Doom-Ed

F50 pros and cons vs F40:

The front and rear views are definately cooler on the F50, but I think I
like the F40 side view better. I haven’t taken the top off the F50 yet,
though (its supposed to be a 40 minute job…).

Adjustable front suspension. Press a button and it raises two inches,
which means you can actually drive it up into strip malls. The F40 had
to be driven into my garage at an angle to keep the front from rubbing.
This makes the car actually fairly practical for daily driving.

Drastically better off idle torque. You have to rev the F40 a fair amount
to even get it moving, and if you are moving at 2000 rpm in first gear,
a honda can pull away from you until it starts making boost at 3500 rpm.
The f50 has enough torque that you don’t even need to rev to get moving,
and it goes quite well by just flooring it after you are moving. No need
to wreck a clutch by slipping it out from 4000 rpm.

Much nicer clutch. The F40 clutch was a very low-tech single disk clutch
that required more effort than on my crazy TR with over twice the torque.

Better rearward visibility. The F40’s lexan fastback made everything to
your rear a blur.

Better shifting. A much smoother six speed than the F40’s five speed.

Better suspension. Some bumps that would upset the F40 badly are handled
without any problems.

Better aerodynamics. A flat underbody with tunnels is a good thing if you
are going to be moving at very high speeds.

I beleive the F50 could probably lap a road coarse faster than the F40, but
in a straight line, the F40 is faster. The F50 felt a fair amount slower,
but I was chalking that up to the lack of non-linear turbo rush. Today I
drove it down to the dyno and we got real numbers.

It only made 385 hp at the rear wheels, which is maybe 450 at the crank if
you are being generous. The F40 made 415, but that was with the boost
cranked up a bit over stock.

We’re going to have to do something about that.

I’m thinking that a mild twin-turbo job will do the trick. Six pounds of
boost should get it up to a health 500 hp at the rear wheels, which will
keep me happy. I don’t want to turn it into a science project like my
TR, I just want to make sure it is well out of the range of any normal
cars.

I may put that in line after my GTO gets finished.

Yes, I bought an F50. No, I don’t want a McLaren.

We will be going back to the dragstrip in a couple weeks, and I will be
exercising both the F50 and the TR there. Cash’s supercharged M3 will
probably show some of the porsches a thing or two, as well.

I’ll probably rent a road coarse sometime soon, but I’m not in too much of
a hurry to run the F50 into the weeds.

My TR finally got put back together after a terrific nitrous explosion
just before the last dragstrip. It now makes 1000.0 hp at the rear wheels.
Contrast that with the 415 rear wheel hp that the F40 made. Of cource, a
loaded testarossa does weigh about 4000 lbs…

My project car is somewhat nearing completion. My mechanic says it will
be running in six weeks, but mechanics can be even more optimistic than
software developers. I’m betting on fall. It should really be something
when completed: a carbon fiber bodied ferrari GTO with a custom, one-of-a
kind billet alluminum 4 valve DOHC 5.2L V12 with twin turbos running
around 30 lbs of boost. It should be good for quite a bit more hp than my
TR, and the entire car will only weigh 2400 lbs.

———

The distance between a cool demo and production code is vast. Two months
ago, I had some functional demos of several pieces of the Quake 3 rendering
tech, but today it still isn’t usable as a full replacement for ref_gl yet.

Writing a modern game engine is a lot of work.

The new architecture is turning out very elegent. Not having to support
software rendering or color index images is helping a lot, but it is also
nice to reflect on just how much I have learned in the couple years since
the original Quake renderer was written.

My C coding style has changed for Quake 3, which is going to give me a nice
way of telling at a glance which code I have or haven’t touched since
Quake 2. In fact, there have been enough evolutions in my style that you
can usually tell what year I wrote a piece of code by just looking at
a single function:

/*
=============
=
= Function headers like this are DOOM or earlier
=
=============
*/

/*
=============
Function Headers like this are Quake or later
=============
*/

{
// comments not indented were written on NEXTSTEP
// (quake 1)

// indented comments were written on
// Visual C++ (glquake / quakeworld, quake2)
}

for (testnum=0 ; testnum<4 ; testnum++)
{ // older coding style
}

for (testNumber = 0 ; testNumber < 4 ; testNumber++) {
// quake 3 coding style
}

F40 + $465,000 = F50

Things are progressing reasonably well on the Quake 3 engine.

Not being limited to supporting a 320*240 256 color screen is
very, very nice, and will make everyone’s lives a lot easier.

All of our new source artwork is being done in 24 bit TGA files,
but the engine will continue to load .wal files and .pcx files
for developer’s convenience. Each pcx can have its own palette
now though, because it is just converted to 24 bit at load time.

Q3 is going to have a fixed virtual screen coordinate system,
independant of resolution. I tried that back in the original
glquake, but the fixed coordinate system was only 320*200, which
was excessively low. Q2 went with a dynamic layout at different
resolutions, which was a pain, and won’t scale to the high resolutions
that very fast cards will be capable of running at next year.

All screen drawing is now done assuming the screen is 640*480, and
everything is just scaled as you go higher or lower. This makes
laying out status bars and HUDs a ton easier, and will let us
do a lot cooler looking screens.

There will be an interface to let game dlls draw whatever they want
on the screen, precisely where they want it. You can suck up a lot
of network bandwidth doing that though, so some care will be needed.

–

Going to the completely opposite end of the hardware spectrum from
quake 3…

I have been very pleased with the fallout from the release of the
DOOM source code.

At any given spot in design space, there are different paths you
can take to move forward. I have usually chosen to try to make a
large step to a completely new area, but the temptation is there
to just clean up and improve in the same area, continuously
polishing the same program.

I am enjoying seeing several groups pouring over DOOM, fixing it
up and enhancing it. Cleaning up long standing bugs. Removing
internal limitations. Orthogonalizing feature sets. Etc.

The two that I have been following closest are Team TNT’s BOOM
engine project, which is a clear headed, well engineered
improvement on the basic DOOM technical decisions, and Bruce Lewis’
glDoom project.

Any quakers feeling nostalgic should browse around:

http://www.doomworld.com/

Drag strip day! Most of the id guys, John Romero from ION,
and George and Alan from 3drealms headed to the Ennis
dragstrip today.

Nobody broke down, and some good times were posted.

11.9 @ 122 John Carmack F40
12.2 @ 122 George Broussard custom turbo 911
12.4 @ 116 Brian Hook Viper GTS
13.4 @ 106 John Romero custom turbo testarossa
13.6 @ 106 Todd Hollenshead ‘vette
13.9 @ 100 Paul Steed 911
14.0 @ 99 Tim Willits 911
14.3 @ 101 Bear Turbo Supra
14.4 @ 98 Alan Blum turbo rx-7
14.7 @ 92 Brandon James M3
15.3 @ 92 Christian Boxster
15.5 @ 93 Jen (Hook’s Chick) Turbo Volvo
16.1 @ 89 Ms. Donna Mustang GT
17.4 @ 82 Anna (Carmack’s Chick) Honda Accord
18.1 @ 75 Jennifer (Jim Molinets’ Chick) Saturn

We had three significant no-shows for various reasons: my TR,
Adrian’s viper, and Cash’s supercharged M3 were all in the shop.