentially visible set (PVS) algorithm, masked by an area connectivity graph (in Q2 and Q3), followed by hierarchical frustum culling (which does use the BSP). The software renderers then performed an edge based scan-line rasterization algorithm, which resulted in zero-overdraw for the world.
Early in Q1's development, I pursued "beam trees", which were truly a BSP based visibility algorithm that did exact visibility by tracking unfilled screen geometry going front to back, but the log2 complexity scaling factor lost out to the constant complexity factor from the PVS.
That highlights an important point that some graphics programmers don't appreciate properly - it is the performance of the entire system that matters, not a single metric. It is very easy to go significantly slower while drawing less primitives or with less overdraw, because you spent more time deciding which ones to not draw than it would have taken to draw them in a more optimized manner. This applies heavily to visibility culling and level of detail work, and is much more significant now with geometry processors and static meshes.
The PVS system had two significant benefits: constant time lookup, and complete automation (no designer input required).
Through Q2 and Q3, the "complete automation" advantage started to deteriorate, as designers were coerced into marking more and more things as detail brushes to speed up the processing, placing hint brushes to control the cluster sizes, or manually placing area-portals.
The principle drawbacks of the PVS are the large pre-processing time, the large storage space cost, and the static nature of the data.
The size and space drawbacks were helped with detail-brushes, which basically made a more complex map seem less complex to the visibility process, but they required the level designers to pro-actively take action. It has been interesting to watch the designers' standard practices. Almost nobody just picks a policy like "all small trim will be detail brushes". Instead, they tend to completely ignore detail brushes until the map processing time reaches their personal pain threshold. Here at Id, we usually didn't let maps take more than a half-hour to process (on our huge 16 CPU server.), but I heard tales from other companies and the community of maps that were allowed to take overnight or all weekend to vis. That is a mistake, but the optimize-for-vis-time guidelines are not widely understood.
The static nature of a pre-computed PVS showed up most glaringly when you had your face in front of a closed door, but the game was running slow because it was drawing everything behind the door, then drawing the door on top of it. I introduced areaportals in Q2 to allow designers to explicitly allow large sections of the vis to be pruned off when an entity is in a certain state. This is much more efficient than a more generalized scheme that actually looked at geometric information.
In the Q1 timeframe, I think the PVS was a huge win, but the advantage deteriorated somewhat as the nature of the rendering datasets changed.
In any case, the gross culling in the new engine is completely different from previous engines. It does require the designers to manually placed portal brushes with some degree of intelligence, so it isn't completely automated, but I expect that for commercial grade levels, there will be less portal brushes than there currently are hint brushes. It doesn't have any significant pre-processing time, and it is an exact point-to-area, instead of cluster-to-cluster. There will probably also be an entity-state based pruning facility like areaportals, but I haven't coded it yet.
Voodoo Extreme -- The shader rendering pipeline [in DOOM 3] - completely re-written from Quake III? How are you going to handle the radically different abilities of todays cards to produce a similar visual effect on each? For example I'm thinking of the presence or non presence of register combiners, and the different implemntations of these extensions.
John Carmack -- The renderer is completely new, and very different in structure from previous engines. Interestingly, the interface remained fairly close for a long time, such that I was able to develop most of the DOOM renderer using the rest of Q3 almost unmodified. It finally did diverge, but still not too radically.
The theoretically ideal feature set for a 3D accelerator would be:
Many texture units to allow all the lighting calculations to be done in a single pass. I can use at least eight, and possibly more if the reflection vector math needs to burn texture units for its calculations. Even with the exact same memory subsystem, this would more than double the rendering speed over a current dual texture chip.
Flexible dependent texture reads to allow specular power function lookups and non-triangulation dependent specular interpolation. No shipping card has this yet. I was initially very excited about the possibility that the ATI Radeon would be able to do some of this, but it turns out to not quite be flexible enough. I do fault Microsoft for adopting "bumped environment mapping" as a specialized, degenerate case of dependent texture reads.
Dot3 texture blending. This is critical for bump mapping. Embossing and bump env mapping don't cut it at all. GeForce and Radeon have this now, and everyone will follow.
Flexible geometry acceleration. I can't use current geometry accelerators to calculate bumped specular, so the CPU must still touch a lot of data when that feature is enabled. Upcoming geometry processors will be powerful enough to do it all by themselves. I could also use multiple texture units to get the same effect in some cases, if the combiners are flexible enough.
Destination alpha and stencil buffer support are needed for the basic functioning of the renderer. Every modern card has this, but no game has required it yet.
The ideal card for DOOM hasn't shipped yet, but there are a couple good candidates just over the horizon. The existing cards stack up like this:
Nvidia GeForce[2]: We are using these as our primary development platform. I play some tricks with the register combiners to get a bit better quality than would be possible with a generic dual texture accelerator.
ATI Radeon: All features work properly, but I needed to disable some things in the driver. I will be working with ATI to make sure everything works as well as possible. The third texture unit will allow the general lighting path to operate a bit more efficiently than on a GeForce. Lacking the extra math of the register combiners, the specular highlights don't look as good as on a GeForce.
3DFX Voodoo4/5, S3 Savage4/2000, Matrox G400/450, ATI Rage128, Nvidia TNT[2]: Much of the visual lushness will be missing due to the lack of bump mapping, but the game won't have any gaping holes. Most of these except the V5 probably won't have enough fill-rate to be very enjoyable.
3DFX Voodoo3, S3 Savage3D/MX, Matrox G200, etc: Without a stencil buffer, much of the core capabilities of the renderer are just lost. The game will probably run, but it won't be anything like we intend it to be viewed. Almost certainly not enough fill rate.
Voodoo Extreme -- The game side is C++, why not the rest of the code?
John Carmack -- It's still a possibility, but I am fairly happy with how the internals of the renderer are represented in straight C code.
Voodoo Extremist Gabe Newell; Valve Software -- John has consistently made very clear decisions about the scope of projects id has undertaken, which I would say is one of the main reasons id has been such a consistent producer over an extended period of time. Not having spoken with John about it directly, I think I understand his rational for focusing id on the Doom project. For the benefit of other developers, are there a couple of heuristics John uses to decide what does and doesn't make sense to undertake on a given project?
John Carmack -- The basic decision making process is the same for almost any choices: assess your capabilities, value goals objectively, cost estimate as well as you can, look for synergies to exploit and parasitic losses to avoid. Maximize the resulting values for an amount of effort you are willing to expend.
Computer games do have some notable aspects of their own, though. Riding the wave of Moore's Law causes timeliness to take on a couple new facets. Every once in a while, new things become possible or pragmatic for the first time, and you have an opportunity to do something that hasn't been seen before, which may be more important than lots of other factors combined.
It also cuts the other way, where something that would have been a great return on the work involved becomes useless or even a liability when you miss your time window. Several software rendering engines fell into that category.
SWG (Single White Geek) seeking same to build home as geek compound. Age not really an issue, 19-35 preferred. Females welcome, males expected. Must have knowledge of GNU license, mod_perl, linux kernel recompilation, and +20% system overclock. Contact box 31337 if interested.
Hey,
This attempt seems impressive, although I was a little stricken by the fact that they were bothered when they finished the first part (before the LN2) that they thought they needed the Nitogen.
If I were them...I would have tried for a higher clock speed before switching to L2. They were running at -48 degrees Celsius, and at 1035mhz....they could have probably overclocked that thing to 1100 or more, and still not broken -20 C.
I was also suprised they didn't attempt overclocking the GeForce they had on the system, since it was also running below freezing temperature, they probably could have clocked it up QUITE a bit.
In any case, I don't think I'll be needing any SuperCool solutions for some time...I'm quite happy overclocking my Celeron566 to 875 and keeping my GeForce256 SDR to 145/190.
Its nice to see Apple will be including a graphite option for the interface. Although the flashiness of the aqua is nice, the graphite just provides a much more "professional" presentation.
The Aqua look is reminiscent of the Blue/White G3s and the iMac look, and is probably where it will be most commonly used. But, if you've noticed...all of Apple's newer high end systems (the G4/G4multiprocessor/Cube/iMac DV/iBook SE) are graphite colored; becuase they know that although people want a good looking system, it must keep a professional image.
Frankly, you won't get that if your system is Blue, Orange, or Green.
He didn't say that they wanted to include K-Meleon itself into WA3, just Gecko...and I suppose K-Meleon was his way of experimenting with it to see how it worked....
I'd say...nice experiment.
As for them doing it because they are AOL, I'd say doubtful. Some of Nullsoft's plans are to port Winamp to Linux, and using Mozilla would make sense since IE obviously isn't cross-platform.
And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble.
...from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31
(Red Letter Edition)
Click here if you are using Mozilla (M17) or Netscape PR2.
While true...that doesnt necessitate a copy of the platform they have just come from. When features are copied so exactly, people will go and look at it and say "So? It looks just like Windows? Why should I switch when I already have that?"
We should be concentrating on making a unique(but also very user-friendly) experience, not one that copies what we already have.
Nautilus looks nice. Much better than it did before...although the non-antialiased fonts really do a number on it's look.
I have two questions...why is it, that with most of the *Nix community despising Microsoft, that every single new GUI that comes out ends up trying to be just like it?? Let's face it, that whole File View in Nautilus looks almost exactly like Win98/Win2k/IE4's 'Web View', which is a feature that is taken far too little advantage of. KDE has it too. The standard button alignment is also very close to that of Windows....what's the deal here people?? You've got a great product here, but you don't want to distinguish it for itself, or just running out of ideas?
My other question.....but I suppose this one contradicts the other above, is why is the menu bar always raised? This has always puzzled me about X-based GUIs. MacOS, Windows, and Be, all rely on a menubar that is flush with the rest of the window, and it looks nice. But even the most cutting edge of X-based GUIs have a raised menubar...what is the purpose of this? Its not like we don't see it...there may have been a purpose for it back years ago with monochrome displays or whatnot, but I think it's a practice whose time has come.
So on one hand, these guys seem to be doing everything they can to look like Windows(at least functionality wise), and then they have the one thing they cling to, and it's probably the one thing they shouldn't be clinging to.
-Julius X
Corpratism isn't the problem neccessarily...
on
Selfish Society
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· Score: 1
Ok...I didn't feel like reading through 300+ posts, so I'm just going to write what I believe.
First of all, it truly amazes me how Katz continually uses the term "Corpratism". While we all know he is referring to the corporations and only the corporations when he talks about this...I think the problem might be more toward Capitalism. One of the worst commercials on television is, I believe, any one of the Wall Street Journal commercials that shows some disgusting snobby or rich folk, and ends with the phrase "Wall Street Journal--Adventures In Capitalism". It may just be me, but it seems that Capitalism is exactly our problem. Capitalism is exactly what the word dictates, the pursuit of money. Our problem today isn't just that corporations want to protect their ahem-property, but that they don't want to lose money. This goes not only for the corporations themselves, but the people running them, and their shareholders. There are far too many of us who spend our time on the stock market, just looking to see what is coming over the line on the next Tech IPO and soforth. In doing that, we become one of them. So, I think that Katz has got a point, but it may be directed in the wrong place....we need to stop the moneygrubbing for a little while, then, and only then, will we be able to control some of the problems that encroach on this society(and we may even be able to get Mozilla out the door!)
Uhm....it's due out this fall. I'm actually holding a copy of the Gold Final in my hands right now....
-Julius X
Does this mean a nonbiased ZD, or a biased C|Net?
on
CNET Buys Ziff-Davis
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· Score: 1
For a long time now, myself, and I know many others, have lost most(if not all respect) for ZD as far as their editorials, news, and reviews....usually being biased towards the highest bidder.
On the other hand, CNET has typically had very good reviews and news, never catering to whomever seems to be buying the advertisements.
So with this merger at hand, will that mean that ZD's publications such as PCmag will actually be worth reading again? Or does it mean that CNet will turn to biased reviews?
(I hope the first thing that CNet does is fire Jesse Burst...his "Burst Alerts" have to be some of the biggest crap on the web)
On another note...does this mean that John C. Dvorak is going to return to doing editorials for CNET? I remember he did some half interesting content for them years ago...but not in quite some time.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't used AT&T long distance in years. I currently use Sprint here at school, and back home my parents use MCI/Worldcom. Both of them provide decent & curious service, and don't call bitching you out trying to switch to another service.
The funny thing is that even back in the day when I _had_ AT&T they still called asking me if I wanted to switch! My reaction would be....uhm morons...I use you already, are you that stupid?
Any company that can't keep track of its own customers has serious problems.
-Julius X
I've seen the trailer for this, and I have to admit it looks beautiful. Even though, part of me is itching to say that it still doesn't look completely real.
The fact is that CGI movies shouldn't look real. There is a certain magic that CGI can create in a film that makes it look...perhaps more than real... CGI can allow things to look real enough, but then allow us to go beyond what is actually possible, and then take us there.
That is what I'm looking forward to about Final Fantasy. A movie that doesnt even pretend to be a cartoon, and a film that will take us past where reality has ever gone.
-Julius X
The fact that I said "mozilla installer" was an oversight.
I do understand the difference between the two, I just would have preferred an option to disable that "feature" I don't take very kindly that Netscape put an icon for itself on my desktop either without asking.
-Julius X
In that case, IE probably uses between 20-30mb itself...but at least 1/2 of that is being shared with the rest of the system. I think the biggest problem Netscape6 has (at least on the Windows side, this wouldn't affect Mac or Unix users), is that its using all of its own libraries for rendering and whatnot.
Netscape pre6.x (i.e., 4.x, 3.x, etc.) used the Native Windwows libraries, which let it also share a good portion of its memory usage to the system..but now it has to generate all of that itself, and that causes a dramatic increase in memory usage. Many people may find themselves in a bind when their system runs slow as crap under NS 6.
On the other hand...this could all just be attributed to debug code thats eating up memory. Lets hope so.
-Julius X
Ok.... I'll admit it. I griped previously about the AOL on desktop thing...but what we really carea bout here is the browser.
Big selling point---the "Modern" skin looks much better. Its very smooth and doesn't clash with every other program I'm running. Many people will like it just because it looks good.
The stability is much improved, and its faster than Internet Explorer 5.5 in loading and in downloading web pages. One thing I noticed....I'm just sitting at Slashdot typing this right now, and Netscape 6 is using 34 MB of memory! That's a bit excessive, 2-3x what IE5 uses.
Overall...I think PR3 is a huge improvement over PR2...and could be the best Netscape release to date. I'm actually looking forward to the final release now...as long as they cut down on the memory usage.
I wonder how Mozilla M18 will compare to this.
-Julius X
Ok ok...I can deal with most things, but when I saw the Mozilla "installer" (i.e., downloader) picking up a package called "AOL On Desktop"--aod.xpi, I promptly became suspicious. I deleted the file before the Netscape Installer could install that .xpi, but then the installer crashed. How beautiful. They give you no choice on whether you want that or not. Looks like Netscape is doing the Real(tm) thing for us.
(Sigh).
-Julius X
Why does this not suprise me. I would expect the P4 not to get any real system integration until March, if not April of next year.
They're just too damned expensive.
-Julius X
Wouldn't this be a bit dangerous---seeing the properties of Mercury? Its bad enough that they use Liquid Mercury in some thermometers, but the amount required for a mirror of this size could be a huge environmental health hazard if anything ever happened.
If it weren't for that fact, I'd be all for it. I have no problem with cheap telescopes...but they need to be safe enough not to worry about killing the entire population of the town its located in.
-Julius X
I think Katz and others carry a good point...the world of politics does not carry as much clout as it once did, and there are so many of us who believe that things need to change. But I do not believe this will happen just yet.
Katz seems to imply that the reason politics will not work anymore is because the issues they are discussing don't matter anymore...that the community of the net and the technology is making all of it irrelevant.
But for millions of people...not just Americans (U.S.), but for people all over the world, there are still issues that need to be solved, and they do not involve the internet. To many of us, these are tired, old issues, but to many, including the young, they are very important. I am of course referring to the issues such as Abortion, Gun Control, and all of those things that we cringe when we hear a politician mention.
The issue is that right now most people still want to think they have a say in this, so they elect the "conservative" or "liberal" candidate whome might do what they think is right...but in the end, we get exactly the same thing.
Throughout this election year, I, as well as others, have seen the candidates and thought...who picked these guys? Do they really have what we want at heart? All I've seen is a pissing match to see who can get the "highest office in the land". Nothing more.
Democratic politics was designed to be a way for the people to say what they needed to live in the world they wanted. But the United States is no longer this way. We exist in a place where companies, special interests, and possibly above all, other politicians, decide who we vote for and who runs our government. These groups are NOT the people...as much as they'd like to pretend they are.
But politics as we know it...such as it is...will not end yet. It will not end until those that Katz mentioned, the ones controlling these groups--the boomers, the corpratists, etc. are long gone. Then we will have a time for the people who have known freedom--through the net perhaps, and who do believe that the other issues are perhaps irrelevant, and the change will take place. I know I await that day.
But until then, we have to deal with what we have. This election is probably the most important one we will face in the forseeable future. For technology/net related issues, who is elected will determine the de-facto law that all cases(such as copyright and IP) will be based on. Hopefully, the right choice will be made.
-Julius X
THAT was awesome...... I just wish it were higher-res...but what am I saying..they were just pixels!
Very cool though.
-Julius X
Win2000 has Tab Completion...so you only need to click *tab* once you have the "CD DOC" typed.
-Julius X
I can't wait to see this...PI rocked my world....hopefully he'll take things back even more bizzare than Tim Burton did with the first movie.
-Julius X
This is the second part of the article, posted today.
--
Voodoo Extremist Chris Rhinehart; Human Head Studios -- From what I've read, Doom3 is intended to have a strong single-player experience. What do you anticipate to be the biggest design hurdles to overcome while creating Doom3, as opposed to designing a title intended primarly for multiplayer?
John Carmack -- We sort of went into Q3 thinking that the multi-player only focus was going to make the game design easier. It turned out that the lack of any good unifying concept left the level designers and artists without a good focal point, and there was more meandering around that we cared for. The hardest thing is deciding what to focus on, because DOOM meant different things to different people. We have decided to make the single player game story experience the primary focus, but many people would argue that DOOM was more about the multi-player.
Voodoo Extreme -- When do you think computers will become fast enough so that developers can dump BSP based VSD algorithms for more flexible ones?
John Carmack -- I think this has been mis-characterized for a long time - None of the Quake games have had what I would call a "BSP based VSD algorithm". The visibility associated with quake is a cluster to cluster potentially visible set (PVS) algorithm, masked by an area connectivity graph (in Q2 and Q3), followed by hierarchical frustum culling (which does use the BSP). The software renderers then performed an edge based scan-line rasterization algorithm, which resulted in zero-overdraw for the world.
Early in Q1's development, I pursued "beam trees", which were truly a BSP based visibility algorithm that did exact visibility by tracking unfilled screen geometry going front to back, but the log2 complexity scaling factor lost out to the constant complexity factor from the PVS.
That highlights an important point that some graphics programmers don't appreciate properly - it is the performance of the entire system that matters, not a single metric. It is very easy to go significantly slower while drawing less primitives or with less overdraw, because you spent more time deciding which ones to not draw than it would have taken to draw them in a more optimized manner. This applies heavily to visibility culling and level of detail work, and is much more significant now with geometry processors and static meshes.
The PVS system had two significant benefits: constant time lookup, and complete automation (no designer input required).
Through Q2 and Q3, the "complete automation" advantage started to deteriorate, as designers were coerced into marking more and more things as detail brushes to speed up the processing, placing hint brushes to control the cluster sizes, or manually placing area-portals.
The principle drawbacks of the PVS are the large pre-processing time, the large storage space cost, and the static nature of the data.
The size and space drawbacks were helped with detail-brushes, which basically made a more complex map seem less complex to the visibility process, but they required the level designers to pro-actively take action. It has been interesting to watch the designers' standard practices. Almost nobody just picks a policy like "all small trim will be detail brushes". Instead, they tend to completely ignore detail brushes until the map processing time reaches their personal pain threshold. Here at Id, we usually didn't let maps take more than a half-hour to process (on our huge 16 CPU server.), but I heard tales from other companies and the community of maps that were allowed to take overnight or all weekend to vis. That is a mistake, but the optimize-for-vis-time guidelines are not widely understood.
The static nature of a pre-computed PVS showed up most glaringly when you had your face in front of a closed door, but the game was running slow because it was drawing everything behind the door, then drawing the door on top of it. I introduced areaportals in Q2 to allow designers to explicitly allow large sections of the vis to be pruned off when an entity is in a certain state. This is much more efficient than a more generalized scheme that actually looked at geometric information.
In the Q1 timeframe, I think the PVS was a huge win, but the advantage deteriorated somewhat as the nature of the rendering datasets changed.
In any case, the gross culling in the new engine is completely different from previous engines. It does require the designers to manually placed portal brushes with some degree of intelligence, so it isn't completely automated, but I expect that for commercial grade levels, there will be less portal brushes than there currently are hint brushes. It doesn't have any significant pre-processing time, and it is an exact point-to-area, instead of cluster-to-cluster. There will probably also be an entity-state based pruning facility like areaportals, but I haven't coded it yet.
Voodoo Extreme -- The shader rendering pipeline [in DOOM 3] - completely re-written from Quake III? How are you going to handle the radically different abilities of todays cards to produce a similar visual effect on each? For example I'm thinking of the presence or non presence of register combiners, and the different implemntations of these extensions.
John Carmack -- The renderer is completely new, and very different in structure from previous engines. Interestingly, the interface remained fairly close for a long time, such that I was able to develop most of the DOOM renderer using the rest of Q3 almost unmodified. It finally did diverge, but still not too radically.
The theoretically ideal feature set for a 3D accelerator would be:
Many texture units to allow all the lighting calculations to be done in a single pass. I can use at least eight, and possibly more if the reflection vector math needs to burn texture units for its calculations. Even with the exact same memory subsystem, this would more than double the rendering speed over a current dual texture chip.
Flexible dependent texture reads to allow specular power function lookups and non-triangulation dependent specular interpolation. No shipping card has this yet. I was initially very excited about the possibility that the ATI Radeon would be able to do some of this, but it turns out to not quite be flexible enough. I do fault Microsoft for adopting "bumped environment mapping" as a specialized, degenerate case of dependent texture reads.
Dot3 texture blending. This is critical for bump mapping. Embossing and bump env mapping don't cut it at all. GeForce and Radeon have this now, and everyone will follow.
Flexible geometry acceleration. I can't use current geometry accelerators to calculate bumped specular, so the CPU must still touch a lot of data when that feature is enabled. Upcoming geometry processors will be powerful enough to do it all by themselves. I could also use multiple texture units to get the same effect in some cases, if the combiners are flexible enough.
Destination alpha and stencil buffer support are needed for the basic functioning of the renderer. Every modern card has this, but no game has required it yet.
The ideal card for DOOM hasn't shipped yet, but there are a couple good candidates just over the horizon. The existing cards stack up like this:
Nvidia GeForce[2]: We are using these as our primary development platform. I play some tricks with the register combiners to get a bit better quality than would be possible with a generic dual texture accelerator.
ATI Radeon: All features work properly, but I needed to disable some things in the driver. I will be working with ATI to make sure everything works as well as possible. The third texture unit will allow the general lighting path to operate a bit more efficiently than on a GeForce. Lacking the extra math of the register combiners, the specular highlights don't look as good as on a GeForce.
3DFX Voodoo4/5, S3 Savage4/2000, Matrox G400/450, ATI Rage128, Nvidia TNT[2]: Much of the visual lushness will be missing due to the lack of bump mapping, but the game won't have any gaping holes. Most of these except the V5 probably won't have enough fill-rate to be very enjoyable.
3DFX Voodoo3, S3 Savage3D/MX, Matrox G200, etc: Without a stencil buffer, much of the core capabilities of the renderer are just lost. The game will probably run, but it won't be anything like we intend it to be viewed. Almost certainly not enough fill rate.
Voodoo Extreme -- The game side is C++, why not the rest of the code?
John Carmack -- It's still a possibility, but I am fairly happy with how the internals of the renderer are represented in straight C code.
Voodoo Extremist Gabe Newell; Valve Software -- John has consistently made very clear decisions about the scope of projects id has undertaken, which I would say is one of the main reasons id has been such a consistent producer over an extended period of time. Not having spoken with John about it directly, I think I understand his rational for focusing id on the Doom project. For the benefit of other developers, are there a couple of heuristics John uses to decide what does and doesn't make sense to undertake on a given project?
John Carmack -- The basic decision making process is the same for almost any choices: assess your capabilities, value goals objectively, cost estimate as well as you can, look for synergies to exploit and parasitic losses to avoid. Maximize the resulting values for an amount of effort you are willing to expend.
Computer games do have some notable aspects of their own, though. Riding the wave of Moore's Law causes timeliness to take on a couple new facets. Every once in a while, new things become possible or pragmatic for the first time, and you have an opportunity to do something that hasn't been seen before, which may be more important than lots of other factors combined.
It also cuts the other way, where something that would have been a great return on the work involved becomes useless or even a liability when you miss your time window. Several software rendering engines fell into that category.
-Julius X
Well blow me down!
Vooodooextreme is set as my start page....and I always wondered if that TI-85 they run the site off of would get Slashdotted......looks like they are!
Good thing I already read the article .
-Julius X
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-Julius X
Hey,
This attempt seems impressive, although I was a little stricken by the fact that they were bothered when they finished the first part (before the LN2) that they thought they needed the Nitogen.
If I were them...I would have tried for a higher clock speed before switching to L2. They were running at -48 degrees Celsius, and at 1035mhz....they could have probably overclocked that thing to 1100 or more, and still not broken -20 C.
I was also suprised they didn't attempt overclocking the GeForce they had on the system, since it was also running below freezing temperature, they probably could have clocked it up QUITE a bit.
In any case, I don't think I'll be needing any SuperCool solutions for some time...I'm quite happy overclocking my Celeron566 to 875 and keeping my GeForce256 SDR to 145/190.
-Julius X
Bad Karma (.net) is a Mechwarrior information site, they have nothing to do with Apple. Why do they have to do with this?
-Julius X
Its nice to see Apple will be including a graphite option for the interface. Although the flashiness of the aqua is nice, the graphite just provides a much more "professional" presentation.
The Aqua look is reminiscent of the Blue/White G3s and the iMac look, and is probably where it will be most commonly used. But, if you've noticed...all of Apple's newer high end systems (the G4/G4multiprocessor/Cube/iMac DV/iBook SE) are graphite colored; becuase they know that although people want a good looking system, it must keep a professional image.
Frankly, you won't get that if your system is Blue, Orange, or Green.
-Julius X
He didn't say that they wanted to include K-Meleon itself into WA3, just Gecko...and I suppose K-Meleon was his way of experimenting with it to see how it worked....
I'd say...nice experiment.
As for them doing it because they are AOL, I'd say doubtful. Some of Nullsoft's plans are to port Winamp to Linux, and using Mozilla would make sense since IE obviously isn't cross-platform.
-Julius X
And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble.
...from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31
(Red Letter Edition)
Click here if you are using Mozilla (M17) or Netscape PR2.
-Julius X
While true...that doesnt necessitate a copy of the platform they have just come from. When features are copied so exactly, people will go and look at it and say "So? It looks just like Windows? Why should I switch when I already have that?"
We should be concentrating on making a unique(but also very user-friendly) experience, not one that copies what we already have.
-Julius X
Nautilus looks nice. Much better than it did before...although the non-antialiased fonts really do a number on it's look.
I have two questions...why is it, that with most of the *Nix community despising Microsoft, that every single new GUI that comes out ends up trying to be just like it?? Let's face it, that whole File View in Nautilus looks almost exactly like Win98/Win2k/IE4's 'Web View', which is a feature that is taken far too little advantage of. KDE has it too. The standard button alignment is also very close to that of Windows....what's the deal here people?? You've got a great product here, but you don't want to distinguish it for itself, or just running out of ideas?
My other question.....but I suppose this one contradicts the other above, is why is the menu bar always raised? This has always puzzled me about X-based GUIs. MacOS, Windows, and Be, all rely on a menubar that is flush with the rest of the window, and it looks nice. But even the most cutting edge of X-based GUIs have a raised menubar...what is the purpose of this? Its not like we don't see it...there may have been a purpose for it back years ago with monochrome displays or whatnot, but I think it's a practice whose time has come.
So on one hand, these guys seem to be doing everything they can to look like Windows(at least functionality wise), and then they have the one thing they cling to, and it's probably the one thing they shouldn't be clinging to.
-Julius X
Ok...I didn't feel like reading through 300+ posts, so I'm just going to write what I believe.
First of all, it truly amazes me how Katz continually uses the term "Corpratism". While we all know he is referring to the corporations and only the corporations when he talks about this...I think the problem might be more toward Capitalism. One of the worst commercials on television is, I believe, any one of the Wall Street Journal commercials that shows some disgusting snobby or rich folk, and ends with the phrase "Wall Street Journal--Adventures In Capitalism".
It may just be me, but it seems that Capitalism is exactly our problem. Capitalism is exactly what the word dictates, the pursuit of money. Our problem today isn't just that corporations want to protect their ahem-property, but that they don't want to lose money. This goes not only for the corporations themselves, but the people running them, and their shareholders.
There are far too many of us who spend our time on the stock market, just looking to see what is coming over the line on the next Tech IPO and soforth. In doing that, we become one of them.
So, I think that Katz has got a point, but it may be directed in the wrong place....we need to stop the moneygrubbing for a little while, then, and only then, will we be able to control some of the problems that encroach on this society(and we may even be able to get Mozilla out the door!)
-Julius X
millenium isnt expected for another 24 months
Uhm....it's due out this fall. I'm actually holding a copy of the Gold Final in my hands right now....
-Julius X
For a long time now, myself, and I know many others, have lost most(if not all respect) for ZD as far as their editorials, news, and reviews....usually being biased towards the highest bidder.
On the other hand, CNET has typically had very good reviews and news, never catering to whomever seems to be buying the advertisements.
So with this merger at hand, will that mean that ZD's publications such as PCmag will actually be worth reading again? Or does it mean that CNet will turn to biased reviews?
(I hope the first thing that CNet does is fire Jesse Burst...his "Burst Alerts" have to be some of the biggest crap on the web)
On another note...does this mean that John C. Dvorak is going to return to doing editorials for CNET? I remember he did some half interesting content for them years ago...but not in quite some time.
--Bring back CNET Central!
-Julius X