A Rick Overman .plan update gives word from the Director and Lead Programmer of Starsiege about progress on OpenGL support for both Starsiege TRIBES and Starsiege, as well as a mention of a little known telnet feature in both games: Thanks Datumplane::Starsiege. Here's the poop:

As a secondary project we have been working on additional OpenGL engine changes for Starsiege and Tribes. The rendering pipeline is fairly optimal as of Starsiege patch v1.002 but we are still not seeing the FPS we should be because of poorly written drivers.

The only option remaining to us is to take as much texture management responsibilities from the driver as possible. This is a good and bad thing. The good is that it looks like we'll get a generous FPS boost by micro-managing textures. The bad is there is no reason we should have to do this. Most the hardware available today can handle many times over the textures we typically download but the drivers just cannot keep up. It's sad, there is a lot of great silicon out there that will never live up to it's potential. So micro-managing textures will compensate for driver inadequacies but will eliminate the possibility of ever really being able to push the cards to their limit.

So why all this rambling about drivers all of a sudden? Because I'm thinking of holding onto patch v1.004 for another week or so and rolling in the OpenGL engine changes now rather than doing yet another patch. v1.003 seems very solid and adding the OpenGL changes to v1.004 will make it a nice package for everyone to look forward to.

Starsiege Telnet! So there is a little undocumented feature in Starsiege (and Tribes) that many of you may be very interested in. Starsiege supports remote telnet sessions. To enable telnet just add the following lines to your autoexec.cs it's that simple.

$telnetPort = 15000; // port number
$telnetPassword = mypass; // password

You can use this for a variety of things: Remote Administration, write your own ladder monitoring tools or even extend Starsiege in ways I've never considered. Have fun if you come up with a unique application send me some mail and let me know.