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Technology Stocks : 3DFX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ralph Bergmann who wrote (5157)	7/9/1998 11:25:00 AM
From: Bob Howarth	Respond to of 16960

If TDFX puts up some of the money then maybe Glide gets a lead time for access to the feature or something like that? Beats me.

To: Ralph Bergmann who wrote (5157)	7/9/1998 11:42:00 AM
From: Chip Anderson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Hi Ralph, That ability is built into Quake2 and used heavily today. It is called "Skins" and lots of the internet deathmatch players use them. Some are more menacing, others are cartoonish (Cartman from SouthPark), many are slightly devious in that they are harder to spot at a distance (small, thin, light grey ET alien). Anyone with a bitmap editor can create a skin fairly easily. Where this game (and other "Total Conversions" (TCs) for Quake2 like the mission packs) go beyond that is with custom levels, a new set of weapons, and new monsters. All of those require some moderately interesting programming. Chip

To: Ralph Bergmann who wrote (5157)	7/9/1998 11:58:00 AM
From: Greg S.	Respond to of 16960

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see where the hardware gets involved AT ALL. The 3D model for a player (or any object for that matter) gets read from disk and stored in system memory, or possibly the video card's memory if it's capable of storing meshes. If you want to use (theoretically) a model of yourself, it is a component of Quake II that can allow you to incorporate the model into the game. Instead of loading the default player model it will load yours - no fancy hardware tricks are needed, as far as I know. Swapping in a new model in real-time, MAYBE, but I don't think that has any practicality. The only way I can see 3Dfx lending anything to the issue is that they make the hardware of choice on which to play Quake II, and the contest has to do with 3D modeling. Just a publicity stunt to get their name around some more. Unfortunately, the people that are likely to care about this event are mostly people that already know all about 3Dfx, and that's not the market that needs to be tapped. As an aside, this kind of feature (customizing appearances, taunts, etc.) is pretty cool but it lacks one thing - consistency. I may be wrong on this, but I'm pretty sure that if you use a model of yourself or any other custom model, no one else in the game is going to see you as that model - they will just see the default. The reason? Suppose the game is played over a 56k line. When someone joins and they have a "custom" player, does everyone in the game really want to wait to download the model the player is using? Nope, not until bandwidth increases ... -G