EntBlog
Code, 3D, Games, Linux and much more...

FireFox 1.5 available

Firefox 1.5 is available now to download. Here you can read a detailed list of the things that have changed since the last release. I specially like the option to report a broken website.

Having been browsing for about an hour, I can say this version seems to be running faster and smoother than before.

If you don’t know it, google is firmly supporting firefox. Even they will pay you if you promote it.

People at www.spreadfirefox.com is preparing a big marketing campaign this time.

MarioKartDS

Yesterday, Nintendo started to sell Mario Kart DS here in Spain. Undoubtly, this is a game that sells consoles, NintendoDS in this case. I was tempted to buy it when Nintendogs was released, and now I have decided to buy it (the pack with console + mariokart). The game is absolutely addictive and reminds me the feeling from SNES. To this, you add the Wi-Fi support. This is the first NintendoDS game to support Wi-Fi. Here in Spain, Nintendo is getting some interesting agreements to get the maximun hotspot coverage. I am suspicious of this idea to work in Spain. Nevertheless you can always use yor home connection to play in internet.

In the topic of games, Nokia assume that N-Gage gaming phone is not working properly and they retire temporally from the videogame market until 2007.

Windows Vista & DirectX

Windows Vista will be coming next year and with it a new GUI architecture based on DirectX. Although it is difficult to get info about the future DirectX (out of NDA) you can get an idea of what is coming here.

Here are the more interestings point:

• GDI will be deprecated and software emulated
• D3D9 will be available in Windows Vista. Lower versions won’t be supported (emulated?)
• Forget all the tricks about performance in D3D (batching). Microsoft has decided to attack the problem at a low level: IHV will need to implement a new driver for D3D9Vista. In this model, calls to the API are not so costly (command buffer is moved to user mode). And forget the problems with DEVICE_LOST! It will only occurs under very strange circustances.
• Memory for D3DPOOL_DEFAULT wil be virtualized and D3DPOOL_MANAGED is deprecated.
• The fun will come with D3D10. The new pipeline stages Input Assembler and Geometry Shader will allow to do things unthinkable now.

XBOX360 is out [USA]

We will have to wait until December 2nd to buy it in Europe, but US gamers can buy it since yesterday. Being a hardware fanatic I will buy it only by the hardware you get (Main Processor, Graphic Processor, Motherboard) . The 299€ (399€ the full version) is worth the money.

The most wanted games for me are Perfect Dark Zero and Project Gotham Racing 3. They are getting good reviews to be the first games for this generation. We will have to wait some months until we get the first games using the full potential of the console. Most of the first games are not fully optimized and are only using one of the three cores.

By the way, not everybody is buying this console to play. What would the people betting in ebay say about this?

Hello World!

After some experiments with MSN Spaces, I have decided to run a new blog on my own server. I’m expecting to keep this updated. I’m a computer engineer, so you will be reading here topics about computers. I specially love realtime, 3d, linux and videogames.

I’m from Spain but I have decided to start this in english so I can get to more people.

Thanks for visiting me. Now you can syndicate to me, read my posts and comment them. Let the Fun Begin.