Thursday, January 30, 2003

UT2K3 DE Bonus Pack Tomorrow -- 5:11 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Digital Extremes contacted Blue to inform him that the Unreal Tournament 2003 bonus pack will be released tomorrow. They even gave him a couple of screenshots for our viewing pleasure. Here's the word:

Sizing in at around 195 Megs, the DE Bonus Pack includes 6 all new maps - 3 deathmatch, 2 CTF and 1 Bombing Run. Here's a couple of screens to whet your appetite until tomorrow.

The Bonus Pack will be available in two forms - umod form and a zip file that extracts the map/textures/static meshs to the correct spots for people who don't have the latest patch (v. 2166) or who are running dedicated servers only. (umods sadly don't work without the latest patch or with server only versions.)

Freshmeat HOWNOTTO -- 11:42 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

This is from a couple of years ago, but I just found it so it's new to me. If you've never seen it before, it'll be new to you as well! Now that the obvious is out of the way, check out Ryan "icculus" Gordon's Freshmeat HOWNOTTO to show you what not to do if you want to be an open-source programmer. After that, you can visit this page to pick a name for your program in the finest open-source style. Someday, I hope to find what "GkrellM" is before I die. (Yes, I looked it up on Google. It's still my favorite example of a true open-source program name.)

J.t.Qbe comments: Hey, I LIKE GkrellM, so watch out! It's extremely handy for monitoring your system.

A.T. Hun comments: I didn't say it was bad, I just said it's name is inscrutable.

John Carmack .plan Update -- 8:47 am CST, Update by The Master

John Carmack made a rare update to his .plan talking about the new Nvidia cards, comparing them to the latest crop of ATI cards. This thing is technoweenie to the max. Go forth and don't strain anything reading it :-)

At the moment, the NV30 is slightly faster on most scenes in Doom than the R300, but I can still find some scenes where the R300 pulls a little bit ahead. The issue is complicated because of the different ways the cards can choose to run the game.

The R300 can run Doom in three different modes: ARB (minimum extensions, no specular highlights, no vertex programs), R200 (full featured, almost always single pass interaction rendering), ARB2 (floating point fragment shaders, minor quality improvements, always single pass).

The NV30 can run DOOM in five different modes: ARB, NV10 (full featured, five rendering passes, no vertex programs), NV20 (full featured, two or three rendering passes), NV30 ( full featured, single pass), and ARB2.

The R200 path has a slight speed advantage over the ARB2 path on the R300, but only by a small margin, so it defaults to using the ARB2 path for the quality improvements. The NV30 runs the ARB2 path MUCH slower than the NV30 path. Half the speed at the moment. This is unfortunate, because when you do an exact, apples-to-apples comparison using exactly the same API, the R300 looks twice as fast, but when you use the vendor-specific paths, the NV30 wins.

The reason for this is that ATI does everything at high precision all the time, while Nvidia internally supports three different precisions with different performances. To make it even more complicated, the exact precision that ATI uses is in between the floating point precisions offered by Nvidia, so when Nvidia runs fragment programs, they are at a higher precision than ATI's, which is some justification for the slower speed. Nvidia assures me that there is a lot of room for improving the fragment program performance with improved driver compiler technology.

A.T. Hun comments: Ahh, the brain-pain that comes from reading a Carmack .plan update. I missed it so. Good stuff here, I just wish I could grasp more of it.

Wednesday, January 29, 2003

Unreal 2 Demo After All? -- 5:05 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Unreal Ops got word that Legend might just release a demo of Unreal 2 after all. Here's a taste:

Now that Unreal II has gone gold, we've been exploring the possibility with Infogrames and Epic, which is something that Headup wasn’t aware of. FWIW, everyone involvedâ€"including Legendâ€"is very conscious of the benefits of a demo, and we’d all love to do it. I hope to have more news soon.

Thanks Shacknews.

Past Two Days' News

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