Category Archives: General

Alienware M17x – The fastest alien amongst laptops.

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alienwareI was invited to the preview of Alienware M17x unveiled by Dell to cater to the high end, hard-core gaming enthusiast. It was my first experience with the Alienware brand, though I have often read about other high performance laptops from them. Dell is marketing the M17x product as “The most powerful gaming laptop machine in the universe”. Well, that is probably correct, at least for now the machine is more than capable of pushing anything out there within it’s resolution limits. Alienware is known for it’s high end machines and this avatar in the Alienware series is no different in keeping with the brand image.

The M17x packs some heavy duty, top of the line stuff in it’s guts, probably far more than what is required for a gaming notebook. Ergonomically the M17x is designed to please the hard-core gamer, and also to make a style statement. Complete with flashing lights, multi-colored keyboard and scintillating sound, every effort has been made to attract yours and everybody else’s attention. The whole laptop is designed to look different and will stand out from anything else in the room. If you want to show off your “new gaming laptop” then the M17x is probably what you should be looking at.

No high end gaming rig can be complete without a heavy duty GPU, or should I say GPUs (plural), 2 in fact. The M17x features either with Dual SLI Nvidia GTX 260M or the Nvidia GTX 280M GPUs. I would suggest the 280M. (Well, if you are going for a high end gaming system, you might as well get a top line GPU.) The 280M is, as of today, the highest performing GPU for notebooks. The laptop comes fitted with the  Intel Core 2 Extreme mobile processor and you seem to have an option of choosing Dual or Quad core CPU. The choice of the CPU will depend on the type of games that are played. Games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 are more CPU intensive since a lot of data is streamed in real-time, but in any case I don’t think there should be too many problems even with a Dual core CPU since most games wont go CPU bound with a powerful GPU setup and fast 1333 MHZ GDDR3 RAM. Again, if you are the one to play at exceptionally high frame-rates and can’t tolerate even the slightest glitch, then by all means the Quad core option is also provided for the M17x.

While M17x looks like a laptop, it’s actually is a mobile desktop. Weighing in at more than 5 Kgs, it isn’t something you can lug around to every place you go. The weight of the laptop must be due to the 2 GPUs, heat dissipation devices and the large battery that will be needed for such a huge performance monster. The M17x is without a doubt a high performance gaming rig. I personally tried pushing Crysis at 1440×900 at full AA and AF and there were no visible hiccups or slowdowns and the gameplay was flawless. I bet it will be able to push every game out there without a sweat. Too bad it only has a 17″ screen. For this kind of performance the 17″ screen looks a tad bit small. I would have loved to see a larger and a higher resolution monitor but I guess the compulsions of space and laptop dimensions made 17″ the largest choice.

The only real nag that I found were the lights. At a first glance you may (or may not) like the flashing lights and the multi colored keyboard, but once you start using the machine, the lights are nothing more than a distraction, especially in fast paced game. Well, you have an option to turn them off, so I guess that’s not too much of a bother. Also the only real advantage of a Dual GPU setup is for systems that have enormous resolutions (2560×1600) or for multi monitor systems. SLI combos are excellent when rendering with very heavy fillrates and even at it’s highest resolution the 17″ monitor isn’t quite in the league for Dual SLI, considering that it already has the 280/260M. Having 2 GPUs instead of one also means the machine will generate quite a lot of heat, guzzle battery power and will weigh substantially more than it would have with a single GPU. However the choice seems to have been made to please the hardest of the hardcore gamer out there. The M17x makes absolutely no compromises on performance, anywhere.

Well, there isn’t too much further to say regarding the machine. My experience with the rig was limited, but it is interesting that Dell launched the Alienware brand in India. India is not known for it’s hardcore gaming enthusiasts and you wont find too many laptops specifically for “the gamer”, at least nothing in the league of the M17x. Kudos to Dell for that.

Free after a long time.

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Yes the blog has been neglected again, but I was very busy for a while. I have been pulling 3 projects in all for the last couple of months. Some consulting work got thrown my way and in these times of crisis, every bit helps (not that it was too much to begin with). Nothing related to games or 3D, but you can’t be too picky these days. I am glad it’s finally over. Not only has the blog suffered, but the work on the engine has been on the slower side as well. The May and June targets for the engine tech haven’t been met, and I have a huge list of pending items to put in. Everything from soft-shadows and deferred shading to integration of new Blender features have yet to be done. The 2D game has also been kept on the back burner and I hope that I can finish it soon so I can get back to the 3D engine at least by August. On the whole it’s been a very hectic 6 months or so. But consulting is a good way to sustain oneself since games typically take time to develop and deploy, and in the meantime contract work can keep things rolling. OTH, it can suck up time like a vacuum cleaner. Good and bad, one has to learn to balance these things.

Ah yes, I can get back to Fallout. It’s been ages since I fired that game up. Still so many games to catch up to. Haven’t even installed Left 4 Dead.

A new Chrome OS…WOW…Er, Not exactly!

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What! Google is releasing a new Chrome OS. Wow! Hold on there…. Read carefully, it’s just another Linux distro, maybe with a new UI. But just read what’s is written on the blog…

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Emphasis mine. What about apps that already work on other standard compliant browsers? I bet they will work too. I read that post and it made me smile; no it made me laugh. Talk about marketing hype. Come on, it’s just the Chrome browser ported on to Linux, probably using GTK+ or something else. But branding it as another OS, sheesh! At the very least Google could have called it a Chrome distro.

Well the general move everywhere is away from the desktop to full online apps, so it doesn’t come as a surprise to me. In fact, after ranting about web-applications taking over the desktop just yesterday this almost makes me feel vindicated! 😀

A richer faster web.

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fflogoFirefox 3.5 was released a few days ago and it’s not surprising that the browser adds a host of features to the new release, some innovative and some maybe not so much. Yes, we do see some ideas from Chrome and other browsers carried over (as we expected they would), and yes we also see a faster browser, mostly due to a faster Javascript engine (Tracemonkey) being deployed. (Though I have to say that Chrome still beats Firefox on  my machine on both the SunSpider and the V8 benchmarking suite.)  Firefox is something that I always use, mainly because I don’t run Win32 on my Internet machine and there is no real replacement for Firefox on other platforms when it comes to a good professional browser (except maybe the Mac, which I don’t happen to have) . So predictably, I am glad to see the new version up to speed with Chorme.

Recently there has been some sort of a competition between browsers; each trying to outperform the the other. Whatever you may call it, the browser wars  show one clear trend — the increase of Javascript speed to allow client side code to run at par, if not at the speed of desktop applications. The wars started with the launch of Chrome. Through Firefox started early, it was beaten to the soap-box, probably because Firefox runs across so many platforms, and it took more time to get everything running at par on everything supported. In any case, V8 outperformed it’s rivals by JIT compiling Javascript code (, which is similar  to what’s been done in SquirrelFish Extreme and now by Tracemonkey). But why this sudden obsession with Javascript speed? What’s so special about Javascript? As you probably already know, Javascript is the defacto client side language that is embedded in web content (HTML). It is used by almost all websites that display dynamic content and thus by analogy, faster Javascript means faster and consequently more powerful web applications. So as websites like Google push for more Javascript in their online services, the plan is to offset the use of conventional desktops applications, replacing them with mobile/online services. Take the example of gmail, Google’s email service. There was a time when I couldn’t live without Pop3 (Outlook express/Outlook/Thunderbird). I even got pissed when Yahoo stopped Pop3 support for their free service.  Now, since Gmail and the advent of fast Javascript browsers, I don’t even bother. Gmail was the first to push the bar and soon everybody followed. There was a time however when everything was not as speedy. Gmail used to take a long time to load and one did question the sanity behind having a Javascript heavy email service. However, what is more subtle is the fact that because of Chrome and the subsequent across the board Javascript enhancements that followed, gmail is now comparable to any desktop mail client you can find. Oh yes remember, gmail mails occupy zero space on the hard-drive, are accessible from any place that has a Internet connection and you don’t have to upgrade the application when a new version comes out. Log-in and you are there! With Chrome and now all others following suit, we could see even more enhancements to existing Google services and might even see some new applications as well. Whether this progression was evolutionary or revolutionary is up to you to speculate, but it does come across as a clever strategy from Google.

Coming back to Firefox. Interestingly Firefox also brings in some other changes. Apart from the obvious Javascript engine enhancement it includes support of HTML 5.0. Though HTML 5.0 isn’t formally ratified by the W3C, it is as they say it “a game-changer for web application development”. The support for the ogg container and patent free multimedia formats like Theora and Vorbis means an end to propitiatory technologies like Flash and Silverlight. Or does it? Well, at least that was the general idea with HTML 5.0. We will still have to see how that is actually implemented. Predictably not every browser vendor is happy about adopting open formats, but with HTML 5 the road is pretty much set. The push is on for a more dynamic and richer web. But, wasn’t it happening all the time. Well, not entirely. Most of the sound and video on the web today is played via third-party plug-ins like Flash. They are not natively supported by HTML and there in lies the problem. Come to think of it, it’s ridiculous that a multimedia container like a browser which allows rich content like pictures (.gif, .png, .jpg …) to be displayed doesn’t, even in this day and age, support video and sound. Today videos are pretty standard way of displaying content on the web, and mostly every site/portal what wants to demo it’s content has and does show a video clip somewhere. Then the question is; when are we going to see browsers ending their dependence on proprietary technologies like Flash and Silverlight and implement a standard for video and audio as well. Interestingly, Firefox 3.5 does allow the use of audio and video tags. Kudos to Firefox for incorporating the new changes, though it maybe a while before websites support them. I hope they do sooner rather than later, it’s almost trivial.

Mostly the changes in Firefox 3.5 were on expected lines. Nevertheless it does bring in some new enhancements and is a noticeably faster browser. I think the (earlier) release of Chrome did take some shine off the speed increase but still on the whole it’s a welcome development. Lets see when others like Opera catch up, I am sure they will soon, it’s just a matter of time.

Interestingly, PHP 5.3.0 has been released with additions like namespaces, late static binding, lambda functions and closures to the language. I say these features should have been a long time coming to such an immensely popular language like PHP. These are a welcome enhancements to the language indeed. While this may not have any direct bearing on the client side speed of web applications, it does fill in some gap with other popular server side web languages.

Wasn’t expecting this one!

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“id Software the creator of Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein series has been acquired by ZeniMax the parent company of developer and publisher Bethesda Softworks (, creators of Oblivion and Morrowind)”

O_o

Read more here and here.

Is online gaming technology the future of social networking?

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Yes we are all hooked on to Facebook and Twitter, maybe some of us more than others, but what does the future hold for social networking? It’s interesting, but if you were to look at it, online virtual worlds are becoming a lot like social networking sites. I was reading Shawn Fanning’s remarks on online games and it got me thinking about social networking in a virtual world. His technology Rupture attempts to connect gamers together via a common API/Interface. Your typical online game will probably feature quest and sub-quests; not your typical social networking activities. That said, the idea of having “social networking” in a virtual word is not something new. Second Life is probably the best example of how future social networking could be. To me a future 3D social networking virtual world would be something that I can log on to and create applications for. Something like a 3D Facebook, something having it’s own API that can be coded to. While Second Life does offer some capability to create your own content, what is needed is probably much more. How about allowing me to create my own little game in a 3D world? Maybe a full online game inside the service itself, something along the lines of a Facebook app/game. Ah! That would be amazing indeed!

Not all social networking users are actual gamers — but in a way they are. Most people will often end up playing those small little games or interact with others apps which give you an often ridiculous score that users like to brag about to other users/friends/community members. “Ooh lookey here, I have an IQ equal to Einstein” or “Joe Facebooker got 2,000,000 points on SomeApp” are all too common. People like to compete — and at the same time also like to interact, join communities. What current SN sites do is allow people to build communities and groups easily and rapidly — the two most important aspects for a success of an online game! With the advent of sites like Facebook, literally 100s of online games and apps have found easy adoption without needing to worry about things like server programming, latency, hosting, hardware, and you name it. The list goes on. However the most important thing they have cashed in on is an easier way to build communities for their products. Creating an online game/app today is not an easy task, besides the obvious engineering difficulties it is equally difficult to build successful community around an online game/app. Some future service that abstracts all these aspects and allows people to easily and rapidly build apps and games would probably be the social networking virtual world of tomorrow.

Getting a job?

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Getting a Job?

Getting a Job?

trueSpace has been put down!

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Well, what can you say? The once great modeler trueSpace has been killed. Some may remember it as being acquired by Microsoft, and then in what seemed to be too good to be true, was offered as a freeware not long ago. Not entirely unexpected I must say. There was nothing much being done so to say, but TS did have a sizable community who is now understandably disappointed. My first experience with TS was a long time ago, when I was taking baby steps towards learning 3D and 3D modeling. I confess I am not a 3D artist, but I work with 3D tool-chains a lot and I had to switched over to Blender rather quickly since TS back then wasn’t free. When the application was released as a freeware, I did try my hand at some of the tutorials that accompanied the installation and was pretty successful at doing things, mostly because my experience with Blender could be carried over to trueSpace in some way. True it’s interface is a bit wired, but that’s something that could have been worked on. It may not have had all the bells and whistles of the truly top modelers, but it wasn’t all that bad. It’s unfortunate that it got terminated the way it did.

There is something to think about here. Had trueSpace been open source, it would have been forked and the project would have continued to live via enthusiasts and developers, maybe even via contributions from existing developers. The unfortunate thing is — it isn’t and therefore it’s fate is sealed. It’s really sad to see such a product go down and the anguish of the community members that have helped the product grow, is justifiable. Believe me, it’s not easy to see software that you have worked with for years go down like that. 3D software, especially 3D modelers take a considerable amount of time to learn, and it takes even more time to become truly productive with them. My guess it there are going to be a lot of 3D artists that would really pissed off right now.

Now that I think back, it’s a good thing we decided to use Blender as our primary content creation tool. Not that we were going to use TS in the first place. However, had we used some closed source software like TS, we would have burned down with it if it would ever had gone TS’ way. Most of the content pipelines would have been lost, a lot of code would have to be re-engineered for another application. This has been precisely my argument from the very beginning. However popular an application may be, it could very well end up being put down to protect corporate bottom-lines of large corporations. With closed source applications, one can never discount such occurrences.

Then again, could we see a resurrection of TS in some way? I sure hope so. Maybe there will be a release of it in a new incarnation — a integrated game creation tool for XBox/PC? — OR — Are we going to see a new tool to rival Sketchup from existing codebase?  Maybe there will be a community buyout? Or is Microsoft going to release TS as OSS? That would be interesting indeed! No, I am not keeping my fingers crossed.

A new OS with a new desktop.

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After having used Ubuntu for about 2 and a half years now, I got kinda bored and decided it was time to try out something new. Not that this has anything to do with Ubuntu — it’s just that every 2 years or so I get this itch that has to be scratched. It usually leads to a complete overhaul of one or more OSes on my machine. In a way it’s good — it gets rid of a lot of crud that accumulates on my hard-drivers over time. However, it also means I have to put in hours of work to get the new OS up to speed. Fortunately these days the Internet connections are pretty good and most OSes come with one click installers for commonly used software. There was a time not too long ago when every utility had to be downloaded, compiled and then installed. It would take days before you could get an OS up and running the way you wanted. I am glad that isn’t the case today.

I wanted to try something different. The Linux world has a lot of distros and though each one has it’s own special flavour (and many of them are really good) , it’s still Linux. There is a world of *NIX and *NIX-like systems that haven’t been too successful on the desktop — up until now (don’t know what the future holds). However, there are some sincere efforts being made to get these OSes on the desktop as well. One of them is PC-BSD, a FreeBSD based distro that has been customized for the desktop user. I decided to give it a shot given that it has had some good reviews.

The installation of the OS is painless — a standard graphical installation that will be too familiar to most users. Be careful though, the partition naming is a bit different from Linux! I had some anxious moments there, but as soon as that was sorted out, the rest of the procedure is pretty straightforward. The installation bundles some of the most commonly used software. Firefox, OpenOffice, Pidgen are all there. The desktop is based on KDE 4, which I must say, is my first experience with KDE 4. All installed applications worked pretty well and on the whole PC-BSD is usable system. Connecting to the Internet was pretty easy, maybe because I already knew how to setup a PPPoE connection under my former Linux system. Nevertheless, the basic OS was up and running within about 45 mins. The great thing about this distro is, most of my movies and videos work straight out-of-the-box, which thus far no distro has been able to achieve. Even with Ubuntu I have always had to download codecs for most proprietary formats (like wmv). That’s a strong plus for this distro. There is a click and install system called PBI for most commonly used software and it is similar to apt based system under Debian distributions. Most other software can be downloaded via FreeBSD ports and works pretty well. The system has an auto-update feature that updates the system components regularly and with ease.

The only real problem I had was not with the OS itself, but with KDE 4. KDE 4 is a bit on the sluggish side and that’s putting it mildly. Maybe it was just my case since I used a PC with only 1 GB Ram, I don’t know, but the same system flies under a default Ubuntu distribution. Another thing worth mentioning is the size of the install. The system took about 7Gb of disk-space for just a handful of software. Even the PBI updates seem to be on the heavier side than their Linux counterparts. Looks like most software packages are either statically linked or the system bundle separate copies of shared libraries for every software. Disk-space however, is cheap and you could live with larger installs given that nothing gets broken because of a missing shared library — overwritten by another install, or removed by an uninstall of some other unrelated software.

On the whole PC-BSD is a commendable effort. I have been using the system for about a month now and the only real thing that bugs me is the sluggishness of KDE 4 (which I am sure will get sorted out as KDE 4 matures). FreeBSD is a good OS and a desktop distros based on it was a long time coming. I hope PC-BSD and other FreeBSD distros gain more popularity as time passes.

Nostalgia

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Last night I was clearing the hard-dive to free up much needed space and I happen to run across an old zip file and in it was my older experimental engine — something I was working on long before I began work on the O2 Game engine. Well you can’t really call it an engine — it’s what you call; a bunch of experimental code hacked, stretched, hammered and stitched together to produce something that can be displayed on the screen 😀 . A more appropriate name would be a prototype or a demo. I was looking at the code and couldn’t help but wonder how I could comprehend anything inside those bunch of lines back then. To my surprise, the code still complied pretty easily on the new VC 8.0 Express. The app runs at 500+ FPS on the HD 4850 at 1280×1024, back then (, if I remember correctly) it ran at 40-50 FPS on a Riva TnT at 640×480.

experiment 1
Quake 3 Level – missing textures and shaders appear white.

Experiment 2

Another Quake 3 Level in the prototype engine.

Cool ain’t it. Well sorta, but lets take that with a pinch of salt. First, those levels that you see are some really cool Quake 3 Levels that I had downloaded off the internet. They are not created by me. I had written up a Quake 3 Level loader for the demo and albeit incomplete, was pretty good at loading most Quake levels. The lighting was obviously Quake 3’s internal Lightmaps. The collision system was rudimentary and navigation (running around in the level) was a huge problem. There were times when the collision system would completely fail and one would fall through the floor into the dark abyss below. MD3 animation was crap, so there were no players in the level, though I remember I was working on a skeletal animation library later on, but I guess I never integrated it with this piece of code. Oh well!

Baby steps I would say. Obviously I learnt a lot from hacking around that piece of code. But could I have created a game with that? The answer is — No I would not have. With all that was achieved, you wouldn’t be able to pull together anthing more than a short cool looking demo — period! The code is too haphazardly written and has no structure and I would only term it as research and learning material. Even then it’s a bit nostalgic to see some of your old code run 🙂 , and man it still does look cool at higher resolutions!