2006-03-12

Quake 3

http://www.plastk.net/

It's amazing how much more fun games are when you can play them on really large, high-resolution screens. Our HCI lab at Virginia Tech also has a 24 monitor display wall, and as you can see from the pictures below, I got Quake 3 running on it. The system is driven by 12 linux servers (2 monitors per server) using Distributed Multihead X (DMX) and Chromium. Chromium distributes the OpenGL rendering from the head node to all of the servers. The game runs fairly fast, though some lighting effects had to be turned off and Chromium is having some trouble with the mouse. Even so, playing the game is an awesome experience. Feel free to email me (plastk@vt.edu) with what you think.



Quake 3 running at 10240x3072 resolution at 15-30 FPS





A view of our 12-node Linux cluser resting behind the display.



Another view of the cluster/display with our ViCON system in the background.