LAPDOG » Gaming

Warcraft Player Trying To Level Without Killing Anyone

Glenn Batuyong — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:38:08 +0000

A college student is attempting to level two “pacifist” characters up to the top of World of Warcraft’s character progression, characters he’s playing without attacking anything. It’s partly to try out the philosophy of pacifism in the violent virtual world, and partly to see if he can do itread more | digg story

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Gaming Notebooks Get External Air Conditioning from Intel

Glenn Batuyong — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 03:51:50 +0000

There is a new cooler that is in the works to help cool down laptops to prevent throttling while playing high-performance games. A prototype docking station has been developed to air condition your gaming notebook! My MacBook Pro 17″ CPU cores get up to about 190 degrees F during World of Warcraft, even with fans full blast and while it’s on an iLap. This cooler may do the trick if adapted for the Mac.

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OpenGL components missing from Intel 10.4.7 delta upgrade

Glenn Batuyong — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 18:31:43 +0000

I didn't even know about this until I happened to be browsing the Mac tech support forums on the Blizzard World of Warcraft site the day after Mac OS X 10.4.7 came out. Apparently, if you own a Intel Mac (I own a MacBook Pro) and do a typical Software Update from 10.4.6 to 10.4.7 some improved OpenGL components will be missing. The delta upgrade is approximate 133 MB and everything else seems to work fine otherwise. Blizzard (and Apple) recommends that Intel Mac users download the combo 10.4.7 upgrade from Apple's site and install that (for 10.4.6 users and those who did a delta upgrade to 10.4.7). How big of a deal is this? Blizzard mentioned in its forums that it has been tuning performance for Macs and was making some OpenGL enhancements in conjunction with Apple. To verify that these upgrades are working and that you have the latest OpenGL components, run World of Warcraft in Windowed mode and open your Console.log. You should see some strange entries which relate to graphics similar to this:

CGxVboBroker5 activated for GL_ARRAY_BUFFER_ARB, size 2097152 for buffer slot
0, hints = 0x03

CGxVboBroker5 activated for GL_ARRAY_BUFFER_ARB, size 2097152 for buffer slot
1, hints = 0x03

…and if those do not show then you may have to download the 10.4.7 combo upgrade. I can tell you that these new OpenGL improvements bring astounding performance. I can run WOW at 1680×1050, 2x 24-bit multisampling, full screen glow, terrain distance maxed, 50% anisotrophic filtering, trilinear filtering on, and practically every other setting maxed. Best of all, I get about 30 fps all the while, even on raid runs in Zul'Gurub! Of course, it doesn't hurt that this MacBook Pro has a 256 MB ATI Mobility X1600 onboard.

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