Erik, I want to clarify that I wasn't trying to speak ill of sgi or those who use sgi computers. I was just responding to Martin Spott's suggestion that it would cost $1000 to turn an Octane SSI into something that could reasonably run FlightGear. And then pointing out that for that $1000 you could buy an entire PC which would run FlightGear splendidly.
SGI has it's place in the world, they do some things very well, but also at a very high price. I hope FlightGear can continue to support their platform. Back a couple years ago I got a very early version of FlightGear running on SGI. My department had tons of sgi's all over the place so it seemed like a great idea since sgi *is* *the* 3d graphics company (or at least was back then.) I was shocked then to find out that there was only one sgi machine in the entire building (out of about 30) capable of running flightgear decently. This was a $250,000 Onyx which was not for "playing games." The rest of the sgi's around here either had no graphics hardware acceleration at all (i.e. Indies) or had some minimal 3d acceleration but didn't support basic things like texturing. After that, I personally stopped investing time on the sgi port because as I unfortunately discovered, I didn't have convenient access to any sgi machines that could run it. These days you can get a Voodoo2 (with two texture engines) for $10 on ebay. I certainly hope sgi isn't *still* selling machines without hardware texturing support. Any, my real point here is that I personally do not care to work very hard to support a non-textured flightgear mode simply for the sake of old sgi hardware. However, if there are other reasons as well ... supporting notebook (few of which have 3d graphics), or to still support cards with very little texture ram ... then I have no problem with continuing on with our support of a non-textured world mode. However, with respect to the current bug in coloring, someone else is going to have to volunteer to look into the problem. Regards, Curt. Erik Hofman writes: > Curtis L. Olson wrote: > > > Martin Spott writes: > > > >>To explain what Erik's talking about: You don't get an appropriate video > >>card that you can use in an SGI for just $50. 2x 4 MByte Texture RAM to > >>upgrade an Octane SSI to MXI cost more than $1000 - and you can't use > >>FlightGear's textured scenerey without TRAM .... > >> > > > > Well in that case you are probably then better off just taking that > > $1000 and buying a modern PC which for most applications will probably > > beat the socks off the Octane anyways. > > > > In my last job we ran a simulator using an old SGI Onyx. We could buy > > 3 very high end PC's every year for what we paid in yearly hardware > > support contract costs. And each of those 3 PC's individually would > > beat the socks off the onyx. > > > > I like sgi, I wish they were doing better as a company. But, > > unfortunately I just don't see a lot of advantage in buying their > > hardware these days, and there are very few applications these days > > that run on sgi only. There are still a few uses where sgi makes the > > most sense, but these are getting fewer and fewer. > > > So you're basically saying I am wasting my time ... > I doubt that the 40 people downloading FlightGear 0.7.7 each month could > be conviced to use crappy PC hardware just because it's cheap. I realy > don't like that attitude and prefer to leave the hardware choice to > everyone who wishes to chose. > > Ergo, we should stick with support for old hardware or remove the line > "multi platfrom" and state the change on the website. > > Then at least *I* would know what to do. > > Erik > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Flightgear-devel mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel -- Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
