Archive for February 2006

Apple Media Event

February 27, 2006 by Santaduck.

In case you haven’t heard already, Mr. Jobs is hosting another Apple Media Event, in less than 12 hours: 10 AM PST on Feb 28. New Intel iBooks? Touch-sensitive iPods? An Apple-Disney merger? Or something more pedestrian like an Intel MacMini, or portable iPod speaker/carrier? Macrumors.com names these all, and even a movie download service, as possibilities. Check out their live coverage on their Macrumors front page, or the live line by line play by play via irc at irc.krono.net #macrumors.

More on Woz: Hey does anyone know if Wozniak still drives that big Hummer? Some acquaintances used to go to one of his infrequent lunch spots, and I heard the rumor from them he owned a big Hummer, back before they became common.

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The Woz Way

February 26, 2006 by Santaduck.

The Woz Way is an actual street back in San Jose, CA, and I thought of it when I read this interview of the other Steve, Steve Wozniak, as he talked about Apple to the Globe and Mail.

Apparently he’s nominally still on their payroll (I hadn’t realized that), but unlike most normal Apple employees, he can speak his mind, and does he.

He isn’t convinced of the need to jump to Intel, and is skeptical there, but might concede the point.

“
“It’s like consorting with the enemy. We’ve had this long history of saying the enemy is the big black-hatted guys, and they kind of represent evil. We are different, and by being different we’re better… All of a sudden we’re the same in this hardware regard, so it’s a little hard to swallow your words from the past.”

However he is deeply suspicious of the iPod, because according to him, that distracts from Apple’s focus as a “computing company.”

On the possibility of Microsoft entering the mp3 player fray, he says:

“If they do it, they better do it excellent, excellent, excellent because the iPod sure is. Doing something weaker and somehow trying to use your size and market power . . . that’s just not good [enough] if you don’t turn out something superior.”

He’s like the company’s anti-mascot, how great is that? I love it. Read the full interview here.

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Anti Lag Technology Startup: Bigfoot

February 24, 2006 by Santaduck.

The story is I was at this millionaire’s business place (I was about to go flying with him for work), and on the table was Fortune magazine, and on the cover was some startup company contest, and something about gaming lag. A gamer article in a business mag? Intrigued, I picked it up. (Note, I found the online version of this article here, scroll down to the 3rd place winner).

I think the article was about young business school grads who compete to receive some startup seed money from Fortune– one was on an online test prep course (for SATs), one was for a brain pressure monitor, and one was by a couple of MBA CS fans who wanted to fix lag now and forever, so they’ve formed a startup called Bigfoot Networks, and have developed a product, and are, as I understand it, waiting to be bought out.

I found their website, which has not had any news updates since november of last year, so perhaps they are just waiting. It looks like a network interface card, but I’m not sure if it’s for clients, or the gameserver, or somewhere else inline. Here’s a short quote:

“A chip architect at Intel until 2004, Beverly had already developed technologies to accelerate the speed of Intel’s servers by offloading some of the computers’ processes onto a storage card. After researching how to fight the dreaded lag, he realized that he could speed online games similarly. Beverly’s breakthrough: a computer card that communicates with servers, downloading some of the processes that they perform online and allowing them to run faster, thus speeding up online games.
…they formed Bigfoot Networks and developed a prototype called NetBlazer, a gaming accelerator card that can eliminate disruptions caused by server lags. Assuming that Bigfoot can raise more money, it hopes to begin selling NetBlazer by July for $300…Although computer manufacturers such as Dell are luring online gamers with ultrafast processors, none, says Cole, has offered a solution for lag disruptions.”

OK whatever. But what is really cool is their research on lag. I mean we all know lag, different kinds of lag– warping, stuttering, dropouts, etc., but you haven’t thought about it like these guys. I present to you:

Bigfoot Network’s White Paper on Lag (pdf)

whoa. I’ll keep an eye on these guys to see if they get bought out, and begin shipping a product.

It makes me wonder if, in the future of gaming, if network demands will rise as fast as graphics demands have been rising with each generation– this has certainly not been the case so far– UT2004 has much the same network demands as UT99– but would could a game do with a world in which we had a lot more bandwidth and less latency? hmm. I remember when I couldn’t imagine what we’d do with more than 128K RAM, or the yawning abyss of a 10megabyte hard drive in the 8088 IBM XT– it simply changes the parameters of what is possible.

Anyways, here’s a brief quote from the Intro of the Lag White Paper:

“One of the most annoying things for an online gamer is “lag”…This paper will first explore what is Lag in today’s gaming world; what is a fair definition? Lag will be defined as one or more of the following in-game events:
* Game Freezing and Stuttering
* Warping and Rubber-banding
* Ghosting and Vanishing
* Slash-Slash-Pause
* Delayed Responses
* Frames-per-Second Loss

After Lag and the above terms are defined clearly, this white paper will discuss what the causes of Lag are in today’s internet system using broadband connections of the above phenomenon. The causes will be clearly shown as:
*Server Slowness/Congestion
* Internet Packet Loss/Spikes
* Client Slowness
* Network Latency

Several case studies and research will be used to illustrate the concepts explored here. The case studies will include:
* Sony Everquest Client Test
* Sony Star Wars Galaxies Client Test
* Star Wars Battlefront Client+Server Test
* Battlefield: Vietnam Client+Server Test
* Counterstrike Source Client+Server Test

Finally, the obvious question would be what can be done about Lag?

Defining Lag
Lag has no definition. It is a slang term that online gamers have been using since the early days of online gaming to represent anything ‘funky’ going on in an online game. Today, anything bad that happens in an online game is called Lag… Lag could be loosely defined today as everything bad that happens in an online game. It’s become like an online curse word. The only way then, to define Lag, is by looking at those perceived events which gamers attribute to Lag. Those events vary in type and cause, but they are collectively called Lag.

First among these perceived events are the movement or action related events. Game Freezing, Game Stuttering, Warping, and Rubber-banding are terms commonly associated with movement or action based Lag events. Game Freezing occurs when the game appears to suddenly pause for no reason, then after some perceivable time, resume. Game Stuttering is the same as Game Freezing, but happens in rapid succession one right after another. Warping is a movement action weather 3rd person or 1st person perspective, where the character or persona is suddenly in a new position on the screen/in the game world than was expected. When the warping is back to a location that the gamer believed he just left, it is called Rubber-banding.

The next category of Lag is those events where other users or computer controlled characters exhibit strange perceived behaviour. Ghosting, Vanishing, and Slash-Slash-Pause fall into this category. Ghosting is when…”

Okay, you get the idea. We’ve all experienced it, and here are guys who take it seriously, and are trying to tackle it with a boatload of startup capital. Read more at the PDF yourself, and take a look at their site:

Link:
Bigfoot Networks

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Mortal Kombat fix in P2: AW 7

February 22, 2006 by Santaduck.

User Firestorm PM’d me with info he recently posted on Postal forums on fixing the Mortal Kombat subgame in Kamek’s AW7 mod for Apocalypse Weekend. He’s the one who cornered me into making that Mac Install Kit for AW7 a few weeks back. Read full instructions here, apparently Kamek didn’t really provide clear instructions, so Firestorm has done it for you.

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UT2004 Shadows reminder

February 20, 2006 by Santaduck.

Just in case you don’t already know, full dynamic shadows are now available in Mac UT2004 via the 3369.2 patch. Yup, better than blob shadows. However Ryan said he made a li’l mistake in implementing the settings menu in the GUI, so it doesn’t actually work via the menu. If you want real shadows, you need to edit your INI file manually (you know, the ut2004.ini and user.ini in your ~userhome/library/application support/unreal tournament 2004/system folder).

In UT2004.ini in the [OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice] section:
UseRenderTargets=True

Also in the User.ini in the in the [UnrealGame.UnrealPawn] section:
bPlayerShadows=True and
bBlobShadow=False

and you might as well set in the [Engine.Vehicle]section:
bVehicleShadows=True

One of my favorite maps to check this out is in our old standby Antalus, because you can see the shadows of the trees on the ground, and the shadows of the branches and leaves are visible, and they *move* in the wind! Of course, take a look underneath other players or bots to see real character shadows, and not just fuzzy blobby ovals.

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Santaduck Tools for Mac UT2004 Updated

February 19, 2006 by Santaduck.

I’ve just updated the Santaduck Toolpak, which if you don’t already know is a set of utilities for the OS X version of Unreal Tournament 2004. Specifically I updated three of the tools: The installer app DropInstaller now correctly installs .upl and .ucl files. I haven’t had the time to exhaustively test this, say with the Community Bonus Pack manual zip, so no guarantees atm. I was suddenly inspired and just tried to do it as I was falling asleep at 3am. Also, the retail and demo benchmarkers now enable full rendering of shadows, and allows for the enabling or disabling of audio as well as graphics rendering. (Demo benchmarker hasn’t been tested– the 3am syndrome again– that, and I no longer had the Demo installed so I didn’t bother downloading it at that time of nigh). The disabling of graphics rendering provides and indication of the CPU-limited processes, and we’ve long since known that UT2004 is a very CPU-limited app, so this is a fun option– look for it in some of our future reports. The use of shadows during benchmarking brings the results closer inline with Windows-based UT2004 benchmarkers (such as UMark), as full shadows have been enabled in the recent v3369.2 patch to the game, despite the UI option for shadows having a bug– in other words you can get shadows in UT2004 by tweaking the INIs (ut2004.ini and user.ini), but checking the box for full shadows in the settings menu of the game might be broken.

It’s cool, run the Antalus botmatch benchmark (in “Max” detail), and you can see the shadows under the trees moving, and you can see each individual branch and leaf! And of course the shadows under the players are no longer ovals.

The other tool applications remain unchanged from the previous release, and include tools for UMod extraction, UZ2 compression and decompression for online servers, and a cache cleaner– this utility set is the only one of its kind available for the Mac version of UT2004. The Santaduck Toolpak has previously been recognized with an honorable mention in the Atari/Epic Make Something Unreal contest, and benchmarks using these tools were cited by Apple in introducing the Rev. A iMac G5.

Download it here at Macupdate

Yes, btw the download works, even though 99% of our download system at Macologist is still down. We are working on a solution that looks good, but it will take time, and all of us are volunteers and we just went through moving the entire forum at the beginning of the year so this is the next big step.

Tactical Ops: Crossfire: Well the news is that there’s no news. I’m still trying to get Petter to get us any information from the team– I know they are testing away, but have no idea how close they are for release. This will be a big release party I’m sure, since this is probably the only UT2004 mod that will have an absolutely huge waiting audience, if the mod gameplay turns out to be recognizable to fans of TO:AoT.

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Apocalpyse Weekend 7 mod for OS X Postal 2:Share the Pain

February 8, 2006 by Santaduck.

Today a stranger IM’d me with the charming yet creative online handle of Satan’s Beer Can. It didn’t surprise me that he then proceeded to ask me about Postal. Specifically he was trying to get the good Mr. Kamek Magikoopa’s mod AW7 to work. Now AW7 is a mod for Apocalypse Weekend, the bug-ridden (sry RWS) single player expansion to Postal 2: Share the Pain– I think Kamek has added new animations, weapons, and maps, as well as removing the constraint of a linear story line. Sounds like even more political incorrectness served up hot and toasty. The problem is no one seemed to be able to get it working in OS X. A few people had posted about it in our forums at Macologist about a month ago, but I hadn’t had the time to take a look. The first thing to do was look at the windows .bat launcher. Basically it just launches the postal game with the switch -ini=PostalAW7.ini. Sounds easy enough. Of course the default PostalAW7.ini uses D3DDrv as the render device, and WinDrv as the viewport manager, so I changed these to OpenGLDrv and SDLDrv from my Mac INIs. What results is the game boots up into a small square room with the bubbly texture-missing textures. Boo. The INI just didn’t make sense. No where did it specify the path to the Apocalypse Weekend folder, which is where all the AW7 content gets installed– no wonder it can’t find a texture, or even a menu. But neither does the retail AW’s INI file, so I was missing something. I took a look at Ryan Gordon’s launcher that he wrote for retail AW. Nicely he left an uncompiled .c version, (which includes instructions on how to compile it w/gcc in its comments!), which revealed the commandline in its true glory, which is different probably because the compartmentalization of OS X .app bundles as well as some bugginess in the implementation of the unreal engine switches. Long story short, this commandline worked. Now I’ll clean up the INI file as well as the default.INI file (which presumably is used to generated the AW7 ini from the stock AW ini), and write up an launcher. Maybe I’ll even compile one with gcc instead of using Applescript, which is kind of clunky anyways.

BTW on that note I’ve been doing a lot of Applescript yesterday. I’m making some big improvements to the UT2004 benchmarking application by adding some features to really improve the options. No, I haven’t made a convenient radio-button version yet, you’ll have to do with stock Applescript dialog boxes still, but you’ll love what I’ve got up here for you. Thanks in advance to Ryan Gordon, as well as PetterF and Rogue for help suggesting fixes and doing the legwork on how to implement the options. I’ll write up an equivalent version with the new options for the UT2004 Demo benchmarker as well, and pack it up as a new Santaduck Toolpak version 3. No, the dropinstaller will not be fixed yet– it doesn’t install .upl or .ucl files, which usually isn’t a problem with most packages, but I’d like to address that some day, since some packages like the Community Bonus Packs use these filetypes.

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UT2004 Universal Beta released

February 4, 2006 by Santaduck.

Well, Ryan Gordon had the MacNinjas testing this one for a bit, and only a few of us had access to Intel iMacs. Originally the release was just going to be the old 3369.1 PPC released glommed onto the Intel universal binary. However now it’s been released as a full-blown 3369.2 revision for PPC as well. I was also curious about OpenAL, since fellow MacNinja Petter always seems to have something interesting up his sleeve. When I asked Ryan in email, he told me: “It was rebuilt to the latest version in Subversion. Originally the PowerPC side was just going to be 3369.1 glued to the new Intel build, but the UseStencil fixes required a rebuild, and SDL had some serious changes recently, so I opted to rebuild everything so we had known quantities on both CPU architectures.”
Anyways 3369.2 does not exist on Linux or Windows, as these are Mac-specific issues. Also, the server exploit fix from Dec 2005 has also been incorporated, and even better, the Epic Mega Pack is now included with the update, which causes what would be a rather small download to now weigh in a hair short of 200 Mb. If you want to know about the 9 new maps in the Mega Pack, see BeyondUnreal’s overview. Anyways see all the download mirrors at Gordon’s site here. If you want a faster mirror, I don’t know if it’s listed yet, but Petter got a mirror up in Sweden here, and I think MGF has a link as well, but it usually just redirects to Gordon’s icculus.org site. If you’re doing a brand spanking virgin install of UT2004 on your Intel (or PPC) Mac, and the retail installer crashes on you, make sure to use Gordon’s fixed retail installer for Tiger at Macologist downloads. I don’t see a link for this file at MGF, so get it here as icculus.org will be slammed for a few days, and the file was previously in a temporary folder so who knows if it’s still there. Finally, if you want to see our preliminary benchmarks of Universal UT2004 running on Intel iMacs on a pre-release version last week, read our article here, which we wrote in collaboration with barefeats.com. It flies. Keep your eyes peeled as we’ll be working with barefeats again on another benchmarking feature with more universal binaries. w33t indeed. It’s already a good year!

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Dual Boot Intel on Mac Contest pot surpasses $10K

February 3, 2006 by Santaduck.

A informal contest to achieve a dual boot Intel Mac today exceeded $10000 USD in donated community prize money. Blogger Colin Nederkoorn started the contest on a whim just over a week ago on January 23, and contributions accumulated to over $2500 in one week. After the contest was “Slashdotted”, the total pot now stands in excess of $10K. The contest ends March 23, and if no winner is apparent by that deadline, the prize money will be charitably donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The rules are as follows:
1. Instructions must boot Windows XP (at least), not Vista or any other version of Windows.
2. Windows must be able to coexist with Mac OS X and each system may not interfere with the operation of the other (basically a traditional dual boot system where one OS is running at a time)
3. Your method, upon starting the computer, must offer the user to boot either OS X or Windows XP (hint: GRUB)
4. The first person to post complete instructions, including pictures of the boot process to The Forum will be the winner. Instructions will be peer reviewed once they are received and once the solution is guaranteed working, the prize money will be transferred via paypal
5. You give this website the rights to post your solution
6. If it is determined impossible to boot Windows on the Mac by March 23, 2006, all donations will be donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you donated prior to 2006/01/23 2:10pm CST, and you do not wish to donate to charity, I will return your money minus the paypal fee
7. You cannot use virtualization software such as Xen or VMWare

Any interested users may donate any amount $5 and above toward the prize amount through PayPal, and in return for donations over $10, a URL of the donor’s choice will be linked on the contest site. Nederkoorn has set up a new domain for the contest at windowsxp.onmac.net, with a new contest blog and forum. Open accounting of all donations are also available as an Excel file on the site.

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