Give free help to pregnant women who need it

That's called marketing

Vermifax
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"You may want to kill a parent and its child if you are the system administrator..." - Using Unix

I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!

I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!

I'm using Win2K SP1, and the driver for the GEForce 3 works quite well. All the graphics features work. The chameleon demo is indeed impressive. Considering that NVidia just started shipping the Win2K driver, I'm quite impressed.

I have more fans in my systems than most users go for. Nothing is overclocked. GeForce 3 boards have heat sinks on the RAM and a fan on the graphics chip. This board is pushing the limits of what's possible with current semiconductor technology. Power and cooling should be sized accordingly. Just shoving this into some low-end PC with a minimal power supply and fan may not work.

I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!

Here, even the most advanced renderer won't help much if you're talking about real-time interactive stuff -- it is sitll raw CPU speed here...

This is basically proving your point, but just to throw my own slant on it, having worked on small 3d rendering projects myself, it's never been the graphical hardware that has ever made anything I've worked on more realistic. And very rarely, it's been things implemented in code (deformations, etc) but rather texture detail.

A quick explanation I feel is in order before I leave work. First and foremost, the most important aspect of any 3d environment is it's actual construction, in this case, polygons. However to the end user, a bunch of polygons will look like just that, a bunch of polygons. However with smart texturing (explanation of THAT in another minute) these polygons can actually begin to LOOK like something.

Now, smart texturing. This is the tough part, I think, but also the most rewarding. I define smart texturing to be using textures which simulate real life features. Not just having a brick wall where all the bricks look the same, but a brick wall where some of the bricks are broken, some are off color, some are missing, but NEVER in any repeating pattern. The last part is the most important, but rarely done these days. However repetition of textures is usually the first thing that triggers a message in the brain that says, "ooh, right. this is a videogame"

I first realized this a few years back when I was driving to work one morning. I was looking at the road ahead of me and was more or less studying the blacktop. I was trying to figure out why I had never seen a realistic looking road in a videogame before. I realized that it was because most roads consist of very simple textures: black surface, yellow and white lines. But the road I saw in front of me was drastically different: it wasn't just black, but a multitude of color. It didn't appear flat, but rather bumpy, and "textured". It was covered in skid marks, and there were signs that accidents had take place there before. The surface wasn't just some asphalt, but rather it told a story. Humans had been there, damaged it, and thats what made it interesting to look at that day.

But I think we're still a ways off from being able to do away with the repetitive textures that dominate roads or brick walls in videogames. But sometime while texture mapping, experiment with details in the environment that show humans have been there: wear and tear. It's what makes it cool to see bullet holes in the walls and blood splattered all over the floor when you play Quake 3.

Just some thoughts. Yeah, I rambled. But work is over now. Mission accomplished.

-NeoTomba

Information is to shared, whether it wants to be free or not.

Sarcasm mode on:
Will computers continue to get faster? Will we someday have lightbulbs in every room of the house? Will everyone who wants one be able to afford an automobile one day?

Well, it'll be a few years before we're able to play color video games on our personal computers, but when we do the arcade games will really rock!!
Sarcasm mode off:

Really? What kind of sensless 'wow-computers-are-getting-faster' is this? The article actually makes sense and is interesting. It explains how computers are getting faster. It's the silly, so-called 'editoralizing' that stoopid.


Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba

Ohhhh...computer games--silly me, I thought you meant the real ones. Okay, so I admit that the numbering system of the Superbowl annoys me a bit since everything else in by the year.

Protege Posterioram Tuam

Not everyone who can read happened to read whatever it is you read that told you this; furthermore, they probably don't even care. Your implication that one must be iliterate not to know what you do is insulting and immature. And so, to try to answer your sort-of-question, "And the point of this message was...?", it appears that the point of calling you a moron was to in turn insult you back for your original insult directed at every single person reading your message.

no, wait, I think that was FFXVI, nevermind.

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no comment

Achieving Pixar-level animation in real-time has been an industry dream for years. With twice the performance of the GeForce 256 and per-pixel shading technology, the GeForce2 GTS is a major step toward achieving that goal.

-Jen-Hsun Huang, President of NVIDIA Corp.

Here is what Tom Duff from Pixar thinks about that:

These guys just have no idea what goes into `Pixar-level animation.' (That's not quite fair, their engineers do, they come and visit all the time. But their managers and marketing monkeys haven't a clue, or possibly just think that you don't.)

`Pixar-level animation' runs about 8 hundred thousand times slower than real-time on our renderfarm cpus. (I'm guessing. There's about 1000 cpus in the renderfarm and I guess we could produce all the frames in TS2 in about 50 days of renderfarm time. That comes to 1.2 million cpu hours for a 1.5 hour movie. That lags real time by a factor of 800,000.)

Do you really believe that their toy is a million times faster than one of the cpus on our Ultra Sparc servers? What's the chance that we wouldn't put one of these babies on every desk in the building? They cost a couple of hundred bucks, right? Why hasn't NVIDIA tried to give us a carton of these things? -- think of the publicity milage they could get out of it!

Don't forget that the scene descriptions of TS2 frames average between 500MB and 1GB. The data rate required to read the data in real time is at least 96Gb/sec. Think your AGP port can do that? Think again. 96 Gb/sec means that if they clock data in at 250 MHz, they need a bus 384 bits wide [this is typo. 384 _bytes_ wide!]. NBL!

At Moore's Law-like rates (a factor of 10 in 5 years), even if the hardware they have today is 80 times more powerful than what we use now, it will take them 20 years before they can do the frames we do today in real time. And 20 years from now, Pixar won't be even remotely interested in TS2-level images, and I'll be retired, sitting on the front porch and picking my banjo, laughing at the same press release, recycled by NVIDIA's heirs and assigns.

Vermifax
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However, I'd say we ARE about advanced enough to do crap like this in realtime... ;) (No goat links, I swear!!)

However, there is some hope... I remember reading in a great book about 3D games (Black Art of Macintosh Game Programming) that raytrace-quality realtime games would be (according to the author's math) about 20 years away. Interestingly, that's exactly what the Pixar guy predicted, and that book was printed in 1996. My observations: today, Pixar does far more than simple raytracing. It's radiosity up the wazoo, for example (I assume ;). So to me, this suggests that ~20 years from when the book was published, we will be able to have realtime raytracing of 1996 quality. Still not too shabby. BUT. There are gazillions of optimizations you can make in realtime games that you can't make in raytracing. Here's how I see it: We can improve the algorithms a few powers of ten, efficiency-wise. (Don't say we can't, you'd be very wrong.) We can speed up our processors a few powers of ten. I think we're getting there faster than these guys are suggesting, just as long as we don't aim for the moving target of Today's Pixar Production$. (As he points out, there will never be a day when the realtime graphics are as good as the prerendered ones, simply because the big companies have the cash to throw at it to make it look better.) Anyawy. Sorry this was so long. Great stuff ahead, though. :)

The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.

KB9YEQ

After all, that orange tree would have taken years to grow.

I used to moderate, but the crack got too expensive.

The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.

KB9YEQ

Actually using vertex buffers and onboard textures the AGP bus would not need to touch most of that stuff from one frame to the next. Of course you'd need a video card with a gig+ of RAM.

Dude. Both of those quotes are referring to the GeForce 2 GTS. The Tom Duff post to comp.graphics.rendering.renderman is over a year old. The review being posted is about the GeForce 3.

Yes, much of what Tom Duff said probably still holds true, but let's try to quote material that is actually referring to the subject at hand, mm'kay?

You are wrong. The shader language can raytrace.

Using BMRT together with PRMan, it can ray trace, and many people use it. Like in Hollow Man, for instance.

Here is a gallery, which includes Hollow Man. The call looks like this :

color trace (point from, vector dir)

Traces a ray from position from in the direction of vector dir. The return value is the incoming light from that direction.

Source

BMRT Raytracing Howto

You can hook up PRMan and BMRT together, using BMRT to do the trace() calls. This is in fact a semi-supported function that Pixar gives to people. When you get PRMan, they'll happily give you BMRT, as well. Many things Pixar does use BMRT. BMRT is good. Don't diss BMRT. When people use PRMan, BMRT is a natural thing to include in many cases!

If you read the RenderMan Interface Spec. (V 3.2) the entry for trace() reads as follows:

"color trace( point P, point R )

trace returns the incident light reaching a point P from a given direction R. If a particular implementation does not support the Ray Tracing capability, and cannot compute the incident light arriving from an arbitrary direction, trace will return 0 (black). "

So, you can call trace() in prman, but it's not going to do you any good.

That said, it is possible to write a ray tracer in the shading language! This has been done, in fact, by an insane person named Katsuaki Hiramitsu. This shader, however, does not use the trace() call. The trick lies in actually defining the objects you're going to do ray tracing on in the shader along with your own version of trace(), which is, by necessity, intimately bound to the type of object you've defined.

So, saying the shading language can ray trace is like saying you can keep yourself alive for a while by eating selected portions of your own body. It's possible, but certainly pessimal.

BMRT Raytracing Howto

You people are amazing. You don't even bother to look at my link, and you tell me I'm wrong.

On my planet, "Earth", when program 1 calls program 2 to do a specific task, we don't say that program 1 is performing the specific task.

BTW, I did read the link you provided, long before this thread came up. I read it again just to be sure. The HOWTO very carefully refers to two separate renderers. At no point is it even implied that prman is doing raytracing. It clearly states that you must rewrite trace() as a DSO shadeop which calls BMRT to throw some rays around. It even talks about the disadvantage of having to keep the scene geometry in memory for two different renderers.

If you still think that's prman doing raytracing then I suggest you take a remedial english class.

If I'm in Word, and I add an Excel spreadsheet to it - and then I print it - is that Word printing a spreadsheet? By my definition, yes - by your definition, no.

By my definition, Word can use Excel as a spreadsheet renderer. By your definition, apparently, just because Excel is not built in to Word, it means that Word is incapable of printing spreadsheets.

They're telling me, "There's no way for Word to print a spreadsheet," and I'm saying they're wrong. You're also saying I'm wrong. But I'm not, I'm right - and the page I pointed to shows how it can be done. It's not easy, and there are problems, but it can be done. The actual facts are on my side.

Your definition might be more technically correct (since "we don't say that program 1 is performing the specific task"), but mine is certainly more useful. Since my point was that program 1 is able to perform a specific task, by commincating with another program. Many programs are incapable of communicating with other programs in such a manner, and that makes PRMan pretty cool, in my book.

By the way, it's "English," not "english."

You're now talking about two separate things: Word's ability to render an Excel spreadsheet and Word's ability to print an arbitrary object it's able to render.

Let's just assume that Word can print anything it can render.

There are (at least) two situations:

1. You've got a preexisting Excel spreadsheet and both Word and Excel.
2. You've got a preexisting Excel spreadsheet but Word only.

If you can import the spreadsheet and print the resulting document in case (1) but not in case (2), the situation is equivalent to that with BMRT/prman.

If you can import/print in both cases, then your analogy is bogus since it would mean that Word is inherently capable of rendering an Excel spreadsheet.

The point? Well, I'm saying 'echo "Word can't render an Excel spreadsheet without Excel." | sed -e 's/Word/prman/' -e 's/render an Excel spreadsheet/do radiosity via an SL trace\(\) call/' -e 's/Excel/BMRT/'.

If you disagree with that then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

After executing your commands, I am left with the following statement from you :

prman can't do radiosity via an SL trace without BMRT.

Now, I will apply the English language suggestion for good writing, "Don't never use double negatives," after which, your statement becomes :

prman can do radiosity via an SL trace with BMRT.

This is shockingly like my original statment :

PRMAN CAN RAYTRACE USING BMRT AS A TRACER.

And I guess I agree with myself. So, then I can only laugh, when I read your insulting statement :

If you still think that's prman doing raytracing then I suggest you take a remedial english class.

Because I just proved that you "think that's prman doing raytracing"! So, why exactly did you need to insult me twice in your post, in order to agree with me?

Sigh. This will be my last post in this thread.

I did make an actual error in my previous post. Replace "radiosity" with "raytracing" to fix.

The phrase "take a remedial english class" did not appear in my previous post. You might consider getting some help for that persecution complex.

I'll put it as simply as I can: Just as Word's ability to print (or even render) a spreadsheet does not make it a spreadsheet program, prman's ability to call BMRT to do raytracing does not make prman a raytracing program.

I apologize if my previous use of double negatives hurt your widdle head. I'll refrain from using them in the future. HAND!

Thanks - having the last word is kind of fun.

You might consider getting some help for that persecution complex.

If this is a back-handed apology, I accept. If it's merely another insult, you might want to consider taking some agression management classes. I think it's somewhat childish of you to move an argument of fact into a namecalling bout, suggesting that I don't live in the real world, don't know how to use the English language, and now that I need therapy, and have a "widdle head."

Semantic debates are sometimes enthralling, because you can twist words to make facts lie - but they don't really further understanding. Your definitions of "program" and "call" are well stated, and I believe I understand them, but I don't believe that they reall help you.

Word can call Excel to do spreadsheets, but that doesn't make it a spreadsheet program. PRman can call BMRT to do raytracing, but that doesn't make it a raytracing program. Eudora can call PGP to do encryption, but that doesn't make it an encryption program. The JVM can call methods in a class file to give you the long-distance phone calling capabilities in DialPad, but that doesn't make the JVM a long-distance phone calling program. Quake III : Team Arena can call jpeg library functions to load jpeg images, but that doesn't make it a jpeg image loading program. Internet Explorer can call Hotmail to send email, but that doesn't make Internet Explorer an email program. PRMan can call the shader language to do shading, but that doesn't make it a shading program.

Utility is an interesting thing. I can use a butter knife to turn screws, and I will agree with you that my ability to use a butter knife in that manner doesn't somehow turn it into a "screwdriver," in the traditional sense. But, if your definition of a screwdriver is merely that it is an implement with which one may turn a screw, it becomes a pretty hazy line. If you ask me for a screwdriver, and I hand you a butter knife, I'll laugh at myself, right along with you. It's silly, it's not what you asked for, but it'll do the job. You have to agree that if a demolitions expert is trying to defuse a nuclear bomb without his tools, the clock says 26 seconds, and he asks me for a screwdriver, if I hand him a butter knife - I've saved the day!

Most effects houses have a hard time staying in the black, and most use PRMan. If an effects house is down to the wire, and their client demands that a certain effect needs to look more real, and the only way to pull it off is by having PRMan call BMRT to do raytracing, they'd rather use my definitions of "program" and "call" than yours.

I love your last paragraph - I think you should use it, then next time you're on Jerry Springer.

Disclaimer: I work for DotC.

RenderDotC doesn't raytrace either. You might be thinking of Mirage-3D, the author of which, the great Timm Dapper, also works for DotC.

Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means

What's so frightening about terminating a program?

The eye can't even detect anything above 30 FPS or so.

What? Er... What? Er...

The reason why watching a film on a TV monitor vs watching a film in the theater is because that film is translated from 24fps to 30fps (usually by frame doubling, but I don't know the process well enough to describe it -- search the web. I've seen a good review of progressive scan DVD players that gave a good background to the whole film->video conversion process). And as far as films go, many theaters actually use projection cameras with shutters that open two or three times per frame, rather than once. It doesn't help the fact that there are still only 24 frames in a second, but it does make it seem a bit smoother (making it seem as if there are really 48 or 72 frames, though those are doubled or tripled).

I just want true 30fps in theaters! Maybe in an all digital theater... they do shoot some movies on HD video cameras, don't they? Still haven't been in one of them newfangled digital theaters. Seattle has crappy theaters.

Don't I know it! There's no real cutting-edge theaters out here (IMAX doesn't count, as that's not really cutting-edge), though one would expect at least something, what with being a big technology center. Oh well. I guess I'll continue to be happy watching movies at the Bella Botega or Cineplex Odeon (two eastside theaters with stadium seating). As far as better filming processes, the best I've heard of is 32fps. Of course, I'm assuming these get translated down for play in "normal" theaters, because to do otherwise would require a massive layout of cash by theater owners. And we all know that they don't make much money off of anything but the concessions :).

Not many features released in ShowScan, I'll agree. But you occasionally see it turning up in amusement rides & Vegas "experiences".
---

Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?

Cells in the retina have a recovery time of ~30 milliseconds. Do the math.

(If "80 FPS" seems choppy to you, it is because this is an average. The framerate only has to dip below 30 or so for a hundred milliseconds or so to be detectable.)

Here's a link from google
What? Er... What? Er...

Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means

Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means

Incidentally, the upgrade from Lightwave 6 to 6.5 is free, so unless you've got a cracked copy, you really ought to be using 6.5. I've been using Lightwave since 5.6 and 6.5 is incredible by comparison.

The L[6] to L[6.5] upgrade can be had at www.lightwave6.com as well as a feature list. The new features include better volumetrics, some plugins, and faster renders.

Very cool software. The docs are there as well, which (as I understand) are better written than the original L[6] docs.

"Do you really believe that their toy is a million times faster than one of the cpus on our Ultra Sparc servers? What's the chance that we wouldn't put one of these babies on every desk in the building? They cost a couple of hundred bucks, right? Why hasn't NVIDIA tried to give us a carton of these things? -- think of the publicity milage they could get out of it.

"At Moore's Law-like rates (a factor of 10 in 5 years), even if the hardware they have today is 80 times more powerful than what we use now, it will take them 20 years before they can do the frames we do today in real time. And 20 years from now, Pixar won't be even remotely interested in TS2-level images, and I'll be retired, sitting on the front porch and picking my banjo, laughing at the same press release, recycled by NVIDIA's heirs and assigns."

Source

Some of the stuff the GeForce3 can do is great, but let's calm down. Move along...nothing to see here...

-brennan

You're kidding, right?

How often, in every day life, do you notice diffraction and interference? I never do. Consider also that the size of objects which cause diffraction are the same order of magnatude in size as the wavelength of light (i.e. 10^-7m). Which, BTW, is far smaller than you can see. Now imagine you're going to keep track of polygons/voxels 10^-7 in size, for a room that's 10m by 10m by 3m. That's 10*10*3/(10^-7)^3 =~ 3*10^23 voxels to keep track of. Forget it. There are far better ways to simulate diffraction, if you really wanted it.

What I have seen, that's really cool, are Relativistic ray tracing. Do that Nsuck^H^H^H^Hvidia!

--Bob
Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?

But anyway, you don't really want a QED renderer. Imagine rendering a soap bubble. In order to get an accurate shifting-rainbow effect, you'd have to model extremely subtle air currents, and the thickness of the film in micrometers. It's far more efficent to take your usual surface and apply a time-varying texture to it, and tweak it until it looks accurately like a soap film.

The computation required to accurately render QED is absurd. Instead it would be better to have a class of objects in your renderer (diffractors, thin films, etc) that can simulate diffraction. But don't expect those to behave nicely when they interact with non-diffracting objects, the computing required would just be too huge. If you could do that, it's time to start coding The Matrix.

--Bob
Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?

Look at a compact disk.

Look at the sun through your eyelashes.

One way to reproduce those effects would be to model the microgeometry. However such a scheme would require way too much time and would suffer from numerical precision problems. Instead researchers construct analytical methods or model the macroscopic statistics of the microgeometry.

With regards to the original QED poster, researchers recently have looked at dispersion, fluorescence, phosphorescence, Rayleigh and Mie scattering, subsurface scattering, hair, skin, diffraction, wet objects, iridescence, etc. For some of these effects, a clever shader can reproduce the rough characteristics of the effect. Otherwise some subset of the physics is modeled.

For more info, check out recent SIGGRAPHs, Euro. Workshops on Rendering, and Glassner's Principles of Digital Image Synthesis.

And check out this SIGGRAPH for how to render skim milk vs 2% milk vs whole milk :)

Is anyone working on a Quantum Electrodynamic model of raytracing? Diffraction gratings would be cool. It would improve other things. Like hair, thin films, etc.

Yes, and it looks darn cool:

Stam99 Jos Stam, "Diffraction Shaders," Computer Graphics, Proc. of ACM SIGGRAPH 99, ACM Press, New York, 1999, pp. 101-110.

slideshow version

"10,000 spoons when all you want is a knife", how is that ironic? It would only be ironic if later you discovered that a spoon would have done just as well for say, opening a can of paint.

It is slightly ironic that the same people who one day were saying digital art is still art are the next day saying that animation on the level of a movie that took thousands of man-hours to create can be generated by a computer. Thus stripping away the art value of the movie (or at least the animation in the movie).

It does piss me off when people misuse words, especially words that are very nuanced and clever. But there you go. People are stupid.

BTW, good examples.

--------

"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."

Seriously, I think you're barking at a fantom here (it's not a real expression but so what), and besides, aren't the people who make the games 3d artists as much as those who make big-screen cartoons? The only thing that's suggested in the article is that in some point, we could see graphics in the quality of those movies, but in real-time. Nothing to do with creativity or talent. Period (god i love being annoying).

-- Eli Krupitsky, Ramlood

"This review of the NVIDIA GeForce3 at The Tech Report does a nice job explaining how the GF3 chip can create advanced graphics effects in real time. The author raises the prospect of having real-time Final Fantasy or Shrek-style animation on the desktop in a consumer graphics card. The examples from the GF3 he uses to back it up are almost convincing, even if it isn't quite there yet. Will render farms go the way of the dodo?"

It's clear that he was talking about raw computing/rendering power, nothing to do with talent.

-- Eli Krupitsky, Ramlood

----
Capt' Trips
"the internet is made out of people!"

Remember Freedom is slavery, war is piece, and Ignorance is strength!

Now I need to stop goofing around here on the slashdot insoc-msdn party news and go back to work studying the 11th edition of NewSpeak by MSN expedia. I keep hearing people here on slashdot speaking in oldspeak.

You people all need to learn how to excell(smart tag link to Microsoft office homepage)on what you do to learn and explore (smart tag link to internet explorer site)your newspeak party langauge. With free(link to how free you are with hailstorm/.net)enterprise and innovation to lead the market, great Microsoft can actively access(link to ms access)all the information we need. We need an active innovatorto actively explore, and actively leadthe market, and they ask that we all support the revoluton by your activation subscription.

See that wasn't hard. You need to all speak newsspeak and only use these adjectives innovation, lead, explore, access, active, word, excell. This will make thought crime impossible. less is better. For something double-pluss-un-innovative like linux you should not use the word bad or sucks. You all are required to use the following words above with the -un extension. If something is really innovative you need to put doublepluss innovative or really bad its doubleplus uninovative. Everything non Big brother is just plus uninnovative. So remember its not GNU-linux but doubleplussuninnovative gnu/linux. Now lets here you all respect big brother now and after my newspeak lesson I will play some video games and render linus doing a double-plus-un-innovative things to scare people so that Bill Gates can actively explore my record so that I can be considered loyal member who doesn't doublethink.

Barnes & Barnes: "I took a fish head out to see a movie, I didn't have to pay to get it in."

Hmm, think about the budget for films now...

If games take off in the same way as films did, then the $50 per game would certainly pay for the development cost, even if the development cost was comparable. Think about how much you pay on average per different film you watch, compared to how much you pay on average per different game you play... There's big money to be made in the gaming industry as it takes off over time.

-- Pete.

This will allow the next-generation Final Fantasy games to have back the nonlinear gameplay that made the earlier games in the series (the SNES games at least) so extremely good.

Because whats wrong with todays FMV (IMO) is how it is impossible to vary them! You just can't make a new FMV for every combination of characters and so on... But with this technique the cut-scenes can be changed to suit that spesific game, the changes can be change of characters/weather/landscape and so on...

Real time cutscenes versus FMV is a lot like a comparision of speech, read by actors, and speech from an engine which just requires text input. The latter allowing the oral replics of the characters to change a bit every time you play the game, and doesn't take up that much space. It's just up to game-developers...
__
Greets, Øyvind Berg ~ ËlaC|n
[ icq#:123433 || elacin@c2i.net ] [ elacin12@world-online.no ]

I still play Ms. Pac Man, but I hardly ever play games from just five years ago.

Graphics are cool and all, but they're essentially just pornographic. Not in the sexual sense, but pretty graphics just sit there vacuously to amuse your eyes. As has been said long and loud, game developers should strive to focus at least as much on gameplay as they do on making their graphics cutting edge. Give the user an elegant interface, something fun to interact with, something new, and something challenging.

Give a man a fish, he owes you one fish.

Teach a man to fish, you give up your monopoly on fisheries.

It's bad enough they aren't planning to release Final Fantasy 9 for the computer, what chance do we have of getting to 21?

Anyways, I agree with the marketing trend of "flashy graphics" over "gaming value and playability" and it sucks...I miss the days of FF1, FF2, and FF3...now _that's_ gaming.

Magius_AR

Or maybe they will announce Blender supporting actual usable file formats.

More likely, however, is that Malda is hungry for a new, graphics-fancy game to play on his "[im]pluasibly deniable" Windows machine, not realizing that Tribes 2 is available for Linux.