Re:They don't use DirectX...
on
Doom 3 Linux Client
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Rather, they use OpenGL and a thin API over the other parts of DirectX (sound, input). OpenGL is cross-platform.
If it's anything like Quake 2, it'll have its own internal sound and display APIs, with some simple platform-specific stuff at the very end. I get the impression Quake 2 could be ported to a new system just by writing a couple of new files and using that as the target...
Actually, slightly irrelevantly, I've been busy poking around in the demo's.pk4 datafile, and most of the data is already portable. Textures are DDS or TGA, audio is OGG or WAV, and everything else is text-files. Models, animations, scripting, even the sodding maps - it's plain, human-readable text!
It's not XML (heh), but it's definitely not some endian-specific binary garbage...
I downloaded the Windows demo earlier this week, in the hope of getting it to run on my (somewhat rubbish) PC. Of course, my games-only Windows 98 installation turned out to be somewhat insufficient - while the demo installed, it refused to run. Some hex-editing of the Doom3.exe as recommended for the full game turned out to be worthless, making it crash immediately after launch.
Absolutely no visual glitches, no audio glitches, and completely, utterly and boringly stable. Only criticism was that the frame rate was rather low, but I'm not surprised - my PC's below minimum specs processor-wise (1.1GHz Athlon), although merely low-end graphics-wise (128MB GF4Ti).
It'll be interesting to compare the performance of the native client with the running-on-Cedega one - I really wonder how much processor time Cedega takes to do all its API-translation thing.
As for the game? It's... Interesting, but highly derivative. Pretty atmospheric, and an intriguing engine - but gameplay was rather dull, and the poor sound-effects really didn't help. Footsteps sounded horrible and far too repetitive, likewise a lot of the other sounds. Plus the repetition wasn't confined to the audio, with way too much scripting and linearity...
Will I buy the game? Probably, eventually, but only when it's come down in price.;-)
Wrong timeline. I assume they're following the books, in which case the end of the second radio series doesn't apply. Although, to be honest, I haven't a clue...
You, sir, are using Win95 and Win98. You are wrong here my friend!
Actually, it's more a case of catching the Lunix bug back in 1997, and never bothering to get a more modern version of Windows than the OEM version which came with my first new PC. The Windows 98 CD, erm, magically 'appeared' one day, after it became increasingly difficult to get Win95 working for games on a newer machine...;-)
Now if you had complained about the lack of a DOS version, that would have been an other story.
Actually, probably the only real legacy platform that's lacking an up-to-date web browser is pre-X versions of Mac OS. Not surprising, really, given the horrors of programming for that platform - but it does mean that older Macs are cut adrift, stuck with an increasingly obsolete Internet Explorer...
Firefox on a Win95 era (i.e. a Pentium) computer? That sounds like madness. I can't even get it to run acceptably on my PII-350.
In this case, the Win95 machine's a 333MHz K6-2. Firefox is a little slow on startup (ten seconds or so?) but a big improvement on Mozilla. In use, it's absolutely fine.
One of the Win98 machines is a 166MHz Pentium. Firefox is completely usable there, too - screen updates are slightly slower than on a modern machine, but it's really nothing to complain about. It's all completely 'interactive' - no stupid pauses not responding to mouse clicks, or anything like that.
What sort of things do people do to make Firefox run so slowly? I'm always puzzled as to how people are using web browsers to make them behave like that; I've never noticed any real slow-downs on the pages I visit...
Okay, I probably downloaded it more times than was really necessary, but they were all for different computers. Two for Win98, one for Win95, and one for MacOS X.
Something I don't think has been promoted enough is that Firefox works brilliantly on older computers. I've got an old Win95 machine that I use for when I need to use Microsoft Office (OpenOffice.org is great, but sometimes I need the real MS thing), and was trying to update the IE 4 that it's currently stuck with. Is it possible? I've no idea. I was bounced around various Microsoft download pages, unable to find something that suited Windows 95 - all the system requirements for newer versions of IE given were at least Win98...
Contrast this with Firefox. Visit the Mozilla site, and it guesses which version of Firefox you should need from the User-Agent string of your existing browser. Big link on front page, click on it to download, and minutes later you're in a new browser.
There are many, many older computers around, and before not it was too easy to get stuck with an out-of-date browser. There were alternatives, but Firefox has become the easiest of the lot - it's incredibly simple to upgrade to something secure and modern. It's brilliant!
Actually it ran in X before it ever did in Windows. IE is the browser formerly known as NCSA Mosaic.
Yeah, but who would seriously want to run Mosaic nowadays? It's got crap support for modern standards, piss-poor rendering, no working PNG support, broken CSS, and with no chance of it being updated it's, erm... Well...
... Kind of like its descendant, Internet Explorer.;-)
I only wish that people that frequent a US based website would understand why said website seems to be US centric. Sheesh.
I only wish that people who contribute to a US-based website with a significant international audience would understand why people get pissed off when said website seems to be US-centric in a particularly impenetrable way.
I hadn't a clue what this article was supposed to be about. Some mention of 'Jeopardy', 'game-show' or whatever would have helped greatly...
This is a joke. Maybe not a super funny joke, but a joke. So, don't get your shorts in a twist over it. Take a deep breath...Hold it...Keep holding it....Aaaaaand release.
It seemed to install correctly on my iBook, but on rebooting the Apple logo morphed into a deep red pentagram. Flames then started belching from the optical drive, the screen became a window into the lower reaches of hell, sulphurous fumes vented from the keyboard and all the cables caught fire.
So, seems to be working okay - haven't noticed any other differences, and it's just as stable as it was before. Kind of disappointing, really...
How the heck are we going to mod this section? It sounds like EVERY comment is going to be flamebait.
Hey, Mr 'Guy', you have dubious personal hygiene and your mother dresses you funny!:-)
I think if Slashdot is going for maximising pointless, impossible-to-resolve arguments and flamebait, there's always another section that can be added...
You are somehow labeled as "right" or "left" depending on the whim of the moderators or random members of the community.
Really old, but I happened to be thinking of it earlier today - the Political Compass. Apparently I'm way off to the left, and down a bit.
Maybe all posters in this new section should take said test so that posters with conflicting views may safely ignore viewpoints that they disagree with. After all, there's a place for partisan publishing (scroll down a bit...);-)
Half-Life 1 back in '99 was doing echoes and reverb based on the size of the room, and even now in 2004, a game like Doom 3 still plays its sounds effects raw, like you're in a closet.
Half-Life's actually a lot simpler than that - in the single-player game, you control the DSP algorithm with the env_sound point entity. There are a bunch of presets, and park 'em either side of an entrance, for instance one with 'Cavern Large' and one with 'Tunnel Small', and as the player walks past their audio changes... There are only two channels processed (left and right) - if a sound plays, it gets shoved out through the DSP. You can't have some sound effects with one effect applied and others with another, it's an all-or-nothing trick.
Having said that, it can be incredibly effective, and since it's completely controlled by the mapper, you can choose effects to maximise the atmospheric effects. Who cares how big the room is, what's the most claustrophobic effect that can be applied for when the player's soemwhere they shouldn't be? And what's a much safer ambience for when they're away from danger?
Highly impressive, especially as it ran without problems in high-quality on my old P166MMX. Interestingly, the guy who wrote the DSP stuff, Kelly Bailey, also did all the music and sound effects for Half-Life. I've always felt that the audio systems in Id games were a bit of an afterthought, but Half-Life's is a major feature in the game, designed in part by the designer of what it would play...
Actually, I've realised that one untapped source of data storage space is in Slashdot comments. Untold gigabytes of free storage space at our fingertips, just waiting to be tapped!
I've decided I'll be uploading an encrypted backup of my hard disk with my new SlashdotFS. Yeah, it's slow, yeah, it's against untold numbers of terms of service, but who cares. It's free, and it's huge!
I think there are plenty of titles that use opengl
Doom 3's probably the biggest - and even if you hate the game, its very existence means that graphics card manufacturers can't even think about dropping OpenGL support, at least not without alienating a good number of potential purchasers.
If there were more rigidly enforced rules as to what can be recorded and how it can be used, then perhaps the cameras wouldn't be so bad - instead, you can get filmed by dozens of cameras and not have a clue what's being done with the footage.
Cameras might be helpful in catching criminals, but too many times you see fuzzy, single-frame-per-second, black-and-white video footage of an armed robbery with the police asking if anyone in the public recognises the masked perpetrators...
Then there's the mast-mounted CCTV cameras in town centres and the like, which merely have the effect of shifting crime out of the field of view of the cameras' lenses...
Slashdot Mirror
Shall we announce a "Burn all JPEGs" day because of Microsoft security issues now and switch all to PNG?
;-)
Well, you could, but don't forget the recent bugs in libpng...
Rather, they use OpenGL and a thin API over the other parts of DirectX (sound, input). OpenGL is cross-platform.
.pk4 datafile, and most of the data is already portable. Textures are DDS or TGA, audio is OGG or WAV, and everything else is text-files. Models, animations, scripting, even the sodding maps - it's plain, human-readable text!
If it's anything like Quake 2, it'll have its own internal sound and display APIs, with some simple platform-specific stuff at the very end. I get the impression Quake 2 could be ported to a new system just by writing a couple of new files and using that as the target...
Actually, slightly irrelevantly, I've been busy poking around in the demo's
It's not XML (heh), but it's definitely not some endian-specific binary garbage...
I downloaded the Windows demo earlier this week, in the hope of getting it to run on my (somewhat rubbish) PC. Of course, my games-only Windows 98 installation turned out to be somewhat insufficient - while the demo installed, it refused to run. Some hex-editing of the Doom3.exe as recommended for the full game turned out to be worthless, making it crash immediately after launch.
... Interesting, but highly derivative. Pretty atmospheric, and an intriguing engine - but gameplay was rather dull, and the poor sound-effects really didn't help. Footsteps sounded horrible and far too repetitive, likewise a lot of the other sounds. Plus the repetition wasn't confined to the audio, with way too much scripting and linearity...
;-)
So, I decided to give Linux a try. I found a clever shell script for downloading the latest Cedega from CVS, and gave that a try. It worked brilliantly.
Absolutely no visual glitches, no audio glitches, and completely, utterly and boringly stable. Only criticism was that the frame rate was rather low, but I'm not surprised - my PC's below minimum specs processor-wise (1.1GHz Athlon), although merely low-end graphics-wise (128MB GF4Ti).
It'll be interesting to compare the performance of the native client with the running-on-Cedega one - I really wonder how much processor time Cedega takes to do all its API-translation thing.
As for the game? It's
Will I buy the game? Probably, eventually, but only when it's come down in price.
Mmm... Dead systems...
;-)
Why not emulate another dead system on the emulated Amiga?
Oooh... You can see it on the graphs. There's a little pimple between 18:30 and 19:00. Not much of a Slashdotting, I have to admit!
This should bring you up to date.
Wrong timeline. I assume they're following the books, in which case the end of the second radio series doesn't apply. Although, to be honest, I haven't a clue...
The butt-ugliness of the race accounts for the lack of any serious british porn, as well.
;-)
For you, I prescribe a serious dose of The Archers. That Lynda Snell - phwooar!
Anyone have backup audio links in case BBC's is overwhelmed?
;-)
I seriously doubt they'll be squashed by the demand - they've got a somewhat greater chance of survival than a whelk in a supernova.
Although, I do have a stack of radios pre-tuned to 92.7MHz FM, just in case...
You, sir, are using Win95 and Win98.
;-)
You are wrong here my friend!
Actually, it's more a case of catching the Lunix bug back in 1997, and never bothering to get a more modern version of Windows than the OEM version which came with my first new PC. The Windows 98 CD, erm, magically 'appeared' one day, after it became increasingly difficult to get Win95 working for games on a newer machine...
Now if you had complained about the lack of a DOS version, that would have been an other story.
Actually, probably the only real legacy platform that's lacking an up-to-date web browser is pre-X versions of Mac OS. Not surprising, really, given the horrors of programming for that platform - but it does mean that older Macs are cut adrift, stuck with an increasingly obsolete Internet Explorer...
Firefox on a Win95 era (i.e. a Pentium) computer? That sounds like madness. I can't even get it to run acceptably on my PII-350.
In this case, the Win95 machine's a 333MHz K6-2. Firefox is a little slow on startup (ten seconds or so?) but a big improvement on Mozilla. In use, it's absolutely fine.
One of the Win98 machines is a 166MHz Pentium. Firefox is completely usable there, too - screen updates are slightly slower than on a modern machine, but it's really nothing to complain about. It's all completely 'interactive' - no stupid pauses not responding to mouse clicks, or anything like that.
What sort of things do people do to make Firefox run so slowly? I'm always puzzled as to how people are using web browsers to make them behave like that; I've never noticed any real slow-downs on the pages I visit...
Okay, I probably downloaded it more times than was really necessary, but they were all for different computers. Two for Win98, one for Win95, and one for MacOS X.
Something I don't think has been promoted enough is that Firefox works brilliantly on older computers. I've got an old Win95 machine that I use for when I need to use Microsoft Office (OpenOffice.org is great, but sometimes I need the real MS thing), and was trying to update the IE 4 that it's currently stuck with. Is it possible? I've no idea. I was bounced around various Microsoft download pages, unable to find something that suited Windows 95 - all the system requirements for newer versions of IE given were at least Win98...
Contrast this with Firefox. Visit the Mozilla site, and it guesses which version of Firefox you should need from the User-Agent string of your existing browser. Big link on front page, click on it to download, and minutes later you're in a new browser.
There are many, many older computers around, and before not it was too easy to get stuck with an out-of-date browser. There were alternatives, but Firefox has become the easiest of the lot - it's incredibly simple to upgrade to something secure and modern. It's brilliant!
And lo, the great Karma Gods emerge from a roiling sky, and smite me down with furious moderation.
;-)
I had a +5 Teh Funney, you know, but I was living on borrowed time...
This is one good thing to dupe stories:
...
;-)
You can always increase your karma by re-posting all the comments modded +5
Oh, wait, do you mean comments from the original stories?
Actually it ran in X before it ever did in Windows. IE is the browser formerly known as NCSA Mosaic.
... Kind of like its descendant, Internet Explorer. ;-)
Yeah, but who would seriously want to run Mosaic nowadays? It's got crap support for modern standards, piss-poor rendering, no working PNG support, broken CSS, and with no chance of it being updated it's, erm... Well...
I only wish that people that frequent a US based website would understand why said website seems to be US centric. Sheesh.
I only wish that people who contribute to a US-based website with a significant international audience would understand why people get pissed off when said website seems to be US-centric in a particularly impenetrable way.
I hadn't a clue what this article was supposed to be about. Some mention of 'Jeopardy', 'game-show' or whatever would have helped greatly...
This is a joke. Maybe not a super funny joke, but a joke. So, don't get your shorts in a twist over it. Take a deep breath...Hold it...Keep holding it....Aaaaaand release.
*PAAARRRP!!!*
Ooops!
It seemed to install correctly on my iBook, but on rebooting the Apple logo morphed into a deep red pentagram. Flames then started belching from the optical drive, the screen became a window into the lower reaches of hell, sulphurous fumes vented from the keyboard and all the cables caught fire.
So, seems to be working okay - haven't noticed any other differences, and it's just as stable as it was before. Kind of disappointing, really...
Almost every question is phrased as a false dilemma
;-)
I think that's the point.
It is apparerently intended to make you believe you are a liberal.
Well, maybe you are...
How the heck are we going to mod this section? It sounds like EVERY comment is going to be flamebait.
:-)
Hey, Mr 'Guy', you have dubious personal hygiene and your mother dresses you funny!
I think if Slashdot is going for maximising pointless, impossible-to-resolve arguments and flamebait, there's always another section that can be added...
You are somehow labeled as "right" or "left" depending on the whim of the moderators or random members of the community.
;-)
Really old, but I happened to be thinking of it earlier today - the Political Compass. Apparently I'm way off to the left, and down a bit.
Maybe all posters in this new section should take said test so that posters with conflicting views may safely ignore viewpoints that they disagree with. After all, there's a place for partisan publishing (scroll down a bit...)
A practice very common in malware analysis to isolate yourself from various ill effects of the malware
;-)
Best description of Windows I've heard in ages...
Half-Life 1 back in '99 was doing echoes and reverb based on the size of the room, and even now in 2004, a game like Doom 3 still plays its sounds effects raw, like you're in a closet.
Half-Life's actually a lot simpler than that - in the single-player game, you control the DSP algorithm with the env_sound point entity. There are a bunch of presets, and park 'em either side of an entrance, for instance one with 'Cavern Large' and one with 'Tunnel Small', and as the player walks past their audio changes... There are only two channels processed (left and right) - if a sound plays, it gets shoved out through the DSP. You can't have some sound effects with one effect applied and others with another, it's an all-or-nothing trick.
Having said that, it can be incredibly effective, and since it's completely controlled by the mapper, you can choose effects to maximise the atmospheric effects. Who cares how big the room is, what's the most claustrophobic effect that can be applied for when the player's soemwhere they shouldn't be? And what's a much safer ambience for when they're away from danger?
Highly impressive, especially as it ran without problems in high-quality on my old P166MMX. Interestingly, the guy who wrote the DSP stuff, Kelly Bailey, also did all the music and sound effects for Half-Life. I've always felt that the audio systems in Id games were a bit of an afterthought, but Half-Life's is a major feature in the game, designed in part by the designer of what it would play...
I've decided I'll be uploading an encrypted backup of my hard disk with my new SlashdotFS. Yeah, it's slow, yeah, it's against untold numbers of terms of service, but who cares. It's free, and it's huge!
I think there are plenty of titles that use opengl
Doom 3's probably the biggest - and even if you hate the game, its very existence means that graphics card manufacturers can't even think about dropping OpenGL support, at least not without alienating a good number of potential purchasers.
Thanks, John Carmack, for keeping OpenGL alive!
There's the slight matter of who watches what the cameras produce, and where that footage gets to.
If there were more rigidly enforced rules as to what can be recorded and how it can be used, then perhaps the cameras wouldn't be so bad - instead, you can get filmed by dozens of cameras and not have a clue what's being done with the footage.
Cameras might be helpful in catching criminals, but too many times you see fuzzy, single-frame-per-second, black-and-white video footage of an armed robbery with the police asking if anyone in the public recognises the masked perpetrators...
Then there's the mast-mounted CCTV cameras in town centres and the like, which merely have the effect of shifting crime out of the field of view of the cameras' lenses...