"You don't get to demand shit. They owe you nothing. You should be grateful they put any effort at all into porting to Linux-- it's not like they're going to make any money doing it."
Many of us bought the game because they promised that a Linux client would be released. So they do "owe me shit" as you put it. I might have never purchased the game if they hadn't said they were going to release a Linux client. I followed this game for a long time because of it. It would be one thing if they hadn't been saying for a year or so before the game came out that they were going to have a Linux port, but they did. It's their responsibility to live up to their words.
"While this sucks, it should be said in BioWare's defense that a Linux port was not originally planned. Bink was a fine choice at the time--it's not BioWare's fault that they're pioneers in the Linux retail gaming market. Instead, fault Bink for not having their shit together."
This is completely untrue. They had mentioned and "planned" a Linux port, years before the client came out. Look here:
http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?Art ic leID=2195
I understood the lack of the toolset. I understood the beta being so late. However, I am extremely hacked off at the fact that the client is still incomplete. Movie playback is missing because of their choice to use Bink instead of a non-proprietary format, and they don't have the guts to port Bink themselves or pay someone like icculus to do it.
I really want to know how Bioware could possibly claim they were going to provide a native Linux port, when it's very obvious they were using non-portable libraries like Miles and Bink. How did they expect things to work at all? Were they just hyping things hoping that community good will would help sell their game better because they were going to have a Linux port? Bah.
The point is, I demand a full client. They said it was going to be there, and it's very close, but it's not quite there. They have done so well, and it's absolutely shameful that they've decided to do this.
As it is, they might as well call the Linux port the "Neverwinter Nights Multiplayer Special Edition", since it doesn't include a toolset, and without movie playback the Single Player experience has been greatly diminished.
You can now use Valgrind with the latest NVidia drivers (43.49+) (thanks NVidia):
DISABLING CPU SPECIFIC FEATURES
Setting the environment variable __GL_FORCE_GENERIC_CPU to a non-zero value will inhibit the use of CPU specific features such as MMX, SSE, or 3DNOW!. Use of this option may result in performance loss. This option may be useful in conjunction with software such as the Valgrind memory debugger.
I was one of the people invted to beta test the game. I would have liked to help, but I could never even run the installer on a freshly formatted and installed Windows box (with only video and audio drivers).
Contacting Infogrames technical support produced a promise for help but I never received any, and I couldn't post on the forums for help because you have to create at least one character in the game first (smooth move EA).
The message boards for the beta testers were filled to the brim with complaints, bug comments and the very annoying artificial limitations that EA decided to place on the game (like only a few hundred objects could be owned per sim house area that caused people at a certain point to be so rich they co no longer buy anything even though they could afford to).
This is another game that should have never shipped. I'm not terribly happy what EA has turned Maxis into. I want the old Maxis back!
As far as your comments regarding the "SoundBlaster TSR", they don't really apply here. OSS is an established, openly documented interface while the SoundBlaster TSR you mention was a proprietary interface.
Re:What's wrong with the old ones?
on
A Sound Server For X
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You only need the sound server if you want "gee neato" sound effects from KDE or Gnome. I'm not aware of any game or program personally that specifically requires one of these sound servers to be active. XMMS for example can output directly to/dev/dsp using the OSS driver.
XMMS uses/dev/dsp with OSS output. And my games uses OSS with/dev/dsp as well. So no sound server necessary. Sure I don't get network transparency, but I don't need it. I bet you'd find that if you disabled both ESD and Arts that many of your games would still have sound, especially if they're using SDL.
The only reason I can figure out that some people use sound servers is because their sound card doesn't support multiple opens of/dev/dsp with OSS, their applications don't support OSS directly (so instead they use the sound server) or they need network transparency.
Re:I'll have to see the bandwidth tests first.
on
A Sound Server For X
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Actually, MAS may integrate with X11, but it doesn't use the X11 protocol, it uses the "RTP" (Real Time Protocl RFC 1889, January 1996) for all communications. Except for multicast mode or in multi-participant mode. RTP is obviously very efficient for this type of data payload...
"viewports", you mean workspaces? RH8 Gnome2 desktop has those. As well as KDE in RH8.
User defined key bindings? RH8 Gnome2 desktop has those too...as well as KDE in RH8.
As far as edge flipping is concerned, I absolutely positively hate that "feature". If you want it back hack it in yourself, but the majority of users don't like or want such an obscure thing. I don't know edge flipping thanks to my hotkeys to switch between workspaces, and those are willfully triggered, unlike edge flipping which has never worked well enough for me.
It wouldn't matter if he did. Almost every ATi based laptop manufacturer simply doesn't have any drivers for update. This is really hacking off a lot of ATi based laptop gamers because their manufacturers have no interesting in updating so the drivers will be fixed for games.
Is a DirectX9 game comparison. ATi only has 96-bit precision Pixel Shaders and other operations, while NVidia supports full 128-bit floating point precision. I wonder how this will affect image quality for later games?
A loss of 32bits of precision could give the GeForce FX a serious image quality advantage when DX9 games or the next generation of OpenGL games start becoming big. Hopefully ATi will correct this glaring oversight in their R350 or later.
Oh, before I forget to mention it. The GeForce FX has full 128-bit floating point precision throughout the pipeline. ATi only has 96-bit in one part of the pipeline, may not seem like much, but it is when you start mixing layers of blended textures. (Bump Map, Specular Map, Lightmap, Texture Map, etc...)
The GeForce FX has more hardware capability and increased hardware precision then the *CURRENT* revision of the R300. While the ATi card is only 96-bit effective floating point precision through the pipeline. Hopefully, this oversight will be corrected by ATi with the R350 or R400. As Carmack said:
NVIDIA is the first of the consumer graphics chip companies to firmly understand what is going to be happening with the convergence of consumer real-time and professional offline rendering. The architectural decision in NVIDIA's next-generation GPU to allow full floating point precision all the way to the frame buffer and texture fetch, instead of just in internal paths, is a good example of far-sighted planning. It has been obvious to me for some time how things are going to come together, but NVIDIA has made moves on both the technical and company strategic fronts that are going to accelerate the timetable over my original estimations.
My current work on Doom is designed around what was made possible on the original GeForce, and reaches an optimal implementation on NVIDIA's next-generation GPU. My next generation of work will be designed around what is made possible on NVIDIA's next-generation GPU.
- John Carmack, id Software
So even if the GeForce FX is a bit slower for some things, those games that are using full DX9/OpenGL features will get better looking graphics thanks to the increased hardware precision. People using 3D programs like Maya with the Cg plugin will notice the biggest difference especially IMO. And at this point, NVidia's shaders are far better geared to the professional 3D graphics industry than ATi's *current* offering. This might encourage many developers to take advantage of extra GeForce FX features instead of ATi features.
(Source URL for Quote: http://www.nvidia.com/content/areyouready/ twimtbp. html)
Actually, there is a reason to not upgrade now. The Radeon 9700 is NOT a full floating point precision card through the entire pipeline. Only 96bits of precision technically. The GeForce FX has a FULL 128-bit floating point precision through the entire pipeline. Unlike the Radeon 9700.
It's rumoured that the next major revision of the Radeon chipset will fix this glaring flaw. You may think that the difference between 96-bit precision and full 128-bit precision is negligible. But just wait until you see the screenshots coming out in hands on GeForce FX reviews this coming month.
This is just sick. I don't think I could even think about eating this. Anyone else feel the same way?
Who know what the long term effects of eating genetically engineered food are? It seems like more and more corporations are putting profit margins before people...
What are you talking about? The NVidia Linux drivers have vertical sync support for OpenGL. However, you can only enable it via an enviorment variable afaik. Check the documentation file that comes with the drivers.
I completely and emphatically disagree with you. For me, Assembly Language step by step was an absolute godsend. It was clear, concise, and didn't leave me confused as to what was actually going on. If you read the book chronologically, you'll see that it doesn't "jump around" as you describe it.
Duntemann's book was the first assembly language book ever that wasn't so dry and painful to read that I simply just gave up trying. I'm sorry you didn't care for it, but instead of being overly negative why not come up with some cunstructive criticism and tell Mr. Duntemann about it so that your concerns can be addressed in a later edition.
The first half of the book covers DOS based systems anyway, the last half or so covers some Linux assembly programming as well.
I would call that a matter of personal opinion more than anything.
In my opinion, Quake 2 or 3 never really scared the crap out of me. Descent 3 did, *OFTEN*. I can't tell you how many times I was zooming down a corridor and all of the sudden I hear missle lock kick in and the first thing out of my mouth is Oh $hit.
I admit Quake I was almost as scary to me. And I liked Quake I's single player MUCH more than I liked Quake 2's. But, nonetheless, the Descent series (especially D3) remains the scariest to me personally.
Descent 3 was a game made mostly for Descent fans anway. It "tied up" the loose ends of the Descent series.
Descent when it was introduced was beyond any engine's capability really at the time in a lot of ways. The first AFAIK to actually do a true 6 degrees of freedom. Most 3D engines still don't have this today. They all rely on the player being unable to do more than jump and move.
I'm not sure if the original Doom engine required convex polygons or not, that's the only "large" limitation that I remember the original Descent engine having.
Personally, I've been pretty upset with NVIDIA ever since they bought out 3dfx and told Voodoo owners to go screw themselves, that they weren't releasing any new drivers or supporting any Voodoo products. I bought a Voodoo5, instead of a Geforce2 - due to the stability of the Voodoo2 and Voodoo3 I had owned, and due to reading the complaints about NVIDIA's drivers... and a week later 3dfx went under. D'OH!
You mean like when 3dfx bought out STB, and told STB card owners to go screw themselves (especially NVidia STB card owners)? Gee, that doesn't sound familiar at all.
Slashdot Mirror
"You don't get to demand shit. They owe you nothing. You should be grateful they put any effort at all into porting to Linux-- it's not like they're going to make any money doing it."
Many of us bought the game because they promised that a Linux client would be released. So they do "owe me shit" as you put it. I might have never purchased the game if they hadn't said they were going to release a Linux client. I followed this game for a long time because of it. It would be one thing if they hadn't been saying for a year or so before the game came out that they were going to have a Linux port, but they did. It's their responsibility to live up to their words.
"While this sucks, it should be said in BioWare's defense that a Linux port was not originally planned. Bink was a fine choice at the time--it's not BioWare's fault that they're pioneers in the Linux retail gaming market. Instead, fault Bink for not having their shit together."
t ic leID=2195
This is completely untrue. They had mentioned and "planned" a Linux port, years before the client came out. Look here:
http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?Ar
They mentioned it as early as 2001!!!
I understood the lack of the toolset. I understood the beta being so late. However, I am extremely hacked off at the fact that the client is still incomplete. Movie playback is missing because of their choice to use Bink instead of a non-proprietary format, and they don't have the guts to port Bink themselves or pay someone like icculus to do it.
I really want to know how Bioware could possibly claim they were going to provide a native Linux port, when it's very obvious they were using non-portable libraries like Miles and Bink. How did they expect things to work at all? Were they just hyping things hoping that community good will would help sell their game better because they were going to have a Linux port? Bah.
The point is, I demand a full client. They said it was going to be there, and it's very close, but it's not quite there. They have done so well, and it's absolutely shameful that they've decided to do this.
As it is, they might as well call the Linux port the "Neverwinter Nights Multiplayer Special Edition", since it doesn't include a toolset, and without movie playback the Single Player experience has been greatly diminished.
Not porn?
In the words of some bender-like entity: "Look at the schematics of that revised algebaric evaluator. Hubba, hubba!"
It's GPL. The source is available, anyone up for a port?
You can now use Valgrind with the latest NVidia drivers (43.49+) (thanks NVidia):
DISABLING CPU SPECIFIC FEATURES
Setting the environment variable __GL_FORCE_GENERIC_CPU to a non-zero value will inhibit the use of CPU specific features such as MMX, SSE, or 3DNOW!. Use of this option may result in performance loss. This option may be useful in conjunction with software such as the Valgrind
memory debugger.
DOH! Did I say Infogrames technical support? Bleh. I meant to say EA technical support.
I was one of the people invted to beta test the game. I would have liked to help, but I could never even run the installer on a freshly formatted and installed Windows box (with only video and audio drivers).
Contacting Infogrames technical support produced a promise for help but I never received any, and I couldn't post on the forums for help because you have to create at least one character in the game first (smooth move EA).
The message boards for the beta testers were filled to the brim with complaints, bug comments and the very annoying artificial limitations that EA decided to place on the game (like only a few hundred objects could be owned per sim house area that caused people at a certain point to be so rich they co no longer buy anything even though they could afford to).
This is another game that should have never shipped. I'm not terribly happy what EA has turned Maxis into. I want the old Maxis back!
As far as your comments regarding the "SoundBlaster TSR", they don't really apply here. OSS is an established, openly documented interface while the SoundBlaster TSR you mention was a proprietary interface.
You only need the sound server if you want "gee neato" sound effects from KDE or Gnome. I'm not aware of any game or program personally that specifically requires one of these sound servers to be active. XMMS for example can output directly to /dev/dsp using the OSS driver.
XMMS uses /dev/dsp with OSS output. And my games uses OSS with /dev/dsp as well. So no sound server necessary. Sure I don't get network transparency, but I don't need it. I bet you'd find that if you disabled both ESD and Arts that many of your games would still have sound, especially if they're using SDL.
/dev/dsp with OSS, their applications don't support OSS directly (so instead they use the sound server) or they need network transparency.
The only reason I can figure out that some people use sound servers is because their sound card doesn't support multiple opens of
Actually, MAS may integrate with X11, but it doesn't use the X11 protocol, it uses the "RTP" (Real Time Protocl RFC 1889, January 1996) for all communications. Except for multicast mode or in multi-participant mode. RTP is obviously very efficient for this type of data payload...
Good sound cards with good drivers allow the same thing. For example, I believe my Audigy allows for up to 63 or 64 simultaneous opens of /dev/dsp.
:)
I can run a game and XMMS at the same time just fine without ESD or Arts running.
I don't need ESD
"viewports", you mean workspaces? RH8 Gnome2 desktop has those. As well as KDE in RH8.
User defined key bindings? RH8 Gnome2 desktop has those too...as well as KDE in RH8.
As far as edge flipping is concerned, I absolutely positively hate that "feature". If you want it back hack it in yourself, but the majority of users don't like or want such an obscure thing. I don't know edge flipping thanks to my hotkeys to switch between workspaces, and those are willfully triggered, unlike edge flipping which has never worked well enough for me.
It wouldn't matter if he did. Almost every ATi based laptop manufacturer simply doesn't have any drivers for update. This is really hacking off a lot of ATi based laptop gamers because their manufacturers have no interesting in updating so the drivers will be fixed for games.
Is a DirectX9 game comparison. ATi only has 96-bit precision Pixel Shaders and other operations, while NVidia supports full 128-bit floating point precision. I wonder how this will affect image quality for later games?
A loss of 32bits of precision could give the GeForce FX a serious image quality advantage when DX9 games or the next generation of OpenGL games start becoming big. Hopefully ATi will correct this glaring oversight in their R350 or later.
Oh, before I forget to mention it. The GeForce FX has full 128-bit floating point precision throughout the pipeline. ATi only has 96-bit in one part of the pipeline, may not seem like much, but it is when you start mixing layers of blended textures. (Bump Map, Specular Map, Lightmap, Texture Map, etc...)
So even if the GeForce FX is a bit slower for some things, those games that are using full DX9/OpenGL features will get better looking graphics thanks to the increased hardware precision. People using 3D programs like Maya with the Cg plugin will notice the biggest difference especially IMO. And at this point, NVidia's shaders are far better geared to the professional 3D graphics industry than ATi's *current* offering. This might encourage many developers to take advantage of extra GeForce FX features instead of ATi features.
(Source URL for Quote:
http://www.nvidia.com/content/areyouready
Actually, there is a reason to not upgrade now. The Radeon 9700 is NOT a full floating point precision card through the entire pipeline. Only 96bits of precision technically. The GeForce FX has a FULL 128-bit floating point precision through the entire pipeline. Unlike the Radeon 9700.
It's rumoured that the next major revision of the Radeon chipset will fix this glaring flaw. You may think that the difference between 96-bit precision and full 128-bit precision is negligible. But just wait until you see the screenshots coming out in hands on GeForce FX reviews this coming month.
Pardon me, but GtkRadiant is a very actively maintained and stable Gtk+ 1.2 based application. It runs on Windows and Linux. Thanks.
This is just sick. I don't think I could even think about eating this. Anyone else feel the same way?
Who know what the long term effects of eating genetically engineered food are? It seems like more and more corporations are putting profit margins before people...
What are you talking about? The NVidia Linux drivers have vertical sync support for OpenGL. However, you can only enable it via an enviorment variable afaik. Check the documentation file that comes with the drivers.
I completely and emphatically disagree with you. For me, Assembly Language step by step was an absolute godsend. It was clear, concise, and didn't leave me confused as to what was actually going on. If you read the book chronologically, you'll see that it doesn't "jump around" as you describe it.
Duntemann's book was the first assembly language book ever that wasn't so dry and painful to read that I simply just gave up trying. I'm sorry you didn't care for it, but instead of being overly negative why not come up with some cunstructive criticism and tell Mr. Duntemann about it so that your concerns can be addressed in a later edition.
The first half of the book covers DOS based systems anyway, the last half or so covers some Linux assembly programming as well.
I would call that a matter of personal opinion more than anything.
In my opinion, Quake 2 or 3 never really scared the crap out of me. Descent 3 did, *OFTEN*. I can't tell you how many times I was zooming down a corridor and all of the sudden I hear missle lock kick in and the first thing out of my mouth is Oh $hit.
I admit Quake I was almost as scary to me. And I liked Quake I's single player MUCH more than I liked Quake 2's. But, nonetheless, the Descent series (especially D3) remains the scariest to me personally.
Descent 3 was a game made mostly for Descent fans anway. It "tied up" the loose ends of the Descent series.
Descent when it was introduced was beyond any engine's capability really at the time in a lot of ways. The first AFAIK to actually do a true 6 degrees of freedom. Most 3D engines still don't have this today. They all rely on the player being unable to do more than jump and move.
I'm not sure if the original Doom engine required convex polygons or not, that's the only "large" limitation that I remember the original Descent engine having.
Just my 2 cents...
Personally, I've been pretty upset with NVIDIA ever since they bought out 3dfx and told Voodoo owners to go screw themselves, that they weren't releasing any new drivers or supporting any Voodoo products. I bought a Voodoo5, instead of a Geforce2 - due to the stability of the Voodoo2 and Voodoo3 I had owned, and due to reading the complaints about NVIDIA's drivers... and a week later 3dfx went under. D'OH!
You mean like when 3dfx bought out STB, and told STB card owners to go screw themselves (especially NVidia STB card owners)? Gee, that doesn't sound familiar at all.