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godzappa · Apr 10, 2001, 06:28 PM

Hi

I remember reading a .plan a couple days after Macworld Tokyo, that id were working on finishing up on the latest build of Quake (27h or e), which would be Altivec optimised and run on OSX natively. The .plan also said that he expected the patch to be ready within afew weeks. Thats around 6 or so weeks ago now, anyone heard anything on when it will be on it's way to us? I'm itching to play Q3 again and the Omni app isnt running on my machine despite efforts to get it working.

James

Archangel · Apr 12, 2001, 06:51 PM

I haven't been keeping too up on Q3 so much (UT fan), but last I heard is that the programmer ran into some unexpected problems for compiling the Altivec code. He was waiting for an update from Codewarrior, and then it would be out the door. Of course, I also read that like 2 months ago, so I have no clue what's really going on. It would be nice to see it run natively w/ Altivec support. X is kinda boring with no games for me right now. Though Omni almost has the FAKK2 patch finished!

I can't wait for UT in X.

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I got a yellow slinky from Outpost.com

godzappa · Apr 12, 2001, 08:23 PM

I think Fakk2 is finished. Shame the movie was so bad

I read that too, but the last plan file I read from the programmer was that the altivec compiler problem was fixed, and that he had used basically the same code base as they would need for the Q3 version, that they used for the Doom 3 they demo'd.. god knows what's happening with the project now.

Archangel · Apr 13, 2001, 03:20 PM

Ah, then it seems you know more than me. I do know the FAKK2 patch is out, but it ain't quite working for me yet.

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I got a yellow slinky from Outpost.com

OverclockedHomoSapien · Apr 16, 2001, 04:16 AM

Carmack made a post in some technical forum (I forget where) in which he lambasted Apple and their claims of the G4s superiority to x86. Basically he said that Altivec is useless for most programming code and that for Quake 3 Altivec only would speed up a few parts of the code, and that the final result was very little overal acceleration. This is in contrast to the comments Graeme Devine made about Altivec, saying that it boosted the speed of Quake dramatically.

So all we have for now is conflicting info from programmers at Id, and no significant Quake 3 updates in a long time. We are still waiting for the audio fix, still waiting for Cocoa and altivec versions, and still waiting for an official 1.27 update (Graeme noted that the one at his iDisk is not the final version. He said a full installer would be released at some point).

Maybe they are too busy with other stuff. While Altivec is very high on Mac Gamer's priority lists, I suspect that it is a low priority at Id.

godzappa · Apr 16, 2001, 06:57 AM

Yes I remember in a couple of posts on places like games.macnn.com etc that Graeme Devine had said the build he was working on had some noticlable speed increases with his X / Altivec build. It would be a real waste if we got the **** on the stick due to internal politics.

I remember a plan just after macworld Tokyo where Carmack said the Wintel builds of the new game where faster than the ones demo'd, maybe he doesnt like macs. Just Apple's money for showing up at expo's

[This message has been edited by godzappa (edited 04-16-2001).]

Apr 16, 2001, 05:25 PM

I doubt it has anything to do with internal politics at Id. Honestly, this has to be pretty low priority. How many new people are going to buy Q3 because a cocoa version is available? Most who are going to buy it already have. So any work done on Q3 cocoa is completely non-revenue producing, i.e. they'd be doing the work for free. Nobody likes to work a lot and not get paid for it (aside from missionary-types, and even these guys get paid in the end <g> ), I don't imagine these guys are any different.

I'm inclined to believe JC on this one, since Devine's claims of massive gains in performance have yet to be seen by any human aside from him. It is quite possible that big gains could be seen in framerates using cards that don't have any T&L capabilities, since that part of the calculation is indeed fairly vector-math heavy. So it's possible that Devine's comments were from testing on very low-end machines (those with Rage 128's and some such). Since pretty much all macs now come with T&L capable cards, the additional benefit from doing altivec optimizations may be minimal for these newer machines.