Tuesday, May 20, 2003

Diablo II 1.10 Interview -- 10:35 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

DiabloII.net caught up with Blizzard's Bill Roper at E3 and fired some questions at him about the fabled 1.10 patch for Diablo II. He gives some insight into the patch, which adds quite a bit of content and makes it harder to level up just by being within nuclear weapon distance of high-level characters.

OSI SCO Smackdown -- 5:22 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Open Source Initiative has posted a position paper on SCO's lawsuit against IBM. They attack some of SCO's points one by one. They can't comment on IBM's contract or the source in question (since SCO hasn't shown either), but they certainly do a good job of weakening, perhaps critically, some of SCO's key arguments.

The Master comments: Oh, this is DELICIOUS reading >:-)

Ren & Stimpy Coming June 26! -- 1:20 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The date is drawing near! On June 26, The New TNN will kick off its animation block, including the triumphant return of Ren & Stimpy! They will show new, 1/2 hour episodes as well as the old, uncut classics. I can hardly contain myself!

Software Rendering w/UT2003 -- 12:48 pm CST, Update by The Master

The Unreal Technology page has posted a link to the RAD Pixomatic software renderer for UT2003. That's right folks, if your video card doesn't have what it takes, you can still maybe play UT2003. Maybe :-) Here's the word:

A.T. Hun comments: I'd say that that's a pretty big maybe. I'm sure it will be nasty ugly too.

A zip file containing the integration of RAD's Pixomatic software renderer into UT2003 can be found here. Unzipping it into the UT2003/System directory and adding the following section to your UT2003.ini file

[PixoDrv.PixoRenderDevice]
FogEnabled=True
Zoom2X=True
LimitTextureSize=True
LowQualityTerrain=True
TerrainLOD=10
SkyboxHack=True
FilterQuality3D=1
FilterQualityHUD=1
HighDetailActors=False
SuperHighDetailActors=False
ReduceMouseLag=False
DesiredRefreshRate=0
DetailTexMipBias=0.000000
Use16bitTextures=False
Use16bit=True
UseStencil=False
UseCompressedLightmaps=False
DetailTextures=False
UsePrecaching=True

should then allow you to select it by modifying your UT2003.ini file as follows.

RenderDevice=PixoDrv.PixoRenderDevice
;RenderDevice=D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice
;RenderDevice=Engine.NullRenderDevice
;RenderDevice=OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice

Keep in mind to lower your resolution to maybe 320x240 or 512x384 in case you have a slow CPU. You can do this from the console by typing "setres 320x240" or "setres 512x384" respectively.

Please check out this thread on the UT2003 forums for questions and bug reports.

Sunday, May 18, 2003

Pondering the Imponderable -- 9:37 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The other day Mozilla Firebird 0.6 was released. Mozilla Firebird is the stand-alone browser that will become focus of development after Mozilla 1.4 is released. You have to call it "Mozilla Firebird" because some programmers of a database called Firebird got all huffy when Mozilla announced the name, as if anyone in their lives had ever heard of a database called Firebird. The only thing I think of when I hear "Firebird" is this.

At any rate, Mozilla Firebird is still in its early stages. It does seem to be a bit snappier than Mozilla 1.4 beta, but it certainly is no lightweight. The full Mozilla suite's tarball is 12.5M while the Mozilla Firebird one is 9.3--just for the browser. They eliminated a lot of the options from the preference menu, which does make things easier for newbies. Unfortunately it hides some things I'd like to change, so your only option is using about:config to do it by hand. I'll probably use it once it gets closer to 1.0. For now, I'm sticking with Mozilla.

No Old News

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