Wednesday, September 1, 1999

Graeme Devine .plan -- 6:59 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Graeme Devine updated his .plan explaining that empty servers are not showing up in Q3Test's server browser. this will be fixed in the next release. That explains why the EZ-Net server would go for days without anyone playing and then would have tons of people on for extended periods of time. He also issues a challenge to those to think that their past network code is better than the current (1.08) revision.

Almost Finished XWA! -- 11:34 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

After not playing it for a while, I picked up X-Wing Alliance again, determined to finish it. I got through the two very tough missions in Battle 6 pretty well. The last two missions in Battle 6 and the first three in Battle 7 (which set up your assault on the Death Star II) went very quickly. I made about six attempts at flying into and destroying the Death Star II last night but kept crashing into things. If you are a fan of the X-Wing series or of Star Wars in general get this game!

Update: I did it! I blew up the Death Star II! Now I can start bugging LucasArts / Totally Games to get an expansion disc out!

UT News -- 11:29 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I saw this on Voodoo Extreme, regarding the status of Unreal Tournament. Thus spake CliffyB (who, I recently found out, is much younger than I originally thought):

There are some bugs left! Duh. There was a minor TNT rendering glitch Tim had to fix. The Flak Cannon would get out of sync in netplay, Steve is fixing it. A hole or two in a level here and there. A guy was missing a face graphic in the HUD in the DM ladder. Stuff like that. Almost there baby.

Despite Unreal's sorry performance, I will be giving UT a shot on my system and see how it performs.

Madden 2000 Out Soon -- 11:24 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Whilst perusing the EA Sports site for any news of the NHL 2000 demo, I saw that their football sim, Madden 2000, is gold and should be in stores soon. There is a demo available. I'm going to download it and check it out. The last version of Madden was maddeningly (ha ha!) slow on my old system, we'll see how my new one handles M2K.

More NeoShogo Information -- 10:54 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I found out that the new mod NeoShogo will be client-side only. The weapon damage and firing rates will not be changed (so you can't cheat with this mod), but it will include new player skins, new weapon models and skins, and new explosion animations.

Carmack .plan Update -- 10:48 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

In his .plan, John Carmack detailed his efforts to reduce memory usage in Quake 3 Arena. He even talked about going to a skeletal animation system, which would seem to me to be a huge change this late in a project. But if anyone can pull it off, he can. In the process, he taught himself Perl. Must be nice to be brilliant.

New GLSetup -- 10:43 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Blue's is reporting that there is a new version of GLSetup available. It will determine and install the proper OpenGL drivers for you card. It is available as a small launcher which will then download the appropriate drivers or as a huge 40+M download with all the drivers in it.

Tuesday, August 31, 1999

More GeForce 256 Goodness -- 1:10 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Elsa has announced a new product based on NVIDIA's GeForce 256 chip. The best preview I've read so far is Dan "Tweak Monkey" Kennedy's GeForce 256 preview on Tweak3D. Unfortunately they are using their patented "Very Slow Web Server" technology so it may take a bit of patience to get through.

I also noticed that the GeForce 256 will support DXTC (the DirectX-licensed version of S3TC, S3's texture-compression method).

And does anyone besides me think that NV10 was a better name than GeForce 256? Sounds like a bad animé series to me ("Coming up next after Pokémon, GeForce 256!"). Update: I saw on Voodoo Extreme that Billy Wilson doesn't care for the name any more than I do. But who cares what they call it, as long as it does what they say it will!

Update #2: I was reminded that there is a bad animé series called G-Force. Guess my intuition was pretty good on that one.

NVIDIA Announces the GeForce 256 -- 10:40 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The GeForce 256 (aka the chip formerly known as NV10) was unveiled to the public today. Here's the specs for you pointy-headed types, which I nabbed from Riva3D's GeForce page:

• 15M triangles/sec - sustained DMA, transform/clip/light, setup, rasterize and render rate
• 4 Pixels per clock (4 pixel pipelines)
• 480M pixels/sec fill rate - 32 texture samples per clock, full speed 8-tap anisotropic filtering.
• 8 hardware lights
• 350 MHz RAMDAC
• Most feature complete for DX7 and OGL - Tranform & Lighting, Cube environment mapping, projective textures, and texture compression.
• Will utilize 4x AGP performance with Fast Writes , which enables the CPU to send data directly to the GPU (1 GB/sec transfer rate), increasing overall performance and freeing the system memory bus for other functions.
• 256 bit rendering engine
• Highest quality HDTV (High Definition Television) video playback
  • High Precision HDTV video overlay
    • 5 horizontal, 3 vertical taps
    • 8:1 up/down scaling
    • Independent hue, saturation and brightness controls in hardware
  • High bandwidth HDTV class video I/O
    • 16 bit video port
    • Full host port
    • Dedicated DMA video
  • Powerful HDTV motion compensation
    • Full frame rate DVD to 1080i resolution
    • Full precision subpixel accuracy to 1/16 pixel
• Enables the PC to compete with the Playstation 2 as a major entertainment platform.

Whew! Creative Labs has already announced a new product based on the GeForce 256. Check out Riva3D's GeForce FAQ, GeForce Technical Papers, and GeForce demo shots.

The really cool thing about this new chip is that it offloads so much work from the CPU that you can keep your old system up-to-date by simply replacing your video card instead of a whole new motherboard/CPU/video card. I think I've found my next video card :). BTW, This news update wins the award for "most HTML ever used in a news blurb."

New Webdog, NV10 -- 8:15 am CST, Update by The Master

K-News for today includes a new build of WebDog 2.0 and the anticipated release of the NV10 today. NV10. Ohhhhhhh baby. I want one. Like, now.

Yeah, right... that's gonna happen :-(

Past Two Days' News

The Haus is powered by:

All original information on this website is copyright © TheHaus.Net, 1999-2005. The use of original images, text, and/or code from this website without expressed written consent is prohibited. The authors of this site cannot be held responsible for any damage, real or imagined, which comes from the use of information presented on this site. All trademarks used are the properties of their respective owners. This site is not to be used as a floatation device (but if you try, I want a video tape of it).