I don't know about that. My experience in running a perfectly legal, licensed, and registered copy of Max (2.0, and 2.5) on NT hasn't been pretty. The machine crashed so frequently it wasn't funny. And it wasn't a wimpy machine either. It was a P2 450, w/ 128 megs of ram, and a video card that is supposed to work just fine (a TNT card).
There is something wrong with your setup if GNOME is crashing that much. Did you compile it your self, or did you use the installer? What Dist are you running on?
My machine is in GNOME 24/7, and I stress memory, CPU power, and graphics capabilities on that machine, and I haven't had GNOME 1.2 crash once. Netscape is currently refusing to work for some reason though (I had been running 1.2 for awhile before netscape started being a pain).
GTK can be ported to MacOSX without relying on X Windows. It is labor intensive though, as the teams porting GTK to BeOS and Windows are finding. And after all their work, personally, I would just rather rewrite my program to use native widgets.
In some cases yes. But the professional OpenGL cards accelerate completely different parts of the pipeline than gamecards. Running Quake on a FireGL 1 or a Wildcat is not good, but interactive modelling is a lot faster than the game cards.
I don't know about that. Halflife and Quake3 looked pretty darn good on the Wildcat machine I saw it on. 1280x1024 and not a frame drop in site.
Line Animation is dead. That is exactly why line animation from Japan is increasingly popular in the US. Because we all know that dead things are the most popular.
Wait, by my calculation, a 1600x1200 display has 1920000 pixels. So, each pixel takes 8 bites to store, so we are using 15360000 bytes per frame buffer. That right around 15 megs. Now, we of course want double buffered, so thats 30megs per display. 3 displays is 90 megs.
Now, we can only drive a maximum of 8 displays per pipeline, so to drive 8 displays at 1600x1200 means 240megs. That means that there is still 80 megs left. Hmm. I guess if we bump up the resolution to 1920x1200 that would increase our frame buffer useage to 294megs, which only leaves us a little over 20megs free.
Now, 8 displays may sound rediculous, but now that I think about it, these machines are made to run CAVEs and video walls, so maybe 8 displays ain't so bad.
Darn it, I'm getting so ansy waiting for BeOS 5 with OpenGL. I have a box ready to have BeOS 5 and a second processor inserted as soon as it ships.
BTW, is it possible to get GL hardware support to work under BeOS 4.5 with a Voodoo3 card? I know that the Voodoo2s are supported, but I can't find any info on the Voodoo3. Oh well.
Err, there are numerous other cards that have XFree drivers, like my spiffy new Voodoo3, or the Matrox G400. And the two cards I just mentioned have open sourced drivers. Nvidia's drivers are binary only.
XSI will use OpenGl. Any card that is going to provide decent performance is going to use DRI though. Softimage has a nasty habit of using GL for everything. For instance, in Softimage 3D, all the buttons are done in OpenGL. Worse, they somehow write their code so that it stresses many cards that you would think would be up to the task. Softimage 3D on a Wildcat system sure is nice though:) (my school has one. Only downside is that it's NT).
Yes, blender is reasonably nice (albeit very difficult to get the hang of. I'm still not productive in it), but it is a 3D animation program. We are discussing 2D animation, like the Smurfs.
The question of course is what industrial strength databases are supported on FreeBSD? I don't think Oracle, Sybase, or DB2 are. That just leaves interbase, and I don't really here too much about interbase.
One could potentially acheive the same results that Toonz provides using Gimp and some custom scripts. Many Animators on a budget do that (well, they generally use photoshop instead of Gimp). Essentially, the first thing you need is a script to automate scanning in hundreds of hand drawn cells. Then you use a gimp script to bring all those cells into a different numbered layer in one XCF file. Then you can use the animation tools that the Gimp already has. Granted, this isn't as powerfull a setup as Toonz, but then when it comes to graphics, free software is seldom as powerful.
One thing I never understood is what the heck is a person to do with a 320mb frame buffer? I just can't come up with any way to use a significant amount of that.
My university still has an Onyx. R10k processor, 128megs ram, RE2 graphics. Oh, we do have the ASO board for 4 sound chanels and an additional 6 serial ports (for a total of ten). We also have the MCO (instead of one 21" display, it can drive 6 TV resolution displays). Currently, the machine is mainly still used only because of the MCO and serial ports. It is darn hard to get multiple video chanels out of an NT machine, not to mention the uglyness of having many serial ports on NT.
The prof in charge of the machince constantly complains about performance. He seems to think this machine is helplessly out date since the new NT machine can pump out more polys. However, I think that this machine is misused. The first and formost problem is that instead of using OpenGL, then use a library called World Tool Kit(WTK). WTK is easy to use, but it limits what can be done. Specifically, you can't do the types of things with WTK that the Onyx excels at, namely multi pass texturing, so WTK is just emphasizing the machines weeknesses.
I'm trying to get my basic world system up and running on linux (I don't have much yet) so that I can port it to the Onyx in such a way as to emphasize the Onyx strengths, rather than its weeknesses.
I would imagine that there would be optional audio upgrades. Just like on SGI (where their top of the line workstation a few years ago shipped with no audio. You had to sell out a few additional grand if you wanted sound).
Au Contrare. CRTs aren't specifically limited to any bit depth (LCDs are though). Thus, your moniter can display much more than a puny 16.7 million colors. Why do you think that John Caramack keeps pushing for 16bit chanels?
And even if the signal is degraded (and it is), there is value in using a higher quality signal as much as possible. In sound processing, there are many effects devices that have 16bit ADCs and DACs, but use a 24bit signal internally. And like wise, many DDRs (digital disk records) like Abecas use 10bit chanels even though their ouput is usually headed to a TV screen near you. The worse the degredation of the final device, the more important it is to preserve every drop of quality possible up to output on the final device.
BTW, I think Cineon is 16bit, but maybe it can work at multiple bit depts.
>Personally, I think that it's stupid to port >this stuff to Linux as long as it sags in the >areas multimedia and real-time. This port would >be better served for BeOS, where the latency for >multimedia operations is much lower (and much >more predictible). This isn't a flamebait >against Linux, just a statement of the facts. >Obviously they're looking for hype first before >technological feasability.
From what I read, linux should work fine. After all, they probably ported in from Irix, which means a linux port is a no brainer.
BeOS on the other hand has a few problems. First, they don't currently have OpenGL support. That's why I haven't upgraded to 5.0 yet. Second, they are making a lot of media companies nervous with all their talk about BeIA. That's why so many projects are on hold. If I were running a development project for BeOS commercially, I would probably put it on hold to.
And the business about it being ported to red hat could mean that there are dependencies on the way Red Hat does things. It wouldn't suprise me if the sell the linux version only has part of a hardware bundle at first. That seems to be what most other large media software companies are going to do.
It should be noted that SCO owns the official Unix title since they bought it from Novel (who bought it from AT&T). Thus, whoever buys SCO can declare their pet OS the one true Unix. I think that the OpenBSD maintainer should buy SCO.
You're really saving money if you have more time than money, like a lot of college students do.\
If you need features that the original doesn't have, developing a clone may be cheaper than getting a source license (assuming that getting a source license is even possible).
How do we know that KDE2 wouldn't have come out even if both MacOS and Windows had collapsed on the day that KDE1 came out?
After all, emacs hasn't had any real competition in years (well, some would consider vi a competitor, but I don't. Nothing ever causes people to switch from one to the other), yet they still keep improving it.
Playstation and Dreamcast don't use OpenGl. I would guess that Nintendo doesn't either. Nor do I expect the PS2 to use OpenGL. And yet all those platforms are doing rather well.
Interestingly, on the Dreamcast developers have the option of developing for WindowsCE and using DirectX, however almost all developers use the Sega OS, where they are much closer to the hardware and can selectively replace parts of the OS that they don't like.
On a related note, how many really good single player games come out for the PC? Diablo 1 and 2 are the only ones that I can think of. So lack of OpenGL doesn't seem to be hurting the good games, I don't expect that it would hurt the X-Box. I do think that being forced to actually use Windows and DirectX might hurt the X-Box though, since if the hardware is constant and unchanging, then an OS isn't really needed (it's helpful when starting, but eventually you'll get to the place that you want to replace it all with your own OS taylored to your game).
>If the Xbox were to be deemed OS like enough to >be bundled into the OS company, you get into a >whole mess regarding the games. It is >traditional in the console industry to sell the >console cheaply and make the money off of the >games. Surely the OS business couldn't get into >selling other software immediately. It would be >ridiculous to allow one company to sell the XBox >at a loss and for the other to make money off of >the games."
That is why game box companies charge high licensing fees from developers. Look at Sony, they don't do any of their own PS development (or at least they didn't when the machine came out), and they still made a bundle. How? By charging a percentage of every copy of every game sold. And that is probably what MS is going to do also. They just wish they could do the samething with Windows 2000 on the desktop.
Can they legally hold us to making the above email confidential? I mean, shouldn't they have us aggree to that condition before sending us the message.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about that. My experience in running a perfectly legal, licensed, and registered copy of Max (2.0, and 2.5) on NT hasn't been pretty. The machine crashed so frequently it wasn't funny. And it wasn't a wimpy machine either. It was a P2 450, w/ 128 megs of ram, and a video card that is supposed to work just fine (a TNT card).
There is something wrong with your setup if GNOME is crashing that much. Did you compile it your self, or did you use the installer? What Dist are you running on?
My machine is in GNOME 24/7, and I stress memory, CPU power, and graphics capabilities on that machine, and I haven't had GNOME 1.2 crash once. Netscape is currently refusing to work for some reason though (I had been running 1.2 for awhile before netscape started being a pain).
GTK can be ported to MacOSX without relying on X Windows. It is labor intensive though, as the teams porting GTK to BeOS and Windows are finding. And after all their work, personally, I would just rather rewrite my program to use native widgets.
I don't know about that. Halflife and Quake3 looked pretty darn good on the Wildcat machine I saw it on. 1280x1024 and not a frame drop in site.
MentalRay isn't from Microsoft. It is from a company called MentalImages. Their URL is http://www.mentalray.com/.
Line Animation is dead. That is exactly why line animation from Japan is increasingly popular in the US. Because we all know that dead things are the most popular.
Wait, by my calculation, a 1600x1200 display has 1920000 pixels. So, each pixel takes 8 bites to store, so we are using 15360000 bytes per frame buffer. That right around 15 megs. Now, we of course want double buffered, so thats 30megs per display. 3 displays is 90 megs.
Now, we can only drive a maximum of 8 displays per pipeline, so to drive 8 displays at 1600x1200 means 240megs. That means that there is still 80 megs left. Hmm. I guess if we bump up the resolution to 1920x1200 that would increase our frame buffer useage to 294megs, which only leaves us a little over 20megs free.
Now, 8 displays may sound rediculous, but now that I think about it, these machines are made to run CAVEs and video walls, so maybe 8 displays ain't so bad.
Darn it, I'm getting so ansy waiting for BeOS 5 with OpenGL. I have a box ready to have BeOS 5 and a second processor inserted as soon as it ships.
BTW, is it possible to get GL hardware support to work under BeOS 4.5 with a Voodoo3 card? I know that the Voodoo2s are supported, but I can't find any info on the Voodoo3. Oh well.
Err, there are numerous other cards that have XFree drivers, like my spiffy new Voodoo3, or the Matrox G400. And the two cards I just mentioned have open sourced drivers. Nvidia's drivers are binary only.
:) (my school has one. Only downside is that it's NT).
XSI will use OpenGl. Any card that is going to provide decent performance is going to use DRI though. Softimage has a nasty habit of using GL for everything. For instance, in Softimage 3D, all the buttons are done in OpenGL. Worse, they somehow write their code so that it stresses many cards that you would think would be up to the task. Softimage 3D on a Wildcat system sure is nice though
Yes, blender is reasonably nice (albeit very difficult to get the hang of. I'm still not productive in it), but it is a 3D animation program. We are discussing 2D animation, like the Smurfs.
The question of course is what industrial strength databases are supported on FreeBSD? I don't think Oracle, Sybase, or DB2 are. That just leaves interbase, and I don't really here too much about interbase.
One could potentially acheive the same results that Toonz provides using Gimp and some custom scripts. Many Animators on a budget do that (well, they generally use photoshop instead of Gimp). Essentially, the first thing you need is a script to automate scanning in hundreds of hand drawn cells. Then you use a gimp script to bring all those cells into a different numbered layer in one XCF file. Then you can use the animation tools that the Gimp already has. Granted, this isn't as powerfull a setup as Toonz, but then when it comes to graphics, free software is seldom as powerful.
One thing I never understood is what the heck is a person to do with a 320mb frame buffer? I just can't come up with any way to use a significant amount of that.
My university still has an Onyx. R10k processor, 128megs ram, RE2 graphics. Oh, we do have the ASO board for 4 sound chanels and an additional 6 serial ports (for a total of ten). We also have the MCO (instead of one 21" display, it can drive 6 TV resolution displays). Currently, the machine is mainly still used only because of the MCO and serial ports. It is darn hard to get multiple video chanels out of an NT machine, not to mention the uglyness of having many serial ports on NT.
The prof in charge of the machince constantly complains about performance. He seems to think this machine is helplessly out date since the new NT machine can pump out more polys. However, I think that this machine is misused. The first and formost problem is that instead of using OpenGL, then use a library called World Tool Kit(WTK). WTK is easy to use, but it limits what can be done. Specifically, you can't do the types of things with WTK that the Onyx excels at, namely multi pass texturing, so WTK is just emphasizing the machines weeknesses.
I'm trying to get my basic world system up and running on linux (I don't have much yet) so that I can port it to the Onyx in such a way as to emphasize the Onyx strengths, rather than its weeknesses.
I would imagine that there would be optional audio upgrades. Just like on SGI (where their top of the line workstation a few years ago shipped with no audio. You had to sell out a few additional grand if you wanted sound).
Au Contrare. CRTs aren't specifically limited to any bit depth (LCDs are though). Thus, your moniter can display much more than a puny 16.7 million colors. Why do you think that John Caramack keeps pushing for 16bit chanels?
And even if the signal is degraded (and it is), there is value in using a higher quality signal as much as possible. In sound processing, there are many effects devices that have 16bit ADCs and DACs, but use a 24bit signal internally. And like wise, many DDRs (digital disk records) like Abecas use 10bit chanels even though their ouput is usually headed to a TV screen near you. The worse the degredation of the final device, the more important it is to preserve every drop of quality possible up to output on the final device.
BTW, I think Cineon is 16bit, but maybe it can work at multiple bit depts.
>Personally, I think that it's stupid to port
>this stuff to Linux as long as it sags in the
>areas multimedia and real-time. This port would
>be better served for BeOS, where the latency for
>multimedia operations is much lower (and much
>more predictible). This isn't a flamebait
>against Linux, just a statement of the facts.
>Obviously they're looking for hype first before
>technological feasability.
From what I read, linux should work fine. After all, they probably ported in from Irix, which means a linux port is a no brainer.
BeOS on the other hand has a few problems. First, they don't currently have OpenGL support. That's why I haven't upgraded to 5.0 yet. Second, they are making a lot of media companies nervous with all their talk about BeIA. That's why so many projects are on hold. If I were running a development project for BeOS commercially, I would probably put it on hold to.
And the business about it being ported to red hat could mean that there are dependencies on the way Red Hat does things. It wouldn't suprise me if the sell the linux version only has part of a hardware bundle at first. That seems to be what most other large media software companies are going to do.
It should be noted that SCO owns the official Unix title since they bought it from Novel (who bought it from AT&T). Thus, whoever buys SCO can declare their pet OS the one true Unix. I think that the OpenBSD maintainer should buy SCO.
Your post does not appear to be anywhere near first. Otherwise, the rest of your statement seems acurate.
You're really saving money if you have more time than money, like a lot of college students do.\
If you need features that the original doesn't have, developing a clone may be cheaper than getting a source license (assuming that getting a source license is even possible).
How do we know that KDE2 wouldn't have come out even if both MacOS and Windows had collapsed on the day that KDE1 came out?
After all, emacs hasn't had any real competition in years (well, some would consider vi a competitor, but I don't. Nothing ever causes people to switch from one to the other), yet they still keep improving it.
Playstation and Dreamcast don't use OpenGl. I would guess that Nintendo doesn't either. Nor do I expect the PS2 to use OpenGL. And yet all those platforms are doing rather well.
Interestingly, on the Dreamcast developers have the option of developing for WindowsCE and using DirectX, however almost all developers use the Sega OS, where they are much closer to the hardware and can selectively replace parts of the OS that they don't like.
On a related note, how many really good single player games come out for the PC? Diablo 1 and 2 are the only ones that I can think of. So lack of OpenGL doesn't seem to be hurting the good games, I don't expect that it would hurt the X-Box. I do think that being forced to actually use Windows and DirectX might hurt the X-Box though, since if the hardware is constant and unchanging, then an OS isn't really needed (it's helpful when starting, but eventually you'll get to the place that you want to replace it all with your own OS taylored to your game).
>If the Xbox were to be deemed OS like enough to
>be bundled into the OS company, you get into a
>whole mess regarding the games. It is
>traditional in the console industry to sell the
>console cheaply and make the money off of the
>games. Surely the OS business couldn't get into
>selling other software immediately. It would be
>ridiculous to allow one company to sell the XBox
>at a loss and for the other to make money off of
>the games."
That is why game box companies charge high licensing fees from developers. Look at Sony, they don't do any of their own PS development (or at least they didn't when the machine came out), and they still made a bundle. How? By charging a percentage of every copy of every game sold. And that is probably what MS is going to do also. They just wish they could do the samething with Windows 2000 on the desktop.
Do you happen to know who ended up with the IP rights to the game? Perhaps we could petition them to open the game up.
Can they legally hold us to making the above email confidential? I mean, shouldn't they have us aggree to that condition before sending us the message.