Hingis' autograph did arrive last friday. But there were so many
events this weekend, that I simply did not find time to post it.
Martina now weights 59 Kg and measures 1.70 m high. She is not
as swiss as you might think. She was born in Slovakia and she will
be 19 years old, next 30 September 1999.
Martina will eventually accept your fan correspondence @ this
postal address, BUT you will have to be a great writer to deserve
her efforts. BTW, she is not dating no one right now :-) and
she never really had a boyfriend. There was this american dude, named
Justin Gimelstob, and some Julian Alonso, but it is all over [we
all hope!].
Sarah Michelle Gellar, currently world's most desirable
female, will begin shooting a NEW movie, day 25 May 1999. The movie is
called "Simply Irresistible", and it features Sarah and Sean
Patrick Flanery, in a regular love story, that will probably NEVER debut
in Europe, and go straight to the video rental market. All the footage
will be taken in New York, as you would expect from someone being a vampire
slayer, 7 days a week. Really!
Buffy, the Vampire Slayer is always on the road, and it
is not trivial for Sarah Gellar to find time for other projects, unless
they are 100% made in the USA. Still, she starred in the great "I
know what you did last Summer" [links to 9 April 1999 news],
and in some other not so famous films... including this one... whose
name I shall NOT reveal [go video hunting!], where she actually kisses
another chick in the mouth! Quite a rare moment...
Delta Force is new PC game from NOVALOGIC. It's a first
person 3D game, that does NOT support 3DFX acceleration (neither VOODOO1
nor VOODOO2 chipsets)! For those of you into gaming, this is quite a surprise,
since the whole 3D genre has been growing thanks to the VOODOO polygon power...
and that is exactly where the whole problem is: polygons...
Nowadays 3D worlds are being made with polygons, projected
from a 3D mathematic reality into a 2D display. The polygons are usually
triangles, which are very fast to draw, rotate and texture, and most of the
3D acceleration hardware is being built on the belief that triangles will
still rule the world, for another 2, 3 years. But there are alternatives
to polygons, or, at least, to the way you use them.
One of the most interesting alternatives to the 3D polygon
pumping engines, is the VOXEL way, where voxel stands for volume pixel, and
where the strangest things can happen, such as a very complex scenary being
FASTER to render than some not-so-complex scenaries! How can this be?! Haven't
we all learned that "more" always means "slower"? Well,
the voxel technique renders the scene from the front to the back, meaning
that volumes that cannot be seen, will simply not be drawn... AND, more important,
every other thing that is behind what cannot be seen, will not even get a
chance at the renderer pipeline. Smart, but very hard to implement, because
traditional buffering of computational data cannot be done.
Delta Force is using a proprietary VOXEL engine, and
that is the reason why it is a nightmare to port it to the VOODOO. The VOODOO
is a hell of a polygon oriented machine, giving very little (none?) support
for other paths.
Now, about the game itself, I must say it is superb.
I use riffle weapons a lot, and I am still @ the 4th Peru mission. May be
some Delta Force pictures tomorrow...
