Dam Small Big Cube

by jcdpc on 05/02/2004 14:19, 49 messages, last message: 05/23/2004 04:17, 13647 views, last view: 05/18/2024 20:38

I left the "n" off so it a beaver home instead a curse word. Anyway DSBC (damn small big cube) is a project that D;plomat and I thought up. I'll collect the maps and maybe write an autorun script, but I need mappers to make absolutly sure that their site and every site they know of is on my list, because thats the list i'm collecting maps and stuff off of. The Cube part of big cube will likely be under 60mg ...
I'll do the Cube part of big cube (map collection, menu updates) as long as somelse can do the linux part. Also we need some little cds.

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#1: Already have some 80mm CD's

by D.plomat on 05/02/2004 16:23

They're a bit more expensive than 120mm ordinary ones, but they're easy to find and it's funnier having a complete cube environment in the pocket. And for the tests, we can simply use an ordinary CDRW to avoid burning a new CD for each new test, only the final version should be burnt on one of those cool CDs. About business card CDs, i think they haven't enough space for this.

Eventually we should fix 128Mb as the maximal size for OS + XServer + BigCube so that it can also fit on an USB-key drive. We'll have to find somewhere to host an ISO of 128Mb... still, we can chose to only provide the authoring script that uses parts of the Knoppix and compiles an XServer with needed modules, but this will raise the requirements to be able to burn a DSBC for anyone, whereas an ISO is universal.
Anyway we'll make the authoring script available for D/L

About the 60Meg for Cube, i think we can still do much more smaller, as the only very space-consuming part is the OGGs, so we'd better replace them by MIDs/MOD's and put them back on depending on left space we have.

I'm now burning a Knoppix so i'll have some more info in some time.
About the 'GL-enabled Live CD' subproject, still remains to find a name... Dawn Small Linux GL? ;)

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#2: Knoppix DRM modules

by D.plomat on 05/02/2004 17:07

They already include the following DRM modules:

i810, i830, mga, r128, radeon, sis, tdfx

so to support a majority of video cards we just have to add the nvidia module.

But they don't have the glx nor dri loaded in the XF86Config(at least on my machine with an unsupported card). Anyone knowing better Knoppix knows if this isn't auto-generated so that on a machine with a supported card GLX and DRI would have been loaded... I'll try on a PC at the office that have a Radeon 7500 to see if it gets enabled.

Also as there is a LOT of things installed on the knoppix, maybe it'd be easier strating from scratch with just a kernel, an integrated shell like ash or busybox, a libc and an XServer.
I'll also burn a dawn small linux, to see if it makes a good place to start.

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#3: Re: Knoppix DRM modules

by Thalion on 05/02/2004 21:02, refers to #2

Frankly, I'd prefer to go for Gentoo, simply because there are no problems with drivers (everything's in Portage), it has a very good tool to author LiveCDs (Catalyst, used to make official Gentoo installations CD) with docs and all that, and it had been successfully used for exactly that purpose - game LiveCDs - in the past.

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#4: Re: Knoppix DRM modules

by D.plomat on 05/02/2004 22:03, refers to #3

I didn't knew Catalyst... funny as i've two PCs running Gentoo, so that'll be easier for me

...emerge catalyst running :)

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#5: Re: Already have some 80mm CD's

by jcdpc on 05/03/2004 00:59, refers to #1

anybody now a good free mp3-midi converter, cuz i can't find one for under $100...

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#6: hosting

by hungerburg on 05/03/2004 02:21

for hosting the iso, that might work: http://www.archive.org/web/freecache.php which is now in beta test.

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#7: ack! i have no idea what your talking about!

by jcdpc on 05/03/2004 02:47, refers to #5

i really don't know anything about what your talking about, could someone tell me what
1)Gentoo,
2)XServer,
3)Knoppix,
4)DRM modules (does that have to do with drivers?),
5)glx, 5 1/2) dri,
6) XF86Config,
7) kernel (that doesn't have anything to do with popcorn does it?),
8)integrated shell like ash or busybox, 9)a libc (is that a c library?)
and an 10) XServer are?
I would like to know what you're talking about. (the orginal idea was a big cube and enough OS to run it on a little cd, so i'm guessing these are linux things and OS parts, but i am new to such things)

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#8: Re: Already have some 80mm CD's

by Thalion on 05/03/2004 10:46, refers to #5

There is no such thing as "MP3-to-MIDI converter", really. It's pretty much the same as trying to convert a digital raster photo to vector image format, only the results (if you manage to find something which claims to be able to do it) are usually worse.

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#9: Re: ack! i have no idea what your talking about!

by Thalion on 05/03/2004 10:52, refers to #7

1)Gentoo,

A Linux distribution, customizable to a high degree. http://gentoo.org

2)XServer,

A server for X Window System. Required for GUI, and for most games.

3)Knoppix,

A Debian-based LiveCD Linux distribution.

4)DRM modules (does that have to do with drivers?),

DRM = Direct Rendering Manager. It's an OS-specific thing to handle direct hardware access. Gives some benefites, but in general it is not required for graphics.

5)glx

That's OpenGL for X Window System.

5 1/2) dri,

Direct Rendering Interface. An interface to DRM =)

6) XF86Config

Configuration file for XFree86, which is one of the possible X Window servers. Another (useful) one is Xorg - which I use BTW.

7) kernel (that doesn't have anything to do with popcorn does it?),

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(computer_science)

8)integrated shell like ash or busybox,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system_shell

9)a libc (is that a c library?)

Yes, exactly =)

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#10: Re: ack! i have no idea what your talking about!

by jcdpc on 05/03/2004 12:22, refers to #9

thank you. :)

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#11: Re: Already have some 80mm CD's

by dcp on 05/03/2004 21:55, refers to #8

there are some applications, that can analyze and convert a MONOPHONIC audiosignal to MIDI. but at the moment it's impossible to convert complex audio material like complete songs to MIDI.

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#12: Re: Already have some 80mm CD's

by jcdpc on 05/03/2004 22:08, refers to #11

i read up on it, I heard that it's basically trying to convert played music to sheet music. and i have seen some convertors but they didn't give any samples, or any explanation of how they worked, so...
i'm working away on big cube, altough i have thought of a problem. what do i do with it when i'm done? It's too big to put on my site or to email to anyone...

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#13: another problem

by jcdpc on 05/04/2004 03:18

how many cds do you have? I figure there are about 50 cubers. (wanna know how i got that number?, yeah you do... I got 155 different visitors on my site, and I only told one person from school, and I know he didn't tell anyone, as he doesn't really have anyone to tell (poor guy), and , and i figure each cuber has about 3 different computers (between school and home) so thats 51 and 2/3's but since it's not nice to chop people into thirds (halfs are ok though) and I round down to 50. Not every cuber has been to my site, but most have, and not every cuber has 3 computers from which to log on, so it's not very accurate, but...)
BTW, i should have a nicer looking site shortly, >driAn< is helping me out a lot with this, so big thanks to him.

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#14: ..

by e:n:i:g:m:a on 05/04/2004 04:05

Well... you could just get someone to host an ISO image, have the cubers download it and...

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#15: ..

by staffy02 on 05/04/2004 09:08

put it on fileplanet for free.

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#16: Re: another problem

by makkE on 05/04/2004 11:06, refers to #13

there are much more than 50 cubers I believe, also some ppl have changing ip´s like me.. :)

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#17: One way to get a ballpark figure...

by e:n:i:g:m:a on 05/05/2004 04:55

Well one way to get some idea, is to look at the total number of downloads on the sourceforge site. Assume five downloads per person to include people that downloaded it multiple times or downloaded it and didn't play it. That makes something like 90, right?

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#18: Re: One way to get a ballpark figure...

by staffy02 on 05/05/2004 08:07, refers to #17

there are 158,169 total downloads over the last 210 days.

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#19: Re: One way to get a ballpark figure...

by jcdpc on 05/05/2004 12:28, refers to #18

i dont think there are 3,000 cubers. well there might be. I'd say that theres only about 50 cubers who post on the forum, but there's probably a lot more who just play the game and might not even know about it's powerfull mapping capabilities.

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#20: Re: One way to get a ballpark figure...

by D.plomat on 05/05/2004 13:46, refers to #19

I also sometime plays net games, i would say that on an average in net games, there is ~10% of regular players that are also active on the forum (assuming that ppl takes the same nick in games and on the forum, and they doesn't often change it)... seems reasonable to me... if 500 regular *internet* cubers *on public servers*, 3000 occasionnal is probably close to reality... about those who played cube 2-3 times, we can use the # of downloads and safely assume that only regular or occasionnal cubers have downloaded it more than one time so this is negligible compared to the #downloads it self. Then we should estimate what % of ppl downloading the game doesn't play it, doesn't manage to run it because bad hw or no OpenGL drivers, but even if we assume that only 50% ppl that downloaded it played it, there are still many ppl that knows Cube :)

...still deducing the # of cubers from the forum_ppl/inet_cubers ratio is probably very inaccurate and statistically incorrect because this doesn't take into account forum_ppl that don't play mp internet public games(*), in fact it's the (forum_ppl AND inet_cubers)/inet_cubers that i'm estimating...

* don't know if that is a large part...

About Google, Cube is now ranking up to #2 on google.fr :)
...looks like it takes much time to update their databases, as it's the wouter.fov120.com url here, not the www.cubeengine.com

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