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Date: 10/31/08
Posted by: Black Monk
Remember that time I WASN'T a slacker?
Me either!

Sorry for the lack of news updates, it's been a busy summer here in the northern latitudes (/me waves to the oz and nz readers!) and I've just been slacking. I apologize!

We got a nice bloke who was working on actually updating the Quake 3 rendering system, sort of like how ioUrT did it except when we opensourced we'd actually, you know, release our source for that for others to use. So not as ambitious as XreaL's improvements but something that would still allow for higher complexity in maps. The coder used to work with Blaze at Hermitworks on SpaceTrader and that video of Q3 ported to the iPhone y'all saw about a year or two ago.

Well, both good and bad news, he got busy with a new job. Good for him but bad for us in the sense that we have some of the work done to offload 3D rendering from CPU to the GPU with fancy words like VBOs, GLSL, HLSL, and other things that I only get a vague gist of.

Most of the semi-active team has kind of been busy the last few months. Me doing nothing productive, TTI working on the UI pretty much solo, Makro busy with his job, JBravo busy with his job, Blaze busy with his job, our current sound guy is... well, he's busy but we don't have any current sound work needing to be done so that's no problem. One bloke who was going to redo some of our web stuff ended up not having enough time due to... too much work at his job. While on one hand I'm like, "dammit!" on the other hand, with the worldwide economy kind of sucking right now, I'm glad so many people associated with Reaction are at least working!

A short while ago a bloke named steve submitted some bug reports:

http://bugzilla.icculus.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4294
http://bugzilla.icculus.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4293
http://bugzilla.icculus.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4190

Thank you very much for taking the time to submit those, steve! We'll have to check them out. I had been avoiding doing much testing for a while with Reaction because my 3D card was having problems. Heating issue. I removed the stock heatsink because it had a wire that the fan kept hitting, was driving me nuts! So I figure, no sound is best, right? I got a passive cooler for my nvidia 9600GT, this sucker (pictures linked in the first post, that's not me, just an example). Worked great, my temps went down from 70+ celcius to 40-ish. Problem is, I think the RAM or VRM heatsinks didn't do enough so when I played a 3D game and it went to 53-ish celcius, the whole computer hard-locked. I finally got a fan set up to blow directly on it (the thing takes up 3 freakin' slots, 1 for the card, 1 for the heatsink, 1 for the fan mounted on it) and now it's rock-solid and I can play 3D games again.

Anyway, that's my tale of woe. I need to get back in the groove for testing and feedback so TTI doesn't feel like he's the only one working on Reaction. Now that I can actually, you know, test stuff, it should be easier. At some point I'll also see if I can sucker JBravo into merging the current ioquake3 SVN to our code as they've had a ton of closed bugs in the last few weeks and some may be beneficial to us. But I'm thinking I'll wait a bit more because some zany German named Thilo (from ioEF fame, remaking of Star Trek:Elite Force as a standalone) along with icculus himself and Timbo and several others from the ioq3 wrecking crew have been churning away at their bugzilla. Churn, baby, churn!

Again, I apologize for the lack of updates. That's totally on me. And maybe Makro because he forgot his login to the news system. Oh ho ho!