1998 July » Doom-Ed

My F50 took some twin turbo vitamins.

Rear wheel numbers:
602 HP @ 8200 rpm
418 ft-lb @ 7200 rpm

This is very low boost, but I got the 50% power increase I was looking for,
and hopefully it won’t be making any contributions to my piston graveyard.

There will be an article in Turbo magazine about it, and several other car
magazines want to test it out. They usually start out with “He did WHAT
to an F50???”

Brian is getting a nitrous kit installed in his viper, and Cash just got his
suspension beefed up, so we will be off to the dragstrip again next month to
sort everything out again.

I have spent the last two days working with Apple’s Rhapsody DR2, and I like
it a lot.

I was dissapointed with the original DR1 release. It was very slow and
seemed to have added the worst elements of the mac experience (who the hell
came up with that windowshade minimizing?) while taking away some of the
strengths of NEXTSTEP.

Things are a whole lot better in the latest release. General speed is up,
memory consumption is down, and the UI feels consistant and productive.

Its still not as fast as windows, and probably never will be, but I think the
tradeoffs are valid.

There are so many things that are just fundamentally better in the rhapsody
design than in windows: frameworks, the yellow box apis, fat binaries,
buffered windows, strong multi user support, strong system / local seperation,
netinfo, etc.

Right now, I think WindowsNT is the best place to do graphics development work,
but if the 3D acceleration issue was properly addressed on rhapsody, I think that
I could be happy using it as my primary development platform.

I ported the current Quake codebase to rhapsody to test out conix’s beta OpenGL.
The game isn’t really playable with the software emulated OpenGL, but it
functions properly, and it makes a fine dedicated server.

We are going to try to stay on top of the portability a little better for QA.
Quake 2 slid a bit because we did the development on NT instead of NEXTSTEP,
and that made the irix port a lot more of a hassle than the original glquake port.

I plan on using the rhapsody system as a dedicated server during development,
and Brian will be using an Alpha-NT system for a lot of testing, which should
give us pretty good coverage of the portability issues.

I’m supposed to go out and have a bunch of meetings at apple next month to cover
games, graphics, and hardware. Various parts of apple have scheduled
meetings with me on three seperate occasions over the past couple years, but they
have always been canceled for one reason or another (they laid off the people
I was going to meet with once…).

I have said some negative things about MacOs before, but my knowledge of
the mac is five years old. There was certainly the possibility that things
had improved since then, so I spent some time browsing mac documentation
recently. I was pretty amused. A stack sniffer. Patching trap vectors.
Cooperative multitasking. Application memory partitions. Heh.

I’m scared of MacOS X. As far as I can tell, The basic plan is to take rhapsody
and bolt all the MacOS APIs into the kernel. I understand that that may well
be a sensible biz direction, but I fear it.

In other operating system news, Be has glquake running hardware accelerated on
their upcoming OpenGL driver architecture. I gave them access to the glquake and
quake 2 codebases for development purposes, and I expect we will work out an
agreement for distribution of the ports.

Any X server vendors working on hardware accelerated OpenGL should get in touch
with Zoid about interfacing and tuning with the Id OpenGL games on linux.

I am not opposed to adding a flag to control the movement styles. I was
rather expecting it to be made optional in 3.17, but I haven’t been directly
involved in the last few releases.

The way this played out in public is a bit unfortunate. Everyone at Id is
busy full time with the new product, so we just weren’t paying enough attention
to the Quake 2 modifications. Some people managed to read into my last update
that we were blaming Zoid for things. Uh, no. I think he was acting within
his charter (catering to the community) very well, it just interfered with an
aspect of the game that shouldn’t have been modified. We just never made it
explicitly clear that it shouldn’t have been modified.

It is a bit amusing how after the QuakeArena anouncement, I got flamed by
lots of people for abandoning single player play (even though we aren’t, really)
but after I say that Quake 2 can’t forget that it is a single player game, I get
flamed by a different set of people who think it is stupid to care about single
player anymore when all “everyone” plays is multiplayer. The joy of having a
wide audience that knows your email address.

Here is the real story on the movement physics changes.

Zoid changed the movement code in a way that he felt improved gameplay in the
3.15 release.

We don’t directly supervise most of the work Zoid does. One of the main
reasons we work with him is that I respect his judgment, and I feel that his
work benefits the community quite a bit with almost no effort on my part. If
I had to code review every change he made, it wouldn’t be worth the effort.

Zoid has “ownership” of the Quake, Glquake, and QuakeWorld codebases. We don’t
intend to do any more modifications at Id on those sources, so he has pretty
free rein within his discretion.

We passed over the Quake 2 codebase to him for the addition of new features
like auto download, but it might have been a bit premature, because official
mission packs were still in development, and unlike glquake and quakeworld,
Q2 is a product that must remain official and supported, so the scope of his
freedoms should have been spelled out a little more clearly.

The air movement code wasn’t a good thing to change in Quake 2, because the
codebase still had to support all the commercial single player levels, and
subtle physics changes can have lots of unintended effects.

QuakeWorld didn’t support single player maps, so it was a fine place to
experiment with physics changes.

QuakeArena is starting with fresh new data, so it is also a good place to
experiment with physics changes.

Quake 2 cannot be allowed to evolve in a way that detracts from the commercial
single player levels.

The old style movement should not be refered to as “real world physics". None
of the quake physics are remotely close to real world physics, so I don’t think
one way is significantly more “real” than the other. In Q2, you accelerate from
0 to 27 mph in 1/30 of a second, which just as unrealistic as being able to
accelerate in midair…