Wow - great tank!

http://www.comicguide.net/images/smilies/wow.gif I love it.

Thanks all. Just goes to show you don't need to have a Mega-size aquarium to have a nice tank. It is a 29 gallon tank and I tried to go for the "mixed reef" look. Contrary to popular belief, my clownfish are hosting in the brain coral on the lower left, you can see a tiny section of it. I don't have an anemone in the tank. I've had this tank up and going for about a year and a half.

Here's a better pic of the clowns in their home

Just thought I'd take a minute and bring the regular Forum up to speed on what's been happening with MA3.

The Alpha testers have been busy finding bugs, and I've been busy fixing them. One problem that came up early-on was the fact that MA3 did not seem to run on nVidia MX440 cards (or perhaps any GeForce 4 card). This was a controversial card, mainly because it claimed to be compatible with DirectX 8.1, but actually isn't. It doesn't do Vertex Shaders. MA3 uses Vertex Shaders for the lightplay, the fish movements, and some other things.

It turns out that these cards were used in a lot of OEM machines, so I thought I'd better support them if at all possible. So I bought a used one on Ebay. When it arrived, I found that it's an AGP card, and I didn't have any AGP machines. So I bought a used AGP motherboard on Ebay. When it arrived, I found that it used a different type of socket from my spare CPU. So I bought a used CPU on Ebay. When it arrived, I found that it needed a different type of fan, and so on and so on...until last Friday, when I finally had enough compatible bone-yard parts to build what I call my Frankentein Machine. Astoundingly, it all worked on the first try.

Now I can compile and test the MA3 program on that machine, and it has lead to a lot of good troubleshooting which will benefit nearly everyone.

As far as getting the program to work on the MX440 card, it is working but with some visual anomolies which still need fixing. In spite of the fact that it has to do Vertex Shaders in software emulation, and only has 64 megs of Video Ram, the card still runs MA3 at a respectable 40+ frames per second.

I think this would affect only the GF 4MX cards.

Long Explanation:
The GeForce 4 series was actually more like two separate series. First, the "real" GeForce 4 cards with the suffix Ti4200, Ti4400 and Ti4600 which had more features and power than the Geforce 3. Secondly, the Geforce 4MX cards (MX420, MX440 and MX460 (and the later MX4000(sic))). These were not much more than a variation on the GeForce2MX (Which in turn was a crippled regular GF2).

/Tiny Done Now

Giving Jim his due
 

Hello everyone. I've haven't been logged in for sometime but I am constantly keeping up with and nervously awaiting MA3. I wanted to commend Jim for his hard work, especially this last thread about getting a machine together for old 440 cards. I think this is wonderful. I just thought I would interject something and I mean no disrespect to anyone.
Yesterday the 9800gx2 came out and just before that the 9600gt. Which means that even nvidia 6 and 7 series cards are starting to sell for almost nothing. If people have an ancient graphics card with some problems you can pick one of these up for as little as 40 to 50 dollars or less depending on where you shop online. Newegg, tigerdirect, xoxide.com and directron.com are always having price wars. And that's just to name a few. But I do understand in these times that 50 dollars can be a great deal to some, myself included and may not be able to upgrade. So again, I want to commend Jim for bending over backwards for everyone. Says a lot about his character. Meanwhile I'll be watching in the wings.:TU:

Well, it is not the price what matters, I suppose.
There are a lot of people who would never open the case of their computer or even touch a part inside (not to speak of pulling something out of it!).
Supporting a wide variety of hardware is always good.

Only time I open my case is to clean out the dust. :D

Also if everything else is working with the computer, people will want a refund, and not be pleased by "It will work if you buy another GFX-card".
If it works for more gfx cars, the customer support will decrease a lot. :)

I understand where everyone is coming from. All I'm saying is eventually you have to draw a line somewhere when things get too old and people don't want to change. If somehow was still using windows 3.1 and had a 386 cpu with 256k of on board memory would you then suggest that they upgrade or would you wait another year or two for MA3 while Jim tries to get it to work with EVERYTHING. Just being realistic.

Definitely this is an important factor but I think Jim tries to shoot for the lower end. This maximized the customer base and hence profit. It also has the extra benefit that the code that can handle a broad range of system specs winds up being very robust and solid. Reduced customer support costs = profit.

The developers of UnrealTournament code to Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X and from reports that I've read, this results in a very solid, stable product. Adobe also writes for Windows and MacOSX and Adobe products are also bastions of stability, in my experience.

I have commended Jim for shooting for the lower end. I would expect that. But there has to be limit. Has nothing to do with different operating systems. Try complaining about unreal tournament not working on an old 8mb video card you have and see how much sympathy you get from the people in this forum. They would politely suggest that you upgrade. Somehow my the point I'm making was not clearly understood.

No worries, I think you're getting more agreement than might be considered normal for this forum. :TU:

Overlord - Yes, there is a lower limit, and the MX440 is it. I wanted to include this card on the "Recommended" list if at all possible because it seems to be included in a lot of OEM setups. I invested a few days of work in getting MA3 to run on it, but (like the Space Program) there have been so many side benefits that it would have been worth the trouble even if I had been unsuccessful. As it turns out, I only had to remove 4 lines of code from my Render loop and use software emulation of Vertex Shaders to get it to work. This low-cost 64-meg card (I paid $12.50 on Ebay) will run MA3 at over 60 frames-per-second, so there's no reason to exclude it.

As time goes on, I will almost certainly include extra effects for those cards that have extra capabilities. One advantage of digging into the MX440 is that now I know how to check the supported properties of different cards. The whole Device Enumeration process was a mystery to me until now.

At this point, Marine Aquarium 3 will probably require a 32MB video card, which is a big bump from the 8MB requirement of MA2. When you see it, I don't think you'll see MA3 as compromising anywhere.

Ah, Jim beat me to the punch. ;)

Of course they are...

And then they release patches and everything works great again...

What's Lightroom? So Adobe has backslidden eh? Well, since Adobe got the FBI to arrest and jail Dmitry Sklyarov I stopped buying Adobe products. The GIMP whill have to do. But TT I was thinking back to the good old days of Photoshop 7, which only took one minor update to 7.01. Alas Leopard killed it for supper.

I know Jim doesn't like to let the user change the program too much, but what about allowing the user to turn off the bubble sound and select their own background music. Might that be possible in MA3?