Dynamix' Tim Gift made a big .plan update giving the status of the TRIBES 1.3 patch, which he says will be released Monday. Here's the update:

The good news is Starsiege went GOLD. This was a little overshadowed by some bad news, layoffs at Dynamix due to the re-org that was announced the other day. The TRIBES team is still here, but this hasn't been a very productive week.

OpenGL status: basically we're ready to release the beta driver except for the TNT's performance. I thought we were close to resolving our last issues here, but we've stalled. We can't get the TNT OpenGL drivers to download textures at anything approaching a reasonable rate. Unfortunately, TRIBES does a fair amount of on the fly construction of textures, mainly for the terrain. The TNT driver does not seem capable of dealing with it. (Dave Moore goes into general OpenGL issues in his latest plan.) Not having access to TNT's source code, or any form of data from the driver, it has been difficult to figure out what's going on. I hate to say "go buy a 3Dfx card", but at this point we're running out of ideas, and unless nVidia get's us more information (or fixes their driver), were probably not going to make much more progress. There is no reason to believe that the TNT cards can't handle our requirements. It's frustrating, if we knew the card couldn't handle it, we would have dropped it long ago. We believe the card can handle the load, we just can't get the TNT driver to perform. There have been some ideas on crippling the game to work around the problem, but those ideas don't appeal to me too much. Another option may be DirectX6, as those drivers may be better optimized. We'll continue to investigate.

In the mean time, we are getting tired of holding back the 1.3 release, as I'm sure most of our players are, so we are going to go ahead and release it. We'll put the build together on Monday. 1.3 will include the beta OpenGL driver, but it will be disabled by default. We'll include instructions on how to enable it if you want to try it out, but there are some serious pauses when new textures are downloaded, most of you will probably not want to play this way.

Starsiege just shipped with our OpenGL driver and does suffer the same problem, but to a lesser degree. Starsiege has it's terrain and interiors configured differently, and being a slower paced game, it downloads textures less often.

I took a look at Shogo's patch progress page (thanks Chas), http://www.shogo-mad.com/patch/fix.as, pretty cool. We'll look into to doing something similar ourselves. It should help keep you guys informed as to what we're working on.