Id Software merges with Bethseda

The god of game development – John Carmack – sells Id to Bethseda (or in other words, Doom meets Elder Scrolls).

Cant wait for a post-apocalyptic MMORPG – Bethseda is great with scripting great stories and architecting its games to make end-user contributions possible (for e.g. Elder Scrolls: Oblivion). Id is famous of course with wrenching out the last drop of juice out of graphics cards with its cutting edge graphics engines.  The last time, everyone upgraded their cards en-masse was when Doom3 came out : I would say nVidia is watching what direction this takes (what with everyone predicting the death of desktop gaming).

Id is famous also for open-sourcing its engines, roughly 5 years after they come out (for e.g. the IoQuake3 open-sourced engine). It will be interesting to see how this gets affected.

But ever since John Romero quit, Id didnt really have a story script to its games – like for example Valve with its superb Half Life franchise. The “Source” game engine was probably not as cutting edge as Doom3’s, but what a game!

I hope they are able to deliver something really kickass and scary (I should probably plug for Penumbra: Dark Plague and oh-so-classic System Shock 2 here)

FUD alert ! 64-bit OS does not use twice the RAM

A few weeks back, I had to re-install Ubuntu because of a windows re-install and this time I went 64-bit. This way, I have the flexibility to upgrade to 4GB RAM, which I cannot do with 32 bit operating systems.

However, all over the IRC channels and forums, I see a lot of FUD about how 64-bit OSes use the double the memory for the exact same programs that you were running on 32-bit OSes… because of the doubling of word size.

All that is a load of crap – the actual increase is about 5% or so, with a substantial increase in video encoding, playback and a lot of other application benchmarks.

Program code uses memory allocation w.r.t primitive types like int, int64, char, etc. These retain their sizes and so memory allocation is explicitly same as before. Structs are aligned by the compiler anyways. However, pointer usage (e.g int*, void*) causes doubling of the space needed, since pointers use the native word size of the OS. These are called ” swollen pointers”. Roughly, these amount to 5% of a program’s allocated memory.

So please upgrade to a 64-bit OS if your processor (core 2 duo, turion onwards) allow it. The next generation of MacOS – Snow Leopard is fully 64-bit  only. Linux has been 64-bit compatible for a long time now (and flash-player 10 for 64-bit linux works nicely). Windows 7 is targetted primarily for 64-bit machines, though there will still be a 32-bit release available.

Why is Sony so dumb with the PS3 ??

An unbelievable article came out today – Ghostbusters on the PS3 vs 360 – note that PS3 has 8 cores  and is more powerful on paper. But then we have opinions like this where some “suit” at Sony says that they actually want to make it difficult for developers to make games for the PS3. The compilers that the PS3 uses took a long, long time to stabilise, vs the 360.

On the other hand, see what Apple did – it had to convince developers (and by developers I mean Micosoft’s Office on Mac and Adobe’s Photoshop Mac groups) to develop on transitioning hardware : from the PowerPC to Intel 32 bit to Intel 64 bit. They leveraged the power of the LLVM open source compiler architecture (which has now emerged as a competing, easier licensed, less obfuscated version of gcc). They made it easier for the compiler developers to create better compilers.

I own a PS3 and feel it is a really complete system – with user changeable HDDs, Linux supported, etc. but the management is really insane if it keeps on pulling such crap. Why would I want to buy a more expensive console which performs worse? And with Project Natal, Microsoft has gone to the next level with the 360.

Atleast they can open up PS2 backward compatibility for God’s sake – Shadow of the Colossus alone would be worth it.

Quickfix for your linux CD/DVD writer errors

Are you getting

Buffer I/O error on device sr0

Change your grub boot options to add

all_generic_ide=1