Gearing Up

Although I haven’t mentioned anything about it yet, I’ve been experimenting with Propellerheads Reason 2.5. While I’ve only produced a couple of short and pretty simple tracks, I am in the process of becoming more serious with it. Up until now, I’ve only been using my sub-par 700MHz laptop with no proper midi controller. In the next day or two, I will clear up enough space so I can partition off something like 10 Gb for windoze and get to work with an Evolution MK-425C that is due to arrive on Thursday. But for now, I have to go write a paper. Oh, and you can click that picture for a (much) larger one.

Nick on nVidia, Poor Linux Doom3 Performance Explained

Nick Triantos, director of OpenGL software (writes and supervises the writing of drivers) at nVidia gave a fast paced and high content presentation about the architecture of GPU’s and how some people and organizations are working on getting them to do things besides graphics, primarily complex scientific simulations that require lots of parallel floating point operations. It was a very interesting talk with lots of technical explanations.

After the presentation, I followed him outside the lecture hall to ask him why Doom 3 runs at 15-20 fps in linux when it goes well over 50 or 60 fps in windows (800×600, low detail). He told me that he had called up “John” (Caramack) and asked why the performance was so poor in the linux port. Caramack said that the Doom3 engine has some programmable something or other, don’t remember what it was now, that wasn’t properly implemented in the linux port. Anyway, after I had several answers from several different sources, Nick was able to tell me that the issue would be solved in a patch update to the Doom3 lin bins. Now at least I know what I’m waiting for. =)

Update: I think it was “programmable pixel shaders”..

UPDATE Nov 23: It was 2 days ago now that I tried out the latest nVidia drivers, 1.0.6629, which were apparently released earlier this month. Much to my surprise, my Doom performance jumped from like 10-20 fps to a smooth-enough 30-50 fps. This is at 800×600 high detail. I’m betting it was a combination between the newer Doom 3 linux binaries and the new nVidia drivers. I guess they figured some stuff out. Now I can play my Doom 3 in linux! Yay!

Spammers Suck

Somebody with a texas holdem site started spamming my comments today with meaningless crap, but with the url to a website—rather, web page with lots of words trying to sell this game on it. If I click on ANY of the buttons on the page, I get EmpirePokerSetup.exe. I have to speculate that this could be some sort of virus… yech I hate the internet. Anyway, I had to turn on moderated comments to stop the spamming. Even now, though, they’re still coming in. I wonder when this guy will give up. I deleted them all, though, so nobody should see that crap.

Oh wow, and I just noticed they are all coming from very different IP addresses. That supports my initial theory.

My New TV

So I just got my new Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 yesterday, and after a few hours of tinkering with the complicated, but ever-so-cool MythTV, I manged to get it running. Now, I can use one of my two screens to not just watch TV, but have all the Tivo-like PVR functionality. That means I can pause, rewind, record, get an on-screen TV guide, and more. Since I already had two screens for my computer, instead of buying a TV, this was my solution. It was cheaper than a whole TV (just over $100) and also offers extra functionality. I don’t usually watch too much TV, but maybe that will change now that I have one.

Oh, I’m still working on those pictures. Maybe in the next few days I’ll put something online.

Doom 3 FPS issue resolved; More Gaming Followed

Last night, I finally beat Doom 3. I still think it’s one of the best games available for the PC right now. Totally captivating. The realism of the game along with the lack of opportunity to get distracted (solid gameplay) just sucks you right into the game. I’ve heard of people playing this game straight from beginning to end (about 20hrs?) in one sitting, and I can see why.

After I had beat the big guy at the end, it dawned on me that I had actually read somewhere already that there is some sort of bug in the nvidia drivers that causes doom3 to perform very poorly (fps) when dual screens is enabled. This page explains it all, but you need to either disable the second screen, or go into the advanced performance options and change the “acceleration mode” to single screen rather than the default setting of dual-head acceleration. This allowed me to still use the second head for aim/irc/web and still get full performance in doom3 on the first. After the fix, I was able to run at 1024×768 high detail at ~20 fps’ish. While it’s fun to play like this (BEAUTIFUL) it’s not as smooth, and that’s what REALLY matters. I’ve been playing at 800×600 low detail at about 60 fps. My GF FX 5600 128M is performing better than I thought it could.

So, needless to say, I had to play some more doom with my newfound performance boost. I took a few more screenshots, but I didn’t have enough really cool ones to bother posting them all. I started playing with some cheat codes and stuff, too. I turned on ‘notarget’ which makes the monsters play like they don’t see you at all. So I was able to shine my flashlight in this demon’s face and get a nice screenshot of him, which I cropped and resized in the gizzimp. (Original screenshot at 1024×768 medium detail.)

KMP Finally Released!

KMP 0.01 has been released. Please grab yourself a copy and give it a good brutal testing. I would be very interested in any feedback you may have. Oh, and happy new year to you all! I hope you’re enjoying yourselves wherever you are.

KMP Developments

As of yesterday, KMP became a very usable MPD client. I’m very happy with the progress, and am expecting to make a release in the very near future. Now that we can finally add songs to the playlist from the file browser, KMP is about 85% complete. I’ll say more on what features are implemented and what’s left to go once we’re ready to make a release.

UPDATE (12/20): Okay, so we still haven’t made a release. Jason went on a skiing trip right after school got out so he couldn’t finish kmp enough to be released, but hopefully we will be able to do it soon. If you would like to check out CVS, you may do so with the instructions on the KMP page.