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6:17 PM Download from Operation 3Dfx 2:10 PM I moved the 3Dfx card back to the P2-266. The P120 is just too slow, or else something is wrong with it. It really chokes on any heavy action. We played some more using that Iron Man skin. Damn, it looks good! We ended getting on one server that had a bunch of people with 75-100 ms pings. They were kicking our ass. You could see the ping really mattered because whenever you ran into another guy, their shot would go off first because of their lower ping. This means that instead of relying on your skills to get you through tough situations you have to start grabbing power-ups like mad to stay alive.
6:14 AM Well, what are my observations about the Permedia 2 after a little playing around? Quake 2 is still very nice on this P2-266 using the Permedia 2's built-in OpenGL acceleration. I turned down the resolution to 512x384 in order to speed up the frame rate, however. The colored lighting that the 3Dfx chips support makes a huge difference in Quake 2. The environments look sort of bland with the Permedia 2. The Permedia 2 does suppot colored lighting, just not the way Quake 2 does it. Hopefully this can be resolved with new drivers. Regarding o/c'ing the Permedia 2, there are a couple of registry entries which I mentioned before...glintclockspeed and permediaclockspeed. I believe both default to 0, which leaves the chips at a default of 80 MHz. Well, in order to try to get a speed boost out of the card, I o/c'ed it to 90. The framerate at 512x384x16 bit color rose from 22.0 to 23.0 fps. Not too spectacular. The Voodoo was doing about 26-27 fps at 640x480 with all the goodies on. In GL Quake 2, you can specify the way texturing should be handled by setting the variable "gl_texturemode" to various things. These commands work for the Voodoo, i.e. I can turn off bilinear filtering if I want to, but if I try them with the Permedia 2, nothing happens. Also, bringing up the menu in Quake 2 seems to disable bilinear filtering on the Permedia 2. It gets reapplied a couple of seconds after the menu disappears. Pretty weird. This card also has an annoying habit of corrupting textures every time a new level loads. I'm not sure whether this is a driver issue or not, but I do have the latest drivers. I have to reset the video mode every time a level change occurs or else the skins of characters and the text and the status bar are all shot to hell. By the way, I made a new Iron Man skin. I gave up trying to grok the skin by hand and started looking for Iron Man art to turn into skin textures. This worked much more quickly and easily than I had ever hoped for. The new skin looks awesome, if I do say so myself. I'll definitely be submitting this one to whoever is in charge of the official skin paks. Back to 3D accelerators. The 3Dfx boosts the performance of Quake 2 on the P120 a whole lot, but for some reason it still just doesn't feel right. In particular, the hard drive seems to get hit a whole lot while Quake 2 is running, which really screws up Quake 2 and causes major pauses. This might be because the machine only has 32MB of RAM, but I figured that would easily be enough. The other problem is that the monitor for that computer is a huge load of crap. The brightness on it is pretty much gone and one of the guns is half dead, which means it tints everything a little blueish. I luckily can mostly compensate for this with some liberal use of the gamma settings for the 3Dfx. I haven't figured out the perfect settings but putting red and green at 2.4 gamma and blue at 2.1 gamma seems to be OK. More on all this later.
4:24 PM 2:50 PM More Quake 2 I have a couple of different theories as to why this is happening. First off might be that the modem is a little too aggressive at retraining and negotiating line conditions. I've tried lowering the port speed to 57,600 in case that's the problem. I don't think it's the ISP becuase a friend of mine is not having any problems and is using the same ISP. Actually, I take that back. He is having problems, just not the same kind. He gets a lot of "Local map version differs from server" errors. Which is quite strange, since we know we are using a correct copy. Either the maps in the .pak file are being corrupted when we copy them from his CD-ROM to the hard drive or his processor is somehow generating an invalid CRC. Or perhaps the modem is somehow receiving an invalid CRC. Next off are the skins. I highly recommend downloading these, they are really cool. I was playing around for a while last night making an Iron Man skin using Paint Shop Pro. Check out the Quake 2 Models/Skins FAQ for some more info. Anyhow, my Iron Man skin is very simplistic but surprisingly doesn't look all that bad. Make sure to get the first skin pak from Telefragged's Skins2 site. As long as you have these skins on your computer you will be able to see what other people who are using this skin pak want to look like. We were playing on satan.idsoftware.com yesterday. Id runs four servers with a maxclients of 12 each on this computer on four different ports, from 27910-27913. It's quite fun, although there are quite a number of bad players. I love the idiots who crouch a lot. I guess they think it makes it harder to hit them, but it actually just makes it easier because you can hardly move while you are crouching.
2:22 PM Quake 2 over a modem is surprisingly playable. 500 ping times are not so hot but still doable; 200-250 ms is what I'm averaging and at that ping rate it's pretty good. AT&T Worldnet seems to have consistently higher pings than other ISP's (my friend uses MSN and averages about 50-100 ms lower than me). Nevertheless, I stick to AT&T because of the other excellent services. I'm currently running a Quake 2 server on my computer at Penn with a fraglimit of 10 (we don't usually have a lot of people on, yet, so 10 takes a little while to hit) and maxclients set to 16. Also, in order to handle disconnects properly you have to do "+set zombietime -1000" as an option when you start the server.
8:45 PM 3:45 PM ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/q2-309.exe 1:49 AM ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/patch_08.zip WinAMP 1.64 released WinAMP: Download The Dark Tower
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