I ended up going so fast that I had to look up and down with mouselook, but that\'s at the end of the story.  ;-)

First, I built Planeshift in Red Hat 8.0 and tarred it up

\"tar -cf psprecompile.cf /home/benjamin/my_planeshift\"

(Of course, save it somewhere that won\'t be overwritten when you install Slackware, such as a fileserver or a Windows partition.)

Then I installed Slackware Linux 9.  It should be noted that there are 12 Linuxes based on Slackware.  One of the most popular is Vector, because it is so fast and highly compatible.  This trick *ought* to work with them, but your mileage may vary.  I\'ll try it out and let you know.

Then, download the following two files.

ftp://194.199.20.114/linux/redhat/updates/8.0/en/os/i386/glibc-2.3.2-4.80.6.i386.rpm

ftp://194.199.20.114/linux/redhat/updates/8.0/en/os/i386/glibc-common-2.3.2-4.80.6.i386.rpm

(They\'re RPMs from Red Hat 8.0\'s updates for glibc 2.3.2 and glibc-common 2.3.2.  Since glibc 2.3.2 has a bug that makes it exceedingly difficult to build from source, it\'s easier to just forcibly shove the RPMs from Red Hat in.)

Now, when I say forcibly, I do mean forcibly.  I know some of you will say, \"--nodeps?!  No way!  Not on your life!\" but it just went right in on mine, and nothing has broken yet.  I\'ve rebooted, installed and played Unreal Tournament 2003, etc.  (Come to think of it, I haven\'t tried building any software, hehe.)  Well, do it at your own risk...

rpm -ivh --force --nodeps glibc-*.rpm

Then, unpack the tarball and run with it!

Now here\'s the weird part.  I went into Planeshift and for over 400 frames per second in the dungeon.  Well, I was using a crude method of measuring frames per second (number of redraws under the mouse pointer).  It only momentarily dropped below 100 frames per second according to my crude tester.

So, I started with the debug turned on.  I started with 688 frames per second, then everything turned blue, then black, then green, and it dropped to about 0.  I could still type, and a few seconds later, the FPS jumped to around 250.  It was still green, and coincidentally, I found an emerald right next to me.  I picked it up, and my colors returned to normal and stayed that way.  My FPS stayed in the 3 digits, so I asked Tycho to help me with a test.  Previously, whenever someone was in a wall near me, most noticeable with Tycho, my video would drop to about one frame every 90 seconds.  This time, we repeated the experiment, and my FPS dropped to double digits, but I could still easily play and type!!

It seems as though lag hit a few people in various places...

I did a /spawn, \'cause I wanted to see what my FPS were when looking at the temple.  I was momentarily getting three digit numbers, but for the most part, I had been slowed down by server load.  (Sorry, I would simply kick everyone off, but...)

I should note that when I first appeared in town, I could not see the wall surrounding the town.  In fact, it seemed as though clipping was just slightly off, but it was slightly off before.

Of course, some of you are wondering where you can buy your own 500GHz chips.  No, I\'m not using anything special.  I\'m using the same system that tortured me with Red Hat.

(As a little bit of free publicity, Slackware 9 does *everything* faster, unless it doesn\'t see your soundcard right, which happens occasionally.)

My system is as follows:

Jetway J867V266B Socket A
512MB PC133 memory
Athlon XP 2000+
GeForce4 Ti 4200 (Will try with GF4 MX440 later)
Philips Acoustic Edge piece of crap sound card
Realtek 8139
80GB 7200RPM with 2MB buffer
Slackware with Kernel 2.4.20 (I wonder if I can get the 2.6 kernel to work with the nVidia drivers.)

If anyone else tries this, post your experience!  :-D

Giladrial and I caught ourselves a few passers-by and had a party.  (I think we should call them Newbie Crystal Fundraisers, since one benefit is that the newbies finally get a chance to find some crystals while the older players hang around and chat.)

I got some party screenshots, and as promised, I posted them on my website.  I also posted a few other screenshots, like graphical glitches and \"Aww\" shots (and a very hot stereogram).  I took over 70 screenshots at the party, but most of them were trying to get the staircase photo to look right.

Just click on the icon that says \"WWW\" just below this post, go to Pictures, and go to PlaneShift ScreenShots.  Or, of you don\'t wanna see my corpse at the front of my homepage, just go to the PlaneShift ScreenShots page.

In the pics, we got Kwartznummatoo, Rainerock, Warewulf, Fredde, Luze, Thundar, Djeba, Banshii, Ilah, and Xenia.  Oops!  I forgot to mention the latecomer Calisto!  Sorry!

(Edit: I didn\'t crop the pics, \'cause I thought it was funny to see what time these pics were taken.  For the curious, the four boxes on my upper menu bar are my system monitor.  They are, from left to right, CPU, memory, network, and swap usage.  As you can see, the CPU is almost constantly 100%.  Fancy that.)

Not meaning to be a rable-rouser, but...

The Wish List forum provides a wider range of ideas and faster refinement and propagation.

The SF feature requests provide a more easily browsable set of requests with more closure to each idea.

I think you can get the best of both worlds, though, if you took the Wish List thread and split it apart again, something like as follows:

Gameplay
-Interface
-Rules
-Policy (different from rules)
-Universe Layout
-Media
--Sound and Music
--Graphics
--Dialog
Code (like code section rewrite requests or programming hints)
Technical Issues
PlaneShift Policy

Then, make a Sticky thread for each forum reserved for proposition of matured ideas.

Perhaps it won\'t completely fix the mess here (several people posting the same thing), but at least it will clean things up a lot...

(oh boy, lightning outside...gotta run!)