Wednesday, August 3, 2005

UT2K4 Render-to-Texture Beta Patch -- 10:21 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Ryan "icculus" Gordon updated his .plan with news of a beta patch for the Linux version of Unreal Tournament 2004. Here's the pertinent part of the update, including several very large caveats:

I wedged in a hack for the license plate. There's some depth test mojo going on that I can't figure out, so I hacked around it.

So, here's a first shot at ut2004 for Linux with all the render-to-texture stuff.

Some things this fixes:

• The scoreboard in DM-Morpheus3.
• Motion blur in Red Orchestra and UnWheel, etc.
• Realistic player shadows.
• The Hellbender license plate.

Some notes, first:

• This is Linux only right now; MacOS doesn't have the GL extension I want, at least not as of 10.4.2. The second it shows up in the OS, I'll pull the trigger there, too.
• You MUST have version 3355 installed. Earlier (and later, later) versions WILL NOT WORK, and the GAME WILL CRASH. You have been WARNED.
• You MUST have Nvidia's latest drivers, or this WILL NOT WORK (although it will probably work like it does now, no render targets). ATI's drivers, or anyone else's, will probably work if they support the OpenGL extension GL_EXT_framebuffer_object.
• You MUST set "UseRenderTargets=True" in the [OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice]" section of your UT2004.ini, or it WILL NOT WORK.
• To get realistic shadows, you also have to set "bPlayerShadows=True" and "bBlobShadow=False" in the "[UnrealGame.UnrealPawn]" section of your User.ini...the GUI config will not let you set this in 3355 (but the next official patch will correct this). You can also enable vehicle shadows in User.ini.
• Realistic player shadows (or even blob shadows) won't render on terrain on the Nvidia drivers, because of their 4 TMU limit for fixed-function pipeline apps. There is no fix planned for this at this time. Go buy an ATI card if it bothers you, and mail the receipt to Nvidia's engineering department.
• The DM-Morpheus3 scoreboard renders strangely in Windows too; this is not an OpenGL renderer bug, it matches the behaviour of the Direct3D renderer.
• Red Orchestra's motion blur now works (and, unrelated, their splash screen got fixed, too), but the sniper scope is still broken; use the "texture" setting and not "model" for the sniper scope in the options. This is my bug, to be considered later.
• This was not built on the Holy Build Box. If it refuses to start up on your machine because of a glibc conflict, etc, sorry. Wait for an official patch.
• This was built with all my gcc4 mangling from MacOS/x86, and all my Win64 changes...there is a LOT of code changed over 3355, so if it crashes, too bad, wait for an official patch.
• This is x86 only. amd64 will not be forthcoming until, you guessed it, an official patch. If you write me asking for an amd64 build, I will delete it without replying.

If you read all that, here you go: http://icculus.org/~icculus/tmp/ut2004-lnx-3355-with-rendertargets.tar.bz2 Unpack it in your game's System dir, overwriting ut2004-bin ...

I have downloaded it but have not had time to check it out yet. Make sure to back up your ut2004-bin just in case things blow up violently.

Update! Well, so much for that. I tried using it and it crashed with only this error message: "Illegal instruction".

Tuesday, August 2, 2005

Pondering the Imponderable -- 11:17 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, I'm finally back home after a couple of weeks. I'm trying to get myself reacclimated. I reassembled my computer to discover that the fan on my northbridge chip has died. Not only won't it spin, but it's hard to move manually. Looks like I'm going to have to figure out how to swap it out. Joy.

I'm also toying with the idea of getting a DVD burner. The prices have dropped quite nicely lately. I'm looking at an LG GSA-4163B which has gotten good reviews but doesn't cost an arm and a leg. It's getting very hard to back up to CD-Rs these days. My Thunderbird directory is 411M alone. I can whittle that down to about 200M, but heaven help me if I need a message I tossed in the Trash folder.

Update! I ended up ordering one from NewEgg (no affiliation, yadda, yadda) for a pretty sweet price. I got the OEM version since I can't use the software in Linux anyway and I've already got more IDE and soundcard cables than I could possible ever use. I was disappointed to note that this drive (and every other DVD burner I checked) does not support Mt. Rainier format. A small thing, but still annoying.

Past Two Days' News

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