Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

  • Doom 3 Doesn’t Run Well… yet

    Co-worker purchased Doom 3 yesterday to prove to me it actually existed. I had thought it was a Mac & Maya publicity stunt gone vaporware, but I was, thankfully, proven wrong.

    The minimum specs are like a 1.5 gigahertz P4… awesome! The problem is, we tested here on a 1.7 with the 9600 Radeon, a beast of a card, and although the game looked good, the framerate/refresh rate was pathetic. We upped and lowered the resolution, turned on and then turned off the special effects (each and every setting), even tweaked the video card for performance… all to no avail. The game would play the same for higher or lower settings. The closer your camera was to a wall, without facing much geometry, the better it ran.

    My guess is, the majority of the game’s framerate is garnered from processor speed, while the effects are all put on the video card. It ran the same with all settings on or off which leads me to believe that hopefully the first patch will tap into some of the video card’s power to up the framerate. Seeing what the Radeon did for Unreal, I only pray that the game’s designers spent part of that 3-4 years (or was it 2…?) 4 years finding out how to use a video card to what it was made to do. One of my older computers had it’s lifespan extended 6 months because of a new video card; they can do wonders if the developers utilize hardware acceleration to its fullest.

    Anyway, I’d wait for the first patch before purchasing… you can still buy the T-shirts, though!

    CNET’s Coverage

    Time Magazine’s Coverage

  • New Design++;

    I’ve updated my web site’s design (for those of you not visiting in RSS/Atom readers). I’ve done my best in the time allotted to support Gecko based browsers as well as Safari since I realize a lot of my readership does not use IE for Windows. I attempted an all CSS solution, but it only rendered correctly in IE, so I used a mixture of tables and css. Designed in Flash, sliced in Fireworks, assembled in Dreamweaver, tested on browsers & OS’ mentioned below.

    Any visual problems and/or issues not noted below that cause the site to be unusable, please let me know.

    – IE 6+ on WinXP = in content colum, sometimes gray will get pushed over the right’s red border; bottom triangle sometimes misaligned
    – Mozilla 1.7 on WinXP = at home, no issues, at work, first download did not render page correctly, had to refresh to correct
    – IE 5.2 on Mac = code boxes do not display correctly, therefore rendering code inside them unreadable
    – Safari on Mac = search field on right pushes out of panel boundary; background colors not defined in right panels, thus gray does not match

  • mProjector v2 Released

    mProjector v2 is a 3rd party Flash extension application. It takes your SWF(s), and allows them to do things that the Flash Player itself cannot do. It’s main selling points are:

    – syncronous commands not using fscommand or callbacks. So, for reading files from the user’s hard drive, reading the registry, etc., it’s all immediate. FlashStudioPro I believe requires fscommands, and Screenweaver requires you to setup callbacks.
    – when opening new windows, you have the same syncronous ActionScript like the above with return values, just like normal ActionScript.
    – direct access to COM objects, and you can use their methods in ActionScript like you’d use a component.

    There are some other neat features, but to me the above is what sets it apart from it’s competitors. I had the ability to see in it in action, and it’s pretty slick. Quick to jump into, as well if your thinking of giving it a spin.

    mProjector v2

  • Flash Ads Invade AIM

    Son of a… I hear the classic creaky door opening sound. I toggle to AIM to see who logged in, and suddenly, the window refreshes probably because it was inactive for a few hours, and then a red square appears over top of it. The window was about 120 x 480 in size, and the red square managed to be about 400×300, just big enough to cover all my buddy’s, plus some of the buttons below it. A rocket then flies over top the whole thing… I panic, and start clicking madly mouthing “wtf…”. Then, the rocket and square disappear as I toggle away and then back again, and it turns it out was the Thunderbirds movie ad in the ad square at the top of AIM.

    Son of a b(*&$#! Suddenly I actually give a hoot about Trillian… another AIM client in Central sounds neat as well.