The Brad Hole

I'm very pleased to say that a new build of Knights of the Old Republic is here.

Like the Jedi Academy patch from the other day, this is a beta-quality build, and not yet final. However, I believe it's fairly solid.

If you are the owner of a Radeon 8500, Radeon 9000 or Radeon 9200 (i.e. r200-class cards from ATI), you'll definitely want this patch. The main (and pretty much only) improvement so far is to address performance on that line of video cards. In my benchmarking here, framerates have pretty much doubled across the board for those cards.

If you don't have one of those 3 cards, odds are you won't notice any improvements - that's mainly due to the unusual and fairly long series of misadventures that was crippling the r200-class ATI cards, so there's not much benefit left to go around for all the other cards. I'm sure the details of what I did to optimize it for the r200-class cards will make for a very interesting blog entry in the near future.

If you don't have one of those three cards, I'd still like you to try the new build just to make sure I haven't made anything slower for everyone else by accident. For example, I haven't yet had a chance to test it on nVidia hardware, since I'd have to yank the 8500 I was testing with to do so. ;-)

Posted by bradman at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)

I've finally gotten off my butt and started wrapping up the Jedi Academy patch. You can find it here. This is a BETA quality patch, and isn't yet final, but I'm fairly optimistic that it's final quality. If you try it, please let me know how it works for you in the comments. It's my hope that if there are no issues, we can get it finalized and released fairly quickly.

This patch should mainly be of interest to those of you who play online.

From the release notes - note my optimism that we'll release it some time in December :)

1.01c - xx December 2004

• Multiplayer app will now load .bundle DLLs from within pk3 files, provided you zip up the .bundle package, remove the .zip extension from the filename, and add "_mac" on the end. For example, cgame.bundle would be zipped, then renamed to "cgame_mac" and placed in a .pk3 file. This will allow Mac MODs to be used in "pure" server conditions, provided that the PC or Mac server contains a pk3 with the Mac DLLs.

• Fixed PC bug in multiplayer app where the client would display "Sabers only" when connecting to a server that disabled some, but not all, of the weapons.

• Dynamic glow is now a bit more dynamic than before. This may exact a bit more of a performance hit, so it can be disabled via the "More Video" options in the UI.

• Fixed potential PC bug when setting force power settings in the UI in the MP app.

• Workaround for "MAX_PATCH_PLANES" error that would occur when loading some very large 3rd party multiplayer maps.

• About box now uses the OSX default version on 10.3.0 and higher.

Edit: Scott Kevill reminded me to add GameRanger TeamVoice support, so I've updated the archive to "b2" and added that as well.

Posted by bradman at 04:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (29)

A few weeks ago, I visited the doctor for the first time in many, many years. Beth had begged me to get a physical, and it had been a long time, so I went in to find out what kinds of horrors I'd been inflicting upon my body. I had inadvertently fasted, so at the end of the physical itself, I was sent to a lab to get bloodwork done. My dad had a heart attack and a subsequent quadruple bypass at age 48. He doesn't drink, but he did smoke heavily up until that time, and he was slightly overweight. This was enough for the doctor to want to know my cholesterol levels.

The blood work came back and I found out today what I suspected: eating fast food isn't a way to stay healthy. It was explained to me that there are essentially 4 readings for your cholesterol: overall, triglycerides (TG), LDL (bad cholesterol) and HDL (good cholesterol). Good values for those 4 are <200, <150, <100 and >40. My readings were 250, 222, 169 and 44. These are, apparently, "really bad". ;-)

So for the next 6 weeks, I'm going to try and affect change by eating significantly better, and then get tested again to see how much of my problem is genetic vs. my crappy eating habits. I think it could go either way, based on my dad's health. I'm not overweight and I don't smoke, so that's good. On the other hand, work has been a bit more stressful overall since I moved to Aspyr, and that can't be helped.

I'm not anxious to start taking medication to regulate this, so I'll keep my fingers crossed that eating better will do the trick. For those of you with stock in Wendy's, now is a good time to sell. ;-)

Posted by bradman at 12:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)