Saturday, April 21, 2001

Mozilla Roadmap -- 4:53 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Mozilla Project recently updated their release roadmap. Version 0.9 of the open-source web browsing suite will hopefully be released on Monday. It would be nice if 1.0 could get out this quarter. We'll see.

Loki: Not Quite Dead -- 4:49 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

ITWorld did an interview with Loki's Scott Draeker on why things have been so quiet at Loki lately and where the Linux gaming market is heading. One of his comments which I'm sure will attract a lot of discussion is this one:

One of the things that I am personally concerned about is that you've got two camps out there, who are ostensibly working on the Linux desktop. You've got the GNOME group, and Helix Code and those folks, on one side, and you've got the KDE folks on the other side. From where we sit, the GNOME people see the desktop as a GNOME desktop and the KDE people see it as a KDE desktop. Nobody is really working on a Linux desktop, per se.

Things seem to be turning around for Loki with the release of the Tribes 2 port and the Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack. I've been enjoying their port of Soldier of Fortune quite a bit myself. Thanks Linux Games.

J.t.Qbe comments: I was encouraged to read that Loki already has enough of a market to stay afloat. That's good news. Loki does good work (currently playing their port of Heroes of Might & Magic III and it's good stuff). You can go to Linux and still have top-quality games, the same games your Windows-running (or maybe Windows-limping) friends are playing. Support 'em, Linux geeks!

Fullscreen Problem Solved -- 10:12 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I figured out why I couldn't get Quake III Arena to run fullscreen in my new Red Hat 7.1 installation. When RH installed XFree86, it only defined one resolution. All I had to do was to edit the "Modes" subsection of the "Screen" section in my /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file and add "800x600" "640x480" after "1024x768". Problem solved. Every Linux distribution has its quirks, I guess I just need to get familiar with RH 7.1's.

RH 7.1 does seem to be snappier overall. My web browsing seems to be much faster, but I don't know if that is a function of RH 7.1 or the newer version of Mozilla than I had been using with Mandrake.

Friday, April 20, 2001

Jake Simpson .plan Update -- 7:10 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Raven's Jake Simpson updated his .plan with a correction to his interview on Voodoo Extreme earlier today:

A couple of things. In the VE interview I stated that SOF2 was based off the 1.17 build of Quake III. Of course I was completely wrong. It's based off the first release of Team Arena. I'm just a dummy getting confused between Elite Force Multiplayer, which was 1.17, and the SOF2 start up times. Oh well. What's an interview without something wrong on it?

That did sound strange to me since he mentioned specifically that it was Team Arena.

Arrrghhh -- 11:50 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I've been extremely frustrated trying to get Red Hat 7.1 to run properly. Here's a list of problems I've had:

• It didn't install Linuxconf automatically. Why?
• It refuses to run any root programs in X after I enter the root password. They just barf.
• It didn't install PCMCIA services even though it detected my PCMCIA wireless card at installation.
• I can't get it to access the Internet at all. I have no idea why. I've quadruple-checked all my settings (mind you, I got this working in Red Hat 6.2 and Mandrake 7.1).

I'm going to keep working at it, but right now I'm very frustrated, especially considering how much time I put into downloading this. There are some cool new features, but right now they are being drowned out in the noise of everything else that's going wrong.

UPDATE! OK, there was a bit of PEBKAC involved. With the help of Crawl we fished through all my settings until I found the problem. Networking is now working. For some reason, running root programs fixed itself. Too weird.

UPDATE #2! I got the NVIDIA driver installed, although I had to use the source RPM instead of the one that was for RH 7.1. Not sure if there is a kernel difference between 7.1 beta and 7.1 final that causes the problem. Now I can't get Quake III to run full-screen. I'll figure that one out later.

SoF 2 Interview -- 9:48 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

VoodooExtreme interviewed Raven's Jake Simpson about Soldier of Fortune 2. Topics include the updates they made to the Quake III engine, weapons that will be included, and much more. Here's a snip about the new GHOUL2 animation system:

And then, inevitably, there's GHOUL2. This is what I've been doing for the past few months. Ghoul2 has all the same abilities of Ghoul 1 (well, mostly anyway) and many more. It's a true skeletal animation system, where we can override any bone in the body so we can do programmer-controlled joints (get the guys to look at specific places, make feet match the floor and so on). We can also run animations on specific parts of the body, share animation skeletons across multiple models, bolt objects on, generate on the fly bolts. This allows us to attach damage geometry to the model exactly where you hit it. Of course per-poly collision detection is still there, as is the multiple bolt-on guys, so you won't see repeats of the same guy all over the place. Our texture budget has grown hugely, as the screen shots in PC gamer show. We are definitely going for the photo-realistic look as much as we can.

Past Two Days' News

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