A steam of random things

Awards: Hey, we’ve got a “runner up” award in Apple Design Awards 2006, Best Use of Graphics category! Yeah, a runner up is more like “the first of the losers”, but oh well. Got beaten by modo 201, which probably is a fair trade. It’s just that we thought we’d be in Best Developer Tool category, but that is apparently for text editors and scripting languages :)

Demos: In the other news, fellow ReJ with TBL just won Assembly 2006 demo competition with an Amiga demo, putting all PC demos faces’ to dust. Check it out. Art direction over hardware capabilities, one more time.

Drivers: why oh why the graphics drivers must be so bad? The other day I was thinking why can’t they auto-update themselves (with an option to turn it off for corporate users etc.). Now you’ve got a (not so recent!) driver that is able to parse vertex programs wrong, and a user who does not have a clue that he should update it. It’s bad enough to have a bug in the first place, but auto-update at least would fix…

Or you have a driver that says “I’m OpenGL 1.2!” but the 3D texture functions are null. And it’s the most recent driver for a particular graphics card that you can buy today! And it’s not even a hard problem! What the developers are thinking - they go over the required GL 1.2 functionality, see that some is actually missing and decide “ah, screw it, we’ll say it’s 1.2 anyways”?!

I just don’t get it. I could use some enlightenment on this.