The development of Steel Beasts began in 1996. 3D accelerator cards were neither popular nor available at that time. Historically it all began with the development of a new rendering engine that allowed better terrain display from close to the ground with stunning results at little CPU expense. Unfortunately our team consists of just one full time programmer, Al Delaney.

The availability of 3D acceleration depends on the version of XFree86 you are using and the type of video chip you have. If you have an NVIDIA chip, you can use the binary drivers provided for FreeBSD 4.7 on the Drivers section of their website. For other cards with XFree86-4, including the Matrox G200/G400, ATI Rage 128/Radeon, and 3dfx Voodoo 3, 4, 5, and Banshee, information on hardware acceleration is available on the XFree86-4 Direct Rendering on FreeBSD page. Users of XFree86 version 3.

No. This sort of hardware support would be most useful as part of a proper 3D API, which Allegro is not, and will never be. If you want to do some work on this, the MESA library (a free implementation of OpenGL) is IMHO the place to start. However, if you are interested in using OpenGL for graphics and Allegro for everything else, you can try the various add-ons libraries linked from http://www.allegro.cc/ such as AllegroGL.

Yes. Now 3D Acceleration hardware is a recommendation and not a requirement. All that is needed is a fast PC or - even better - a 3D graphics acceleration chip or board with 4 MB or more of video RAM. This is not required, but is very useful for speeding up the effects creation process. With a 3D acceleration chip or board, rendering times are completely eliminated. But without 3D acceleration hardware, rendering times are dependent on hardware speed.

Steel Beasts is now in retail stores in North America. It will soon be in retail stores in Europe, as well.

Steel Beasts is aimed at the serious sim fans. If you want an action shooter, you're probably better off with a different game. There are a lot of tank action games on the market by some big name publishers. If you like a simulation that gives you a precise impression of what our tank crews have to do to successfully end their missions, Steel Beasts is the right thing for you.

Currently, in-game text is localized to Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish and Swedish. In-game voices are localized to Danish, English, German, and Swedish. The manual is available only in English.

There's two basic approaches to creating campaigns. They can either be dynamically generated, or be a set of missions that are linked together as a mission tree, where the outcome of one battle will determine what scenario will be presented next. The Steel Beasts game system is fully based on scripted missions. This doesn't allow the dynamic generation of scenarios, they have to be created manually.

It is common for recent graphics chips to support some level of the MPEG-2 decode in hardware. This offloads the CPU from performing the same decode tasks. For less CPU usage, make sure that the "Hardware acceleration" setting on the NVDVD Video property page is enabled. When hardware acceleration is enabled, the "Decoder Format" section of the NVDVD Video property page will indicate the DXVA mode that is currently being used.

In Windows 98, Microsoft decided to disable OpenGL hardware acceleration when multiple monitors are enabled. In Windows NT 4.0, some drivers support multiple monitors when using identical (or nearly identical) cards. I don't believe multiple monitors and hardware accelerated OpenGL work with different types of cards. I don't know the story with Windows 2000, but it's likely to be similar to Windows NT 4.0.

Go to the web page of your graphic card vendor and look for help there. Most of the time, a driver update should do the trick. You can check there if 3D acceleration is supported for your version of Windows, too. For an automated setup for older video cards, try GLSetup.

QuickDraw 3D acceleration is accomplished through the QuickDraw 3D RAVE API (Application Programmers Interface). QuickDraw 3D RAVE is Apple®'s API for Hardware acceleration. QuickDraw 3D RAVE is included with QuickDraw 3D 1.0.6 or later and is installed in the extensions folder. Any application that properly supports QuickDraw 3D or QuickDraw 3D RAVE is accelerated by Xclaim™ VR or Xclaim™ 3D.

The performance of QuickDraw 3D is up to 6X the performance of a Power Macintosh® 9500 running with software only. This performance should be realized on any PCI-based Mac® OS computer using Xclaim™ VR or Xclaim™ 3D as the performance is a function of the ATI 3D RAGE II & 3D RAGE PRO engine. QuickDraw 3D performance is due to a number of factors.

Play the tutorials. We have created a large set of tutorial missions to keep the learning curve relatively low. There still is a lot to learn (and there are good reasons why it takes the Army more than a year to forge a tank commander out of a recruit, and a couple of years to make platoon leaders out of tank commanders). However, we feel confident that if you're interested in modern day armor combat, you'll want to ride the "Steel Beasts".

Not exactly. We don't simulate IVIS equipped tanks, so all tactical symbols in the map reflect the last radio reports, which are normally simulated by you clicking on the unit symbol's "hot-spot" in the lower left corner of each unit. They will be updated in intervals depending on various variables, and if you click on the symbol of a unit under your command, it's current position will be updated (simulating a request to report it's situation).

All of the new RAGE 128 graphics boards have integrated DVD/MPEG-2 decode (IDCT and Motion Compensation) for industry leading DVD with the lowest possible CPU usage. With a DVD drive and ATI’s DVD player*, the customer can achieve full frame rate, full screen DVD playback without the added expense of purchasing a separate hardware DVD decode module as is required with other competing products (not to mention saving one of your computer’s slots!).

We get regular requests from people wanting to update First Encounters for hardware 3D cards or to run under Linux etc etc. We are currently planning to make the sources available to members of the Elite Club.

There are several options, depending on what video card you have (roughly in order of installation difficulty): Utah GLX + XFree3.3.x - ATI RagePro, Matrox G200/400, and some others. Installation is usually painless. NVIDIA GLX + XFree4 - NVIDIA cards. If you follow the install instructions carefully, you are far less likely to have problems. DRI + XFree4 - 3dfx, ATI, Matrox, et. al. Some distributions are shipping DRI enabled XF4 drivers, so installation is a non-issue.

There are currently three nVidia module packages in the stable APT repository. Which one to use depends on the model of your video card: The first is the newest nvidia module (version 1.0.9755), which works on newer hardware but is not backward compatible. The other two are the legacy modules which work with "older" hardware. If you're unsure which legacy driver to use, there's a list of card model numbers which relate to each driver package at http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_32667.

This is free documentation; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation, with the following additional permissions: The copyright holder releases all licensees from the requirements of sections 2a and 2c of the GNU General Public License, version 2.

Even though your application may not support alpha channels, you may be able to specify a color in the image that is transparent. For instance you may assign black (RGB-0,0,0) to be transparent. For these applications, use the TIFF files included with each collection. All of the non-object areas of the images are black (RGB-0,0,0).

Official Answer: This is by design. Graphics Acceleration is disabled by default, which disables DirectX functionality. This is to enhance server stability and is not needed in standard server scenarios. Re-enabling such functionality is not a valid server testing scenario. Unofficial Answer: To enable Direct X, you must first enable graphics acceleration.

There are certain limitations of technical nature that a PC based simulation cannot overcome for technical reasons. One of the most obvious things is the keyboard as an input device. Where a tank crew has a lot of switches to operate in various locations all around the individual crewman, a PC tanker has a joystick at best, and the keyboard and his mouse at worst as his main input devices. You cannot perform basic gunnery procedures with that.

No other 3D chipsets are supported by Carmageddon. There are no patches for cards like the rendition, powerVR, ViRGE, etc, and Carmageddon does not support OpenGL or Direct3D. For the PC, I advise using the auto-installing 3Dfx patch. It has a file check to avoid attempting to install an incomplete download, a nice user interface, a FAQ, etc. In order for the 3Dfx patch to work properly, you must have Glide installed and run the game in full DOS mode.

Various enterprises have different requirements with regards to XML. XML may be in limited use, or you are just starting to experiment with XML deployment. The Stampede Web 2.0 Performance Series makes it easy to match a solution to your needs. Limited XML use can be addressed through a less expensive software option. As the XML demands increase, the hardware option utilizes specifically designed parallel hardware for the most effective acceleration available.

Out of the box, the Repro disables your desktop wallpaper when it starts and re-enables it exits. You can prevent Repro from disabling your wallpaper by clicking on the Repro Recorder System Tray Icon > Preferences > Video, and uncheck the "Disable desktop wallpaper while Repro is running." Desktop wallpaper is often difficult to compress. You can reduce performance overhead while recording and also reduce the size of the compressed Repro file by leaving this option checked.