The collected works of foetz - Page 17

5.3
  • apache 1.3.42

a version 2 apache for 6.2 is likely to follow but my pthreads were somehow broken :P


6.2
  • php 5.2.17

with the module for the apache above
tingo wrote: Maybe the screenshots are photoshopped? ;-P


hehe no
Pontus wrote: So.. lets talk graphics instead, how does the deskside compare with the full graphics module?

it just has less slots. same as with the cpu but if you're not going to use more than what the deskside needs you're totally fine
6.2
  • apache 2.2.26
  • m4 1.4.12
  • autoconf 2.13
  • apr 1.5.0
  • apr-util 1.5.3

... as promised.
a new php with support for this apache is next. then thanks to the m4 and autoconf it should also be easy to add whatever extensions you prefer :-)

the apache is quite complete since i compiled everything shared so you have a crapload of stuff to choose from and can use it just the way you like. it's an mpm prefork build because everything else tends to freak out when used with the php module
ClassicHasClass wrote: You are UNSTOPPABLE!

haha it's not that much but getting stuff done for 6.2 or even 5.3 usually isn't plug&play :P
thanks for both, just installed the plugin on osx :-)
an aix apple, nice. anynow the question remains why you're giving them swedish city names :P
5.3
  • screen_376.bz2
  • algol68g_28.tar.bz2


6.2
  • libxml2_277.tardist
  • libxml2_277p1.tardist
  • gmake_380.tardist
  • mysql_5045.tar.bz2
  • screen_376.bz2
  • algol68g_28.tar.bz2
  • curl_7350.tardist
  • php_5217_apache2.tar.bz2
  • gimp_125.tar.bz2
  • nedit55_rac.bz2
  • wget_182.tardist

please install the patch for libxml2 if you get linking problems. for some reason -lz was missing from xml2-config.
the php has quite a nice number of modules because i tried to keep the basic installation as pure as possible. some modules do have further dependencies of course.
and just to show off a little i wanna emphasize that the mysql as well as anything else is 100% mipspro :D however i had to remove most of the mysql locales thanks to an encoding mess :P
last but not least the algol thingy is for the oldskoolers. it's a free algol68 runner that should be some fun for anyone on a retro trip.

also figured i could share my custom nedit. it has 2 features in addition to the original one:
1. doesn't ask when saving read-only files as root.
2. an extra buffer indepedent from the clipboard.

the latter is simple but quite handy. often i wanted to change some text as test but wouldn't bother making a copy of the file first and wanted to keep using copy/paste so the solution was a separate buffer. the edit menu has 2 additional entries "Buffer" and "Get Buffer". the first one saves the whole text in memory, the second one replaces the current text with whatever was there when you hit the first one.
algol68g_28.tar.bz2

for more info: http://jmvdveer.home.xs4all.nl/
ooh terrific and thanks for sharing! this adds some great perspectives to spare part hunting :D
nice machine and a good call running irix there. doesn't make much sense running anything else.
4 is also interesting from a dev perspective because that was the coff era and the compiler doesn't know a lot yet :P
before taking on something bigger like php 5.5.x you might wanna make yourself familiar with irix for a bit
wow nice work there and thanks for sharing :D
jpstewart wrote: so even getting GCC (up to 3.x is supported AFAIK) runing will be a challenge

no doubt but running gcc there would be kinda missing the point :P
chances are low to get something even slightly recent compiled there so irix 4 is gonna be a hardcore retro trip :D

with irix 5 on the other hand you can actually get stuff done and still have the option for coff if you should feel like it. there's an irix4 dev subsystem for 5.x for such cases.


anyhow whatever you end up with a few pics would be welcome for sure :D
hamei wrote: 5.3 was supposed to be better tho, wasn't it ? I hope so ...

it was but it doesn't matter because for programs as we know them today irix pre-5 doesn't have the required stuff so even if 5 should be slower than 4 in some aspects it's the only way to run most of the stuff you likely wanna have on there. and obviously when running irix 5 or older speed is not the primary concern :P
i only used regular configure options and didn't modify any source so as i said via pm already i'm not related to the project in any way and it did classify irix as unsupported platform. there were no errors and my thread related stuff works fine for any other program so you might wanna talk with the author about any issues that might come up
nice thanks for the update. good to see something is maintained steadily :-)
6.2
  • libogg_131.tardist
  • libvorbis_134.tardist
  • vorbistools_140.tardist
  • audiofile_021.tardist
  • xmms_1211.tardist

for xmms you also need esound from sgi's freeware.
the audiofile is a rebuild of the one from freeware but i replaced vsnprintf to prevent trouble
assuming that it would go through with mipspro at all ... thinking of bitcoind which is serious bloatware with some silly flaws in the build system
i assume that for the r12000 you need irix 6.5?
if so i'm not sure that such a mod, although a great achievement, would be too useful because for 6.5 there're much faster machines.

however with 6.2 or 5.3 for example overclocking and alike would pay off if done to one of the fastest thingies supported by the respective os version
doesn't show for me either. but yesterday it did. no javascript and alike both times
yeah come back if you feel like it. life is not black or white :-)
i'd give the particles a separate pass and do the rest in post. they're too fine grained anyway
Geoman wrote: <rant>Now it's 2014 and no ZFS in MacOS yet. But a very colorful clickable userland - because this is the most important thing of it all.

of course. for the desktop there's no professional section anymore. everything is consumer level.

I shall migrate to Linux or use more IRIX ...

linux on the desktop is pointless because of the ever shining lack of software support from pretty much all major companies. so it comes down to a combo of irix and osx (or wintendo if you must :P )
oh yes, nice tables. that's very handy :-)
hamei wrote: trumpet the "cross-platform" buzzword to the heavens (twelve varieties of Linux, one version of Windows and a Mac port 'in progress')

:lol: quote of the week and so true
vishnu wrote:
foetz wrote:
hamei wrote: trumpet the "cross-platform" buzzword to the heavens (twelve varieties of Linux, one version of Windows and a Mac port 'in progress')

:lol: quote of the week and so true

In all fairness though, the Mozilla project said from day one that the product they were going to provide was source code, which strangely puts me in mind of the line from Kill Bill, "I didn't say I was going to explain myself I said I was going to be honest."


oh sure i didn't mean mozilla in particular. that quote applies to countless other "projects", too :P
dpeterc wrote: Works reasonably fast if you have an SSD.

statements like that always make me giggle :P

anyway i also had a look at your site and can fully agree to what vishnu said :D
theinonen wrote: Mixing hobbies and work is never a good idea.

don't agree at all. it was the best that could have happened to me. what's better than getting paid for what you like to do most :D
this is probably the most wanted of the "old alias apps pics" thread. this time i'm happy to present the legendary:

Alias PowerAnimator v6

but wait why is that special? we have a PowerAnimator review already you might think. that's true of course but as you'll see on the pics below v6 is different which brings us right to the intro:


INTRO
when Alias Research Inc. released the first version of their software it was just called "Alias". the second version was called "Alias/2". so far it was only targeted at industrial design until in the late 80s ILM used it for the fluid creature in the movie "The Abyss". the latter had a serious impact on the popularity of 3d graphics for movies and alias quickly took advantage of it. version 3 was now split into two "packages": Studio and PowerAnimator. however that was just a marketing stunt because the program still was the same. there were no two different programs either. the only difference was a slightly different feature set depending on which license you had.
this went on and with the release of v6 the following base products were available:
  • Animator
  • PowerAnimator
  • Designer
  • Studio
  • AutoStudio
the first two were targeted at the entertainment industry such as film, tv and games. the rest was meant to be used for industrial design just as when the program had been released for the first time in the mid 80s. there was however one exception: AutoStudio. AutoStudio was the top of the line product and had everything. not only all the stuff of the other industrial design versions but also everything the animators had.
bottom line is that no matter which one you had you always had the same program; just with a few features more or less.

after sgi bought alias and merged them with wavefront the alias program got a major ui redesign starting with v7. that is how most people know and remember it and what pretty much every source on the internet shows but until then it was different. that's why this second review might be more interesting than what we had in the thread before because v6 was the last of the original ones and proper screen shots let alone detailed info about all the original versions almost doesn't exist.
so as you know by now although i'm gonna make this review about PowerAnimator it does apply to all of the not so different versions of alias from the time alias still were on their own.


REVIEW

General
the program was fullscreen without any sign of irix style window borders. unlike the competiton in alias all 3d viewports were independent windows which you could move, resize, arrange, open and close at will. also very handy and not available with other programs was a complete customization of ui colors and hotkeys. you could also save that, other stuff like window positions and the general options to files and therefore load different setups as required at any time without changing your scene.
the original alias versions (before v7) had all menus at the bottom (v6 was the only one with a gray style. earlier versions were green). sorted by categories all of the big menu buttons brought up a pop-up list above with the actual functions just like you might know it from the multilister in later versions which is one of a few places where they kept the old style menus after the merge with wavefront. the last used function of each menu button was displayed at the very bottom below the respective menu button and could be repeated by just hitting the button without actually selecting the function again on the pop-up list. which menus you had depended on the mode. you could always switch modes by using the very right menu button or hotkeys. the current mode was shown in a small field in the middle row of the menu area at the bottom.
there were 6 modes:
  • Alias
  • Model
  • Render
  • Anim
  • Video I/O
  • Film
the first one wasn't like the rest but more like an entry point which could be used to enter one of the other modes or run additional stuff like the help, settings or paint. v6 offered a direct launch for StudioPaint as well as the old paint program that still was included with v6. if started without an existing scene there were no 3d viewports either but simply a big, blank screen with the menu in Alias mode.
some menus in the middle were always the same for Model, Anim and Render mode.
[i attached a menu overview pdf i created from the help but it didn't come out too well. should still give the right impression tho]
and to cover some trivia, the default shaders were different depending on the license. the default PowerAnimator shader tho in particular was sort of famous. it was a neat blue which indeed made for a nice default. the values were:
RGB: 0, 150, 255
Diffuse: 0.8
Lambert


Modeling
this has always been the strong part of alias. designed as a spline based program from the start alias was far ahead of the competition at all things nurbs & co. curve tools like there was no tomorrow up to surface evaluation with special shaders and whatnot.
but of course polygons were available as well. in fact v6 introduced a polygon toolbox which was a floating, vertical menu providing quite a nice set of polygon specific tools such as extrusion, vertex edits and a special switch that allowed setting the results of all surface operations to either polygons or nurbs.

Rendering
no surprises here either. as usual there were the 4 main renderers available as well as a hardware renderer (rrfr) and a couple of output options such as sdl, plot or rib. there also was an optional set of r4000 optimized versions of the 4 main renderers available. just in case, the mentioned 4 main renderers were:
  • Render
  • Raytracer
  • PowerCaster
  • PowerTracer
the last two simply were smp capable versions of the first two. i don't recall if there was a hard limit regarding the number of cpus no matter what license you had but at least 16 worked fine if i remember correctly.
unlike maya the results of the alias renderers were great. they had a somewhat warm and natural look as well as neat specials such as glows and lens flares. the latter actually looked serious, not like lightwave for example.
there also was a high number of different lights:
  • Point
  • Spot
  • Directional
  • Ambient
  • Linear
  • Area
  • Volume
all lights provided a quite complete feature set including things like lens flares, glows, halos, shadows (including adjustable soft shadows), fog, force and particles. the latter was actually part of the shader settings and was available for lights as well as regular shaders.
you could also save all shaders, lights and environments separately and all major values could be mapped and the maps mapped again and so on. you could build actual shading networks wich was quite unique at the time.
also worth mentioning is the seamlessly intergrated ramp map that was very useful in many different ways.
one of the pics shows the famous rocket scene with a quickrender preview overlay.

Animation
animation features were not as extensive as in softimage for example but nice nevertheless. there were shape shifters, different kinds of animation curves, an automatic flyby, autokeys and pretty much everything could be keyed in one place or by alt-clicking the parameter name in the respective property windows. not to forget the fully integrated dynamics and particles. there also were a number of performance related settings which let you tweak and tune quite a lot so that working was as smooth as your machine allowed it. a number of different animation previews existed as well as the option to save certain animation data to avoid computing it everytime from scratch. further since v4 there was an IK system (see pics).


EXTERNALS
a number of additional programs were part of the package as well as the popular 3dcd with a neat set of examples of all kinds. some of the terminal based programs included:
  • AliasToRenderman
  • fpaste
  • pixdiff
  • matteRGB
  • WireConvert
  • grab
some gui programs that came with the package (also see pics):
  • MotionSampler 2
  • paint
  • ascan
  • flipbook
paint and ascan were legacy programs and only available as coff binaries.


PERSONAL
one of the things i liked very much was that many important settings were centralized unlike softimage for example where major settings were scattered all over the place. the multilister for example was your one-stop for all material related stuff. or the render stats which let you set things like smooth shading, motion blur, shadows, tesselation and so on for all objects or just a user defined selection in one single place at one.
one other thing that came in very handy was that things did look good by default. with most other programs it took quite some tweaking before you got a decent result; way too sensitive bump values, having a hard time getting half-way realistic smoke with a ramp and so on - i guess some of you can relate.
something alias wasn't is fast. neither the renderers not the program itself won any speed awards especially compared to the wavefront advanced visualizer or prisms.
as a little goodie i extracted the alias logo from one of the demo models and attached a package. that includes the scene (v6 wire file, should also work with later versions and maya), the rendered logo with a separate mask image and the model as obj. the wire file includes both, trimmed nurbs surfaces and a polygon version.


well that's about it. there's much more to tell but it has to stop somewhere :P
in case you wanna know more or something specific just ask anytime. and now to what's probably most intersting: the pics!
josehill wrote: foetz = stud :)

:P
yeah it took a fair share of my weekend but since there's pretty much no info about the original alias versions available anywhere i figured a more detailed article wouldn't hurt. in fact i never found any pics of v6 anywhere and only very brief sequences of the older versions in bad quality vhs rips.
unfortunately v6 is the oldest i have otherwise i'd have used an even older one for the review :P
arhiman57 wrote: Many thanks !!!

Maybe I can make some pictures of the big box, poster etc.. I have one normally it's V6. A 1hour VHS is also include in the package, with a big tutorial.

oh great please do, that would round this thread up nicely :D
if that's not nice teamwork i don't know ... i think it's safe to say that we got the #1 original alias review on the net :D
arhiman57 wrote: Yeah :D

I hope that more and more people that own old package like that will share photo of the box and if it's possible the GUI in action....

absolutely, i hope more "coffers" will show up in the future :-)
very nice box that deserves at least one reply :-)
you could try mine viewtopic.php?p=65901#p65901

additions to it are there viewtopic.php?f=10&t=11322 which you might like or not
it won't. the 8.5 release was particularly picky. not even the renderers work with 6.5.15 or higher. didn't try older 6.5 versions tho.
9 and 8.2 are okay although there're some glitches with vpro.
you might wanna use studiotools 9.x which still has all features of PA but runs better on the late irix machines.

and welcome here btw :D
shel wrote: Folks-

It looks like WinXP and I are going to reach EOL together

good you kept the humor :D
and i'd take the machines as well if i were not across the ocean :-/
great :D