If the past is any guide, a number of Slashdotters are awaiting E 0.17 with at least some level of hope that Raster will come through with something that rocks once again. In that light, he'd be silly not to expect his first news post in months to get some attention.
I still have some version of E.16 installed, and use it from time to time. But then, I switch between window managers like a little girl dressing up her dolly.
I also think its a little....unusual to expect anyone to go and tell him about configurations; I know of the guy as primarily a graphics oriented programmer, who I would expect to know his drivers already. Do you like being told how to suck eggs?
You're absolutely right, and the other guy too. I have it disabled myself (running 4496 drivers from the portage tree, there's a patch for linux 2.6 in there), I was more pointing out that that would be a relevant factor to the tests he was running. I didn't even notice much of a speedup from enabling it on my FX 5200, but I sure noticed the bugs. Mostly Gecko-based browser crashes for me.
Forgot to suggest, perhaps some Cg shaders could speed up the types of operations Raster is looking for in E 0.17? Not that I know much about Cg, but I've read some of the docs for it, and for stuff like the kind of candy the next version will have, well the shader languages appear pretty much designed to do this on the hardware.
Basically 2D vertex programs for the widgets' dimensions, fragment programs for effects on the contents of the widget shaders. Am I smoking crack here or what? Obviously its not a solution that will cover everyone, but I get the impression the next E is some while off anyhow, by which time many more people may have shader enabled GPUs.
Raster doesn't say whther he had 'Option "RenderAccel" "True"' enabled, which you must do on Nvidia cards if you want XRender acceleration.
Here is the entry from the driver README:
Option "RenderAccel" "boolean"
Enable or disable hardware acceleration of the RENDER
extension. THIS OPTION IS EXPERIMENTAL. ENABLE IT AT YOUR
OWN RISK. There is no correctness test suite for the
RENDER extension so NVIDIA can not verify that RENDER
acceleration works correctly. Default: hardware
acceleration of the RENDER extension is disabled.
Following that option, this one is noted:
Option "NoRenderExtension" "boolean"
Disable the RENDER extension. Other than recompiling
the X-server, XFree86 doesn't seem to have another way of
disabling this. Fortunatly, we can control this from the
driver so we export this option. This is useful in depth
8 where RENDER would normally steal most of the default
colormap. Default: RENDER is offered when possible.
...with more memory, an internet connection, hard drives and what not is an exciting development, but look at Carmacks' experience with Sega - they won't even give one of the best PC game programmers some info on a piece of peripheral hardware! He was polite about it, but they're just being silly.
An interesting side point is that whatever hacks people do manage to carry out on these consoles could end up providing a ready-made excuse for poor market performance, whether or not console hacking makes any real effect on profitability. It seems to me it's a question of whether the manufacturers have the balls and foresight to provide in a positive way for the inevitable fact that people will find ways into some of these new systems. As far as Sega are concerned the answer appears to be no. Personally, I'm hoping Sony will do a Net Yaroze-like program for the PS2! It's not implausible, considering the fact they're licensing out the CPU and graphics chips. I'd pay for one. Hobby games ahoy!
"Discreet plans to license development rights for 3d studio gMax to qualified game developers on a per title basis".
and further down:
"Extensions to the new product can be made by qualified game developers who are licensed by Discreet to create "Game Packs" - collections of plug-ins and scripts. gMax is designed to support the same operating systems as 3d studio max including Microsoft Windows, the dominant 3d authoring environment for the consumer game content creation community."
'Including' Windows? Come off it Discreet, what other OS's does Max ship on? Please. There are hints in the release that suggest a partnership with Microsoft, too.
Ok, so maybe the licensing they refer to here is for the right to distribute changes with a commercial product, since they do say elsewhere that it will be used to ship level-editing Game Packs with games, but there is nothing in the language of the press release to suggest anything about Open source, or indeed portability. If that's the way it is, it's a great shame, but still a good thing (just not as good).
...is a lot to watch, especially when most of it's "Well Bob, there's the rocket" "Yep Cindy, we launch in one hour".
So skip through to about 35 minutes to see the lead up to the launch. Once it gets to around 48 minutes they're back to info-graphics and repeating what the flight control crew is saying.
"We're at L+5, that's five minutes after the launch time (Ed. No shit?), and I've just heard that the flight is nominal". Argh, so did we.
Slashdot Mirror
If the past is any guide, a number of Slashdotters are awaiting E 0.17 with at least some level of hope that Raster will come through with something that rocks once again. In that light, he'd be silly not to expect his first news post in months to get some attention.
.16 installed, and use it from time to time. But then, I switch between window managers like a little girl dressing up her dolly.
I still have some version of E
I also think its a little....unusual to expect anyone to go and tell him about configurations; I know of the guy as primarily a graphics oriented programmer, who I would expect to know his drivers already. Do you like being told how to suck eggs?
You're absolutely right, and the other guy too. I have it disabled myself (running 4496 drivers from the portage tree, there's a patch for linux 2.6 in there), I was more pointing out that that would be a relevant factor to the tests he was running. I didn't even notice much of a speedup from enabling it on my FX 5200, but I sure noticed the bugs. Mostly Gecko-based browser crashes for me.
But not to turn this into nvews.net or anything.
Forgot to suggest, perhaps some Cg shaders could speed up the types of operations Raster is looking for in E 0.17? Not that I know much about Cg, but I've read some of the docs for it, and for stuff like the kind of candy the next version will have, well the shader languages appear pretty much designed to do this on the hardware.
Basically 2D vertex programs for the widgets' dimensions, fragment programs for effects on the contents of the widget shaders. Am I smoking crack here or what? Obviously its not a solution that will cover everyone, but I get the impression the next E is some while off anyhow, by which time many more people may have shader enabled GPUs.
(Gotta love the lack of post editing.)
Here is the entry from the driver README:
Following that option, this one is noted:
...with more memory, an internet connection, hard drives and what not is an exciting development, but look at Carmacks' experience with Sega - they won't even give one of the best PC game programmers some info on a piece of peripheral hardware! He was polite about it, but they're just being silly.
An interesting side point is that whatever hacks people do manage to carry out on these consoles could end up providing a ready-made excuse for poor market performance, whether or not console hacking makes any real effect on profitability. It seems to me it's a question of whether the manufacturers have the balls and foresight to provide in a positive way for the inevitable fact that people will find ways into some of these new systems. As far as Sega are concerned the answer appears to be no. Personally, I'm hoping Sony will do a Net Yaroze-like program for the PS2! It's not implausible, considering the fact they're licensing out the CPU and graphics chips. I'd pay for one. Hobby games ahoy!
From the press release:
"Discreet plans to license development rights for 3d studio gMax to qualified game developers on a per title basis".
and further down:
"Extensions to the new product can be made by qualified game developers who are licensed by Discreet to create "Game Packs" - collections of plug-ins and scripts. gMax is designed to support the same operating systems as 3d studio max including Microsoft Windows, the dominant 3d authoring environment for the consumer game content creation community."
'Including' Windows? Come off it Discreet, what other OS's does Max ship on? Please. There are hints in the release that suggest a partnership with Microsoft, too.
Ok, so maybe the licensing they refer to here is for the right to distribute changes with a commercial product, since they do say elsewhere that it will be used to ship level-editing Game Packs with games, but there is nothing in the language of the press release to suggest anything about Open source, or indeed portability. If that's the way it is, it's a great shame, but still a good thing (just not as good).
...is a lot to watch, especially when most of it's "Well Bob, there's the rocket" "Yep Cindy, we launch in one hour".
So skip through to about 35 minutes to see the lead up to the launch. Once it gets to around 48 minutes they're back to info-graphics and repeating what the flight control crew is saying.
"We're at L+5, that's five minutes after the launch time (Ed. No shit?), and I've just heard that the flight is nominal". Argh, so did we.