The Brad Hole

I experienced my first earthquake this evening.

It lasted maybe 5 seconds tops, but that was enough to a) get my attention, b) scare me shitless and c) cause me to run towards the front door. By the time I got to the door, it was all over. It was "only" a 5.6, so I don't know if it's the sort of thing the locals are used to. I can tell you that it felt like the neighbors upstairs had a bunch of off-balance washing machines running, and it was fairly noisy. Several car alarms went off in the parking lot.

It's not something I'm going to forget any time soon, but I am curious what it would feel like to have been driving at the time.

Posted by bradman at 08:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I finally have a happy ending for the VBO performance issues with Knights of the Old Republic. Devout readers of this blog (and its comments) might remember that the VBO performance issue that I filed on KOTOR's outdoor Dantooine levels got assigned to me once I started working at Apple.

Now I didn't look into this immediately - I had to get up to speed at work and had some more pressing tasks to work on - but when I was in Phoenix 2 weeks ago, I did fire up KOTOR on my old PowerPC Mac Mini with Radeon 8500 and run it under the GM version of Leopard.

The money shot: Leopard fixes the VBO performance regression that started in 10.3.7. I tested with both the original GM version of KOTOR and the latest Universal patch (1.03d). The prior workaround - disabling VBOs via the .ini file - caused performance degradation everywhere else in the game, so what you ultimately want to do is keep VBOs on at all times when running KOTOR under Leopard - and enjoy. :-)

Posted by bradman at 08:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)