The collected works of GIJoe - Page 1

woah, finally. will try this out very soon. muchos gracias.

since you mentioned the crash bug on your webpage: i once compiled it myself but it kept crashing X all the time at even the most basic operations. curious to see how your build behaves on my system.

you might check if the wings team (specifically dan) knows anything about what might cause the crashes.

yep, i tested wings on my box before reading your reply and boom - it crashed my machine after 5 seconds of actually using it. a simple face inset did the trick.
seems like it's the exact same behaviour that i experienced back then when i built it myself. at that time i believed that it was caused by my outdated irix/compiler/library-environment and didn't investigate further.

btw. home machine specs:
indigo2 max impact, R10k@195, 256 mb ram, irix 6.5.12

if wings crashes, i'm forced to press reset since the vulcan grip brings me only to a dead login screen where mouse and keyboard do not repond.

for me wings would be an ideal modelling sidekick that i long wished to have on irix. of course that means that it has to run on the sgi box and that i can rely on it in a way that i don't have to fear that all my work will be lost just because of a wings crash.

still, i'm interested into your progress and have just posted in the wings forums in your thread over there. maybe we can get this solved. as dan mentioned, esdl doesn't even operate yet on a 64 bit os...

just wondering if anyone has real-world numbers on flightgear's performance.
i've just browsed through the info that was linked from the official page and from what was written there, even a relatively "newish" octane2 v6 didn't manage to score more than 10 fps in their benchmark. let alone onyx2 or systems comparable to what i have at home (max impact R10k) which seem to score at astonishing 2 - 3 fps.

if blender allows you to loft/extrude a profile along a spline and twist it, it should not be a problem. you could also do that with polygons.

as for texturing: a procedural texture/layered texture with bump should do.

just wanted to try it out again after some years and i get "rld: Fatal error: attempted access to unresolvable symbol in ./blender: _xpg5_vsnprintf"

how to make it work?

edit: blender 2.33 on 6.5.12

maybe, but it isn't worth it for just having a look. will get windows binary instead.

well, all the software i acquired the machine for runs without flaws. in my experience a lot of freeware causes troubles though. that's why i try to stay away from that as much as i can.

actually, considering that softimage|xsi foundation these days sells for 500+ $ and that there are several modeler-only applications for 0 - 200 $ like wings or silo, modo is probably somewhat overpriced.

however, we'll see what kind of workflow improvements it can offer to make it a worthy addition. the main problem is still the lack of a proper data exchange format to really establish a seamless connection between apps.
even FBX is a game of luck sometimes if you want to convert more than a simple mesh (and even that can be tricky at times...).
i'm really curious to see how modo will connect to the other 3d packages, especially with the lightwave-background of it's developers in mind. just don't tell me that it will only transfer obj's or lwo's

with all the problems one can encounter when doing modeling in one app and texturing/animation-setup/rendering in another (and having to go back and forth in the pipeline), we'll see if the whole app-splitting will make sense.

none that i'm aware of. some time ago, i tried wings on Vpro, hoping that it would make the difference but the crashes still occured.

dexter: that sounds definitely promising, looking forward to the results.
one thing though: in case you're able to fix the issues and provide a binary, i hope it's not too much to ask to make it compatible with IRIX'es below the .20's.

anyway i hope your efforts will pay off.

has anyone tried this capture software and can tell if it's remarkably better (and why?) than the standard tools? i've just got my o2 video board (thanks zafunk!) and have played around with it a little.

works really great with my VCR and game consoles when using dmrecord but i'd like to try out no:magic's tool as well. however, seems like the download link is broken.

neko: great - thanks! that was what i hoped for

cory: this thread is quite old, i do not believe that the developer himself still checks in here. you might better ask him personally to get your questions answered.
sorry for reviving old threads but in that case i felt that a new one wasn't justified.

the developer is probably a single-man army who earns his money by developing discreet plugins. sgi's makret is not exactly a hobbyist one, a small company could not earn money by developing low-cost software in such a niche.
i found that his support forum is actually empty and has like three registered users, so i suspect that the product might actually be dead, which is why i asked here first.

anyway, i'll try the capture utility and will look for clear advantages over the standard stuff.

while we're at it: it would be extremely cool if mplayer could output to video (similar to mediaplayer or dmplay functionality) if such a device was found on the system. would that be possible to integrate into a new build?

open office seems to do the job for me. but yes, for heavy usage it's probably as crappy as ms office. still, people manage to write books or their thesis in that - i never understood how they do this. but i also never could wrap my brain around how people manage to model in a modeler as crappy as maya

framemaker would get my vote, but it's inconvenient for writing a letter or something. same with latex. both only shine when you're doing a larger project with more complex layouts.

nah he wants to convert such video files into sgi file sequences, probably to feed them into a compositing/editing app.

Alteredninth wrote: All i can say is WOW! Easily the best CGI I've ever seen. Makes the first one look like tom and jerry

what makes you think so? i found the main problem with the first one in the look department to be the animation, otherwise it was quite nicely done imho. now, advent children looks like motion captured or rotoscoped body animation as well, there are a few horribly weird anims in there too. facial stuff ranges from impressive and subtle to totally laughable. hair animation i remember to be better in the first, cloth sim/dynamics were nicer in advent children though.
one impressive thing that advent children had was the extreme close-ups on some characters where you could literally see every pore of their skin or surface details on their clothing.

as for the movie itself, i too haven't played FF7, so i didn't get a lot of the story (listening to japanese and trying to catch up with english subtitles didn't help either ) but i somehow dislike the whole videogame style. the first one was more serious and - i think - overall better, yet still not good
btw. there's also a 2d/hand drawn FF7 spin off that's called FF7: last order.

x-deep32 is a really nice freeware x-server, but it doesn't do open-gl. i found x-win32 to be a good solution for this. it's commercial, though.

i noticed they give away free licenses for impressario as well, is that one still useful? never tried but i'm curious to know how well current laser and inket printers might be supported (being an sgi user for a few years, i somehow guess: none but prehistoric models ).

of course i'll have a look at shotmaker, too.

any news on this? shotmaker doesn't like to play back here, too. i can't see any mentioning on the manpage regarding onyx-only support. there's a utility "smsetup" that apparently wants to create a framestore. i canceled the setup but maybe it writes out config info that shotmaker depends on for normal operation?

foetz: thanks, but i rather not want to buy any old scanner/printer model, of course that stuff works, too. but not everyhing new and usb or x86, manufactured since the fall of sgi, is junk either.

i'll look into impressario anyway.

hm, is this only about the looks or interaction as well? the most annoying UI i got to know in recent times was/is Windows XP - not because of the looks, but because of how the user is being constantly bugged, reminded, has his focus stolen from him, has files hidden from him, well he's almost being terrorised while using that thing.
recently had to install it on my new machine after a long happy life with win2000 because the latter doesn't perform well with hyperthreading. my, what a different experience...

apples OSX would be a rather close second though - not only are the looks highly overdone to a point where it's no longer enhancing but degrading the whole experience, the thing is also rather restricting, won't adapt well to a user's needs and steals alot of system resources for it's polished cr*p. i'd rather put the mouse aside and use the shell on that one.

third place goes to the standard unix app filebrowser dialog. yes, damn inconvenient, yet a common guest on my screen. go away, thing.

summary: let the user customize your gui, design it with that in mind. different users = different tastes. make it so, that wizards and notifiers and similar annoyances can be turned off permanently.
a pretty gui might attract some, but in the long run, only functionality counts. for those who pretend to work, at least don't overdo it and save up those precious resources.

good GUI example (in my humble opinion): apple (in fact, nothingreal) shake - flexible, attractive, fast (not on o2, though), compact, not cluttered, open and easily customizeable. does a good joob at vanishing into the background and leaving the focus to the actual work. no spacewaster either.

good but somewhat strange GUI example: nichimen mirai - minimalistic, puts total focus on the work, very generalised - once you have learned it, you won't feel lost in any place in that program. but since it'S so different, it takes a lot of time getting used to.

mediocre GUI example #1: alias maya - open and customizeable but also quite slow because of that, cluttered to the extreme because of all the legacy it carries with it, mix of some different usability concepts - why?

mediocre GUI example #2: 3ds max - very customizeable and reasonably fast. compact screen size. quite cluttered plugin-host: know one area of the program, have no idea what to do in another, a lot of different concepts (read: plugins from different vendors) in that one.

confusing GUI example: pixologic zbrush - awesome program with one of the strangest UI's on earth. fast, refresh-issues, lot's of tiny text and hard-to-grab micro-sliders, uses a lot of it's own non-standard terminology to confuse you even further. has gotten better in recent versions. for a really strange experience check out versions 1.23 or 1.55.

just for the record and since i just discovered this thread: LG 2010P, 20.x goodness. working just fine connected to a V8 at 72 or 75 hz at 1600x1200 via 13w3 to VGA.

anyone checked out the seller's store? a single item and what's up with the titties pic?
is that inferno coming straight from the porn industry or what? you know, creamy-colored particles at 4k rez. and i don't want to know what they used the tracker for.

heard a few stories about old machines like indy's on fire. as in: flames bursting out of the computer. too old, dried up parts, apparently. so better be careful when running this unattended.

hm, hamei's right: at the time the o2 had just been introduced, it wasn't so great in comparison to a decent r5k indy. buggy 6.3 and all. o2 was way more RAM-hungry and the standard setup was like 64 or 96 mbytes.
btw. 2-3 years used to be the product cycle and if sgi didn't screw it up, you could have expected a successor to the o2 (and octane) in 99-2000 or so i guess.