Friday, September 22, 2000

Return to Wolfenstein Screenshots -- 3:10 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Telefragged posted some new screenshots from Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Gray Matter's follow-up to id's Wolfenstein 3D. The shot show of some new models we haven't seen before. Thanks Blue.

Deus Ex SDK released -- 9:08 am CST, Update by The Master

ION Storm has released the Deus Ex SDK for download. This package contains the DX versions of UnrealScript/compiler, UnrealEd, documentation, utilities and all the other goodies you'll need to make mods for Deus Ex. Get nuts you modders, I wanna see some new DX missions!

Bleh -- 9:07 am CST, Update by The Master

I can't promise I'll be around this weekend since it appears my home PC's hard drive is going down for the count. I'm going to be playing the diagnostic game all weekend, so hopefully A.T. will be able to keep up with things on his own (he usually does :-) until I can get my machine back in battery. Blech.

It's Official: Creative Buys Aureal -- 9:05 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

It's been rumored for a long time, now the official word is here. Creative Labs has purchased the remnants of Aureal, their chief soundcard competitor for many years. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, Creative does with Aureal's A3D technology. It cost them US$28 million, but I'm sure it saved them at least that much by getting all the pending litigation between the companies settled. Thanks Blue's News.

Thursday, September 21, 2000

Red Hat 7.0 Info -- 6:19 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

MaximumLinux posted an article on the big changes in Red Hat Linux 7.0. The most cool additions (for me anyway) are USB support and the fact that XFree86 4.0.x is installed by default, so we NVIDIA users can immediately take advantage of their sweet Linux drivers. Very cool indeed. Hey J.t.Qbe, fire up that burner! Thanks Slashdot.

NVIDIA announces the MCPX -- 11:29 am CST, Update by The Master

NVIDIA has a press release talking about their second contribution to Microsoft's X-Box project, the MCPX. The MCPX is a special coprocessor dedicated to processing audio/multimedia and broadband data access for the X-Box, at a reported 4 billion operations per second. Wow. Now, let's see it come to the PC market :-)

Carmack on Unreal -- 8:45 am CST, Update by The Master

There's a short blurb over on Slashdot on visibility technology as it was used in Unreal. Thanks Blue.

PVS was The Right Thing when level geometry counts were much lower. With tens of thousands of polygons in a scene, creating a cluster tree directly from that becomes completely unrealistic from a space and time perspective.

The options are to either do PVS with a simplified version of the world, or ignore the geometry and just work with portal topology.

Unreal used a scan-line visibility algorithm, which crippled it's ability to have high poly counts or high framerates with hardware accelerators.

Tim Sweeny knows full well that the architecture is very wrong for modern systems, but many of the original decisions were based on earlier software technologies. Unreal was supposed to be a "killer app" for the Pentium-200 MMX processor.

I have a lot of respect for Tim and Unreal, but the visibility algorithm in Unreal turned out to be a bad call. He is changing it for future work.

Carmack Interview on VE-day 3 -- 8:35 am CST, Update by The Master

The third part of VE's interview with John Carmack is online over at Voodoo Extreme. Today, a few blurbs on hardware, and a big answer on John's feelings towards software patents (I paraphrase: they suck).

Past Two Days' News

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