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> I used -ffast-math myself, when I worked on the quake3 port to Linux (it's been five years, how time flies). What's going on here? Quake 3 port to linux in 1

by pvdebbe 10y ago

> I used -ffast-math myself, when I worked on the quake3 port to Linux (it's been five years, how time flies). What's going on here? Quake 3 port to linux in 1996? Can this sentence be read otherwise? Did he possibly mean Quake 1?

kakarot 10y ago
the dude must be a time traveler
coldtea 10y ago
>Quake 3 port to linux in 1996? Can this sentence be read otherwise? Did he possibly mean Quake 1? The mail is from July 2001. Q3 was released in early 1999, that's already 2 years and 3 months. Now, Q2 was released in 1997. Q3 could have started in development immediately afterwards, so that pushes it to 4 years. Not that much of a stretch to call them 'five years', especially casually speaking. And if you're a little older (over 30) it's even easier to have a fuzzier feeling for time (for a 20 year old, 5 years is 25% of their life -- for a 30 year old just 16%, and even whole decades start to have less defined edges, especially combined work/family routine). Or it could be a typo.
- cma 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure it was a typo, Quake 3 didn't have a software renderer, so I wouldn't think they would get a doubling of framerate from that optimization (unless they were artificially lowering res to make things CPU bound), but Quake 2 did, so it could.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Makes sense.
feld 10y ago
This is an odd statement. I'm not aware of Linus ever being contracted to port video games to Linux. The Quake 3 Linux port was originally worked on by Loki Software, and then when they went out of business it was handled by Timothee Besset.
bluedino 10y ago
I'm guessing he meant Quake 2. He mentions x86 and [DEC] Alpha. Did a Q3 port to the Alpha even exist? >> The main FP work I did on that thing on the alpha improved the framerate by about 50% on alpha - FP was _that_ critical for it.
- gh02t 10y ago
  > I'm guessing he meant Quake 2. He mentions x86 and [DEC] Alpha. Did a Q3 port to the Alpha even exist? I can't seem to find any evidence of one, so I am thinking it must be Q2, which was ported to Linux and NT Alpha. Jeez, just seeing that gave me a pang of nostalgia; I never got to work on an Alpha machine (spent plenty of time on SPARC though) but I always wanted to. I remember people being really excited about Alpha, thinking it was The Future™. That was back in the days where it was hard to imagine that in 20 years the vast majority of computers would be either running on 8086 or Acorn descendants...

by pvdebbe 10y ago

kakarot 10y ago

the dude must be a time traveler

coldtea 10y ago

>Quake 3 port to linux in 1996? Can this sentence be read otherwise? Did he possibly mean Quake 1? The mail is from July 2001. Q3 was released in early 1999, that's already 2 years and 3 months. Now, Q2 was released in 1997. Q3 could have started in development immediately afterwards, so that pushes it to 4 years. Not that much of a stretch to call them 'five years', especially casually speaking. And if you're a little older (over 30) it's even easier to have a fuzzier feeling for time (for a 20 year old, 5 years is 25% of their life -- for a 30 year old just 16%, and even whole decades start to have less defined edges, especially combined work/family routine). Or it could be a typo.

cma 10y ago
I'm pretty sure it was a typo, Quake 3 didn't have a software renderer, so I wouldn't think they would get a doubling of framerate from that optimization (unless they were artificially lowering res to make things CPU bound), but Quake 2 did, so it could.
- coldtea 10y ago
  Makes sense.

feld 10y ago

This is an odd statement. I'm not aware of Linus ever being contracted to port video games to Linux. The Quake 3 Linux port was originally worked on by Loki Software, and then when they went out of business it was handled by Timothee Besset.

bluedino 10y ago

I'm guessing he meant Quake 2. He mentions x86 and [DEC] Alpha. Did a Q3 port to the Alpha even exist? >> The main FP work I did on that thing on the alpha improved the framerate by about 50% on alpha - FP was _that_ critical for it.

gh02t 10y ago
> I'm guessing he meant Quake 2. He mentions x86 and [DEC] Alpha. Did a Q3 port to the Alpha even exist? I can't seem to find any evidence of one, so I am thinking it must be Q2, which was ported to Linux and NT Alpha. Jeez, just seeing that gave me a pang of nostalgia; I never got to work on an Alpha machine (spent plenty of time on SPARC though) but I always wanted to. I remember people being really excited about Alpha, thinking it was The Future™. That was back in the days where it was hard to imagine that in 20 years the vast majority of computers would be either running on 8086 or Acorn descendants...