Wednesday, August 18, 1999

Episode I: Obi-Wan -- 10:44 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I saw on JediKnight.Net that LucasArts' new first-person shooter entitled Episode I: Obi-Wan will be released some time in the first half of 2000. Obi-Wan was announced at E3, but information on it has been extremely limited. You will be able to visit the locales from Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Hopefully LucasArts will release some more information on it soon. For a game that will be released in less than a year, they've been really tight-lipped about it.

GameFan TNT Comment -- 6:18 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

GameFan has an interview with Epic's Mark Rein about their upcoming Unreal Tournament. One question really puzzled me:

GameFan: With the TNT2's poor texture management, do you think it can handle Unreal Tournament as well as the Voodoo 3 line up of graphic cards?

Mark Rein: With our latest D3D improvements, optimizations and a wizard which helps ensure you configure UT correctly for the card you have, TNT and TNT2 can handle things just fine, even in 32bit.

I would like clarification on exactly what is wrong with the TNT2's texture management. GameFan throws this out like it's a well-known fact without any support.

Unreal's problem with TNTs and other non-3dfx hardware is that they were trying to force a Glide engine to do D3D and OpenGL. My Unreal OpenGL framerates (on my TNT) are still significantly slower (> 25% slower) in Unreal than in Q3Test. I guess I have difficulty understanding why id has no problems with the TNTs but Epic can't seem to get it done. Must be the TNT's fault. That's it. Yeah.

The Master comments: Yeah, that's it :-) No, actually-the texture management on the TNT is poor. If you're trying to manage textures like Glide does. Glide uses a completely proprietary and custom-designed algorithm to manage it's texture caches, which works real well for 3dfx. But, hey, TNT ain't 3dfx. It's better :-)

BitBoys OY(!) Interview -- 3:26 pm CST, Update by The Master

An interview with the people behind the newly reannounced Glaze3D processor has been posted on The Tech Zone. Interesting article, but I wouldn't count on anything yet. BitBoys has been promising something since '97, and they haven't come anywhere near delivering yet. If they had silicon, I might buy into the hype some more.

Ah, heck, I'm happy enough with my Creative Riva TNT anyways :-)

A.T. adds: You'll have to forgive me if I'm very doubtful about Bitboys Oy. Given the problems that 3dfx had with some Voodoo3 silicon (and they have experience in this area), I find it extremely hard to believe that a company that has never put out a single chip is going to be able to deliver the goods. I won't even get into drivers . . .

Tuesday, August 17, 1999

Nuke your home town -- 9:47 pm CST, Update by The Master

I remember playing with this a few months back from a link on User Friendly. Here's a site for mapping out the Nuclear Blast Radius of any location you'd like. I tried it out on my hometown, D.C., New York, etc. Very scary stuff.

On a related note, check out The Abandoned Silo, which is a walkthrough of an abandoned Titan I missile base probably in Arizona/New Mexico. This is the home of the cold war, where many men spent many nights waiting for the end to come. And two of them would have to push the buttons for each missile (the base was made up of 3 missiles per control center).

If you're truly interested in the dark side of man, check it out.

UT Chat on Avault -- 1:54 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I saw on Avault that they will be hosting a chat with the developers of Unreal Tournament on Thursday at 7:30 P.M. Eastern Time. I hope to ask if D3D and OpenGL performance in Unreal 2.25 is any indication of performance in Unreal Tourney. If it is, I'm not touching it with a ten foot pole.

Lightmaps in Q3Test -- 1:43 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I had been playing Q3Test with vertex lighting, because in my Q3Test 1.07 timedemos, I found that using vertex lighting gave an 8-14% speed increase. I reran some timedemos in 1.08 and found that the difference was now only 5%. Setting cg_gibs 0 (which eliminates 1.08's new "fountains" of gibs), gives me that 5% back. The Master said that he heard that Carmack had made some lighting improvements since 1.07 and I found that to be very true. Try it for yourself!

q3test2 Hand-Holding -- 11:59 am CST, Update by The Master

Just saw this on Blue's. There's a q3test2 Strategy Guide on BigKid.com. Personally, my strategy is to dominate the quad and launch regular camper-reducing roxs at the railgun platform (yeah, AT, you camper. I'll teach ya to camp that RG :-)

A.T. retorts: I heard there's going to be a QuadHor model in Q3A just for you!

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