Ah yes, having successfuly pleased 14 women in just under 90 minutes, Early Evening Reading doesnt slow down. Having been accused by Evening Reading of 'shooting his load early' Early Evening Reading begs to differ. You can examine this load yourself and make your own decision on if it is premature or not:

- Hrm, hopefully we will have one less stupid person in the world after this stunt is completed. Thanks Klerck
- Man talk about just harsh, some guy actually used his grandma as a human shield in a gunfight. Thanks thanks Mur-r3v (Fuck you Mur!)
- Global warming is going to kills us all, and the UN cant seem to decide anything about it. Suck.
- The DotCom fallout has been pretty nasty lately. Most companies are afraid to IPO now it seems. I think my own advertiser (UGO) was scheduled to IPO a few months ago but that didnt happen.

update: Looks like I spoke a bit soon, Bush has just been certified as the winner of Florida. This is of course still going to be challenged in court etc but it will be quite a surprise if the decision is overturned.

During the lazy Sunday afternoon John A. pointed the way to the Crytek Studios (Via VE I assume) the folks who have been working on a few demos for NVidia as well as their own FPS game based on their own 3D engine technology.

Action: Fast paced FPS gaming. Focus on the traditional aspects of this mode being the shooting of enemies

The screenshots also include a couple of other projects including their NVidia demo which was done with modified versions of their engine.

Tomorrow, we will actually see the werd from the Shack Contest #2 winner! :D Isn't that amazing. Finally wrote one up. It's only been since November 2 after all. Anyway..
How about that news huh? Finally the last day of the long Thanksgiving weekend. I'm pretty sure I'm happy about that. More news makes for a less bored Maarten. Although I did take the time to finally finish NOLF, which actually got better towards the end which was pretty surprising.

As you probably noticed yesterday, I implemented a compression feature on the frontpage. Unfortunately for the time being I had to remove the messages in inbox line from the datebar, as our page is rendered differently now. I know the current solution doesn't look great, so I'm looking for something better.

Everything I touch turns to shit.

Some more posts by ToddH on Quake3World (thanks Voodoo Extreme), discussing the scoring system and performance. On the scoring system sucking according to the message poster

Scoring is a topic which everyone will never be able to agree upon. If you acknowledge that point, then all the specifics and potential minutae of scoring become less significant than the point of having some sort of scoring system that is fair (even if a bit unbalanced). We recognize that no matter what we do, someone will have a system they think is "better" or "more fair". So since we will never be able to have a system that is the "best" and "fairest" in 100% of players' minds, our goal is to have a system that is "good" and "fair" and promotes teamplay.

Also, there's another post regarding powerups. Still don't have that demo? Check here for the original story.

A new version of the Assault addon pack for Unreal Tournament has been released. Two more maps have been added, and the code has been doubled. There's a full release as well as a patch. Remember, this isn't an official addon, but has gotten mad props by some of the Epic guys (CliffyB, Steven Polge).

And I see another mod will try to get commercial, Assassination. I have no idea what all these guys are thinking. Gunman must've unleashed something.

Enjoying your weekend? No? Why not? Oh wait.. because that damned Evening / Afternoon or whatever the hell its called Reading article hasnt shown up yet. Put down the knife! Its not worth it! Here just read this and remain calm...:

- Neeto! I'm pretty sure after all this TonyHawk2 playing my left thumb has developed this stuff, immortal flesh guys.
- Woah.. freaky. Some British kid has a natural magnetic aura, he sets off security alarms and stuff. Doh. Thanks S.I.W.
- Damn, looks like you cant even put goldfish in a blender anymore, at least not when the Danish authorities are around. Thanks Bryon Feller
- Just because we love it, here's some more of that Napster news.

Lastly, if you're an oldschool Nintendo fan you are obligated to check this out. Thanks Klerck.

Here's something interesting for the holidays, the Strike Force mod that was originally a project for Unreal Tournament, but then the team decided to focus towards becoming a TRIBES2 mod instead. Well, they have changed their mind again and have actually decided to go commercial:

Recently we made an announcement that we were not going to be working on Strike Force:Unreal Tournament any longer. The team is going to continue working on Strike Force, however we will be working on a commercial version of the game. Strike Force has drawn attention from several publishers that have great track records with some awesome games. We are going into the final details of the commercial deal this week. Once everything is final we will open our brand new site where you can follow the development of the new commercial Strike Force.

There is no word on who will publish the game, or what engine technology they will be basing the game off of.

Got a new feature for all the dialup users to play with this afternoon (although people on fast connections are welcome to test too), ShackCompression. Using the zlib function of PHP 4.0.1 and a feature of HTTP 1.1, we should soon be able to offer the frontpage compressed. No, you don't have to do anything yourself, it should all be transparent. HTTP 1.1 should be supported by all new IE versions, from last year and up, on Windows at least. I heard HTTP 1.1 is not supported on the Mac. Netscape 4.7 doesn't appear to work, however Netscape 6 does. Both Windows again. I'm interested to know about Linux support. To test, go to this page and at the bottom it should say something like this

Not compress length: 58101
Compressed length: 13532

You might say, woah that's a good difference, why won't it help us cable/dsl/t1/etc guys? Most likely the response time is a little higher because the server has to zip up the page. So it could be that instead of you already getting it instantly, it might actually be a little slower. There is one other group for whom it might not work any better, the people using slow computers. While most people probably have pimped out machines, people checking from college or something might only have access to slow PCs. Since the browser has to render the page on the fly, while it is decompressing, it might take longer to render. When the testing is positive and we start using it for the frontpage, there will be an option to disable it for these groups. Try it out, I'm very interested in the results.

update: Well, the test was successful and so the frontpage is now using this feature. If there are any problems email us.

As things tend to get quiet during the American holidays here's a roundup of a bunch of misc TeamArena stuff that so many people are playing the demo etc. Keep in mind the demo is standalone so you dont need Quake3 to play it, contrary to what a lot of people seem to believe.

- Strategy guide on Denken.com , PlanetQuake
- Reviews on FiringSquad , 3DAP , 3D-Unlimited , ActionTrip , theecronom , Gaming-Unlimited
- The Duffy on TeamArena thread had some posts by a couple of id guys.

After extensive testing, I still cant stand proximity mines, except for neeto rocketjumps.

Yay, went out shopping yesterday just because everyone says its a bad idea. Didnt really seem all that bad at the mall I went to and stuff was marked down like 30% on average. Not to mention all the awesome deals on N'Sync paraphernalia. I'm sold!

Netscape 4.x can kiss my ass. We should have all the page stalling problems fixed today. Thankfully 6.0 they at least figured out what an iframe is. Netscape 6 has its own set of problems though, bah? bah!

IOTD: Hey its like a theme or something for the holiday. Thanks Noj

An evil petting zoo?

Getting into the holiday weekend spirit, Evening Reading comes out its drunken stupor slightly early to reveal that even during intense inebriation, its wisdom is beyond measure. When asked just how smart Evening Reading was, it responded poignantly with "If you have to ask, smarter than you, bitch." Wow, strong words. Here it is:

- A team of scientists are claiming to have found a microbe from space. The folks at NASA say its possible.
- Those crazy drunken Germans are at it again. No doubt drowning their sorrows over that whole condom story from a while back. Thanks king_darius
- An interesting story from a few days ago, online ad companies are being hit with lawsuits about tracking people.
- Just because we needed it, more scandal surrounding the election. Vote fraud.

Lastly, checked out Unbreakable yesterday. Good stuff, not quite 6th Sense but really interesting and fun. Or you can just stay home and watch Big Lebowski again.

Robert Duffy, programmer for id Software on the Team Arena project has a .plan update discussing quite a bit about the demo release as well as some of the mod capabilities and the ordering system that people can play with. He starts out with word that he will be investigating reports of framerate problems:

[...] I've seen reports that frame-rate "feels pretty much just like Q3A" to "it was drastically slower". We will take a look and see where and when we are losing FPS.
[...]
Team Arena is going to offer some unprecedented capabilities to mod teams. The UI is entirely scripted ( the menu system, in-game system and HUD ) and you can attach videos anywhere in the UI, on the HUD, in maps, anywhere. The sound system pages things in and out as necessary so you are not limited to just a hand full of sounds. You can easily script full inventory systems, purchase systems, pretty much anything you can think of.
[...]

A roundup of a few posts made by the id Software guys about the TeamArena demo to look at on turkey-leftovers day. There is a misc tips etc post that is pretty long by ToddH. Then there is a post by Duffy talking about possible framerate help. The id guys also made a few posts to the TASecrets and TADemo threads.

You might try the following for to get some FPS back:

1. Try the mini-hud, it is under Game Options.
2. Turn OFF in-game movies, this is also under Game Options.
3. The default quality option is set to highest which turns a lot of stuff on. Fiddle with your graphics options.

I would also recommend playing with commands like cg_draw3dicons, cg_brasstime, cg_simpleitems, r_lodbias, etc etc.

Time to give this title some more coverage, don't think we had many full items about it yet. If you have been keeping up, you know Red Faction is the upcoming FPS from Volition (Descent, Freespace). Based on the GeoMod engine, Red Faction has fully destructible architecture which should make for some interesting multi and single play. There's a new interview on Playnow, and PS2.IGN has new screenshots along with a movie.

... more screenshots

Hope all the American readers had a nice Thanksgiving. As a result of this holiday, news will probably be even more slow than yesterday as everyone and their mom took yesterday and today off. So not a whole lot of content to link to. But I'll try :)

I want to thank the people of Florida for a good laugh every day. America has nice elections ;) Next time, no more ballots please. There are such things as computers.

From now on, you're in the gettin'-fucked-by-us business.

If you aren't eating right now, I'm about 99.9% sure you want Evening Reading. Well good thing I'm not having a turkey dinner, but instead I am bringing you the following

- For the people looking forward to this movie, Apple.com has a new Dungeons & Dragons trailer for you all to take a look at. Thanks BiG_GunS.
- Microsoft has for the first time talked to one of the people who hacked them. No, with the guys behind that big hack that involved possible source code stealing, but rather the Dutch (wooh) hacker who got in the web server twice in 1 week, making use of a security hole that Microsoft knew about for months and even made a patch for. They forgot to patch their own server though, which is pretty impressive.
- Hmm..cookies. Hmm, drugs bad.
- Clinton after Thanksgiving: I did not have sexual relations with that turkey.
- Gore plans to fight the results of Sunday night. That's right, after like the 3rd count of votes this coming Sunday, he still will not accept the outcome.

I would also like to announce that I hate stealth missions in games! bah!

For anyone running a Half-Life server, Halflife.net has word of a new beta patch. Their page has some notes from Eric Smith and Yahn Bernier, but basically the patch fixes an overflow crash bug, a player entity crash bug and a problem with fragmentation & reassembly of packets.

Look here, some more speculation on the power of the NV20. The German ZDNet has an article, in German obviously (but you can use Babelfish for a half-assed translation). The guys from The Register have their own interpretation. First of all, there seems to be a programmable pipeline if developers use DirectX8. This allows for optimisation when it comes to geometry, texturing, shading and lighting. As for performance, the NV20 should be up to 7x faster than the GeForce2 Ultra (according to ZDNet), most of the increase coming from an improved memory architecture. It will support 250mhz DDR SDRAM, and the chip's clock core should be higher than 250mhz. As for a release date, card manufacturers will be getting samples in December, so products should become available in January or February.

Well, almost managed a regular sleep schedule.. sorta kinda. Sleeping in general is overrated.. its that whole falling asleep part that rocks, and those dreams with the candlewax and that uhm erm.. she's not reading this is she?

TeamArena demo? I like the gametypes but that map isnt one of my favorites at all, given the other maps I've seen at tradeshows etc I just dont feel it was all that great. 120+megs can kiss my ass too, but I think that terrain stuff will be the saving grace for the pack and may justify the pricetag in a few eyes. (Although obviously, not everyones)

Happy turkeyday and all that stuff. Feel free to discuss how evil Americans are for taking over this continent.

Get off the nuclear warhead.

update: So people will quit asking, here's a demo from this morning of me playing pickup CTF, just to see if I've gotten any better since last year. First 2-4minutes are pretty slow.

Well the TeamArena demo is out and looking at the poll it looks like about 60% of the people felt it was at least average or better, which isnt too bad given the famously harsh crowd around here. But we all want more than some new gametypes, maps, and interface changes yes? Well I think I've discovered what id has been holding out on. Lookie at what I found:

... more screenshots of terrain, or full demo

Sorry about the quality of the pictures, but the zoom lens on my spy camera by the id offices had a hard time with their tinted windows. Actually here is a confirmation from Robert Duffy of id on these screenshots that I got:

"Everything in the main menu movie is from actual Team Arena gameplay footage"