Tuesday, February 24, 2004

NWN 1.62 Patch Released -- 11:02 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Bioware has released the 1.62 patch for Neverwinter Nights and its two expansion packs. There is also a full changelog available for your perusal.

Arts/Kernel 2.6.3 Fix -- 9:39 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Following some advice on Google Groups, I found a solution to my problem with KDE 3.2's arts not playing nicely with the ALSA drivers in Linux kernel 2.6.3 (story). I recompiled arts, kdelibs, and kdemultimedia using the ./configure --with-alsa. Now I can be free of the 2.6.2 exploit and have arts actually work at the same time. Special thanks go out to Jean-Christophe Fargette who created the Slackware packages for KDE 3.2 and answered some questions for me.

New JA Siege Map -- 3:51 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Raven's Kenn Hoekstra updated his .plan (remember those?) with word that they have released a new Siege map for Jedi Academy (with X-Wings and TIE Fighters, no less!) and some new tutorials on creating Siege maps. The .plan has mirrors to both the map and tutorials.

UPDATE Raven's Mike Gummelt also updated his .plan with some tips for people running Siege servers.

Monday, February 23, 2004

New Vid Card -- 11:45 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, I finally found a use for some of the cash I got for my (36th!) birthday. I took Best Buy (no affiliation, etc.) up on their deal for a BFG Asylum GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. I had been eyeing this one anyway, knowing a $40 mail-in rebate offer ends at the end of the month. This week, they added a $30 instant rebate. Net cost: $149. Pretty cool. My office smells like new computer bits. I got a chance to play with it a little bit so far. The speedup in UT2K4 is not as great as I expected. Of course, I think the big bottleneck there might be the game's OpenGL renderer. Q3A flies like mad, but I never really had an issue with that. It's just ridiculously fast now. I hope to see what happens with Neverwinter Nights sometime soonish here too.

KDE 3.2 Exposed -- 9:33 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Ars Technica posted a gigantic overview of KDE 3.2, covering some of the apps, what's new since 3.1, and some of the underlying framework. I'm glad that they also talked about licensing issues, since that subject still comes up from people who either don't know or don't care to know that those issues were resolved years ago. It really should answer anyone who is skeptical of open-source as a viable software development model. Excellent stuff as always from the good folks at Ars.

I'm not as clever as the folks at Ars, but here are the things I really like about KDE 3.2 since I upgraded:

• Speed: KDE 3.2 is noticably faster than its predecessor.
• All of its text editors (KEdit, KWrite, Kate) now support dynamic line wrapping! Yes! You cannot believe how annoyed that used to make me.
• KAudioCreator: A very simple and easy-to-use CD ripper and MP3/Ogg encoder. Once it's set up (which doesn't take long), pop in a CD and poke a button. The end.
• The new Plastik theme: graphically handsome and understated.

Another thing that struck me after reading this article, why can't more open source projects (especially big ones) make something like Konstruct? Two commands and it automagically builds all of KDE for you. Most impressive. I'm trying it now, not because I need to, but just because I want to see it actually work.

Bleh -- 8:18 am CST, Update by The Master

Played a TON of the UT2K4 demo Sunday. The onslaught mode is really fun, but dang I suck at driving vehicles. The only one I'm very good with is the tank, and that's only because it doesn't move very fast. I'm decent with the Raptor, but that didn't happen until I found the fly-down button. It's amazing how much prettier UT2K4 is over it's predecessor. It's also amazing that my wimpy P3-1Ghz can run that onslaught map at a decent speed :-)

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