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Saturday, April 25 4:41pm

HexenWorld Siege
Here is some email from Phoebus describing Mike Gummelt's commitment to supporting HexenWorld. Exciting news?

I just received word from Mike (Cosmos) Gummelt that he's agreed to volunteer to "support" HexenWorld and Siege, once their final versions have been released. I (Phoebus) will be his point man, so you can direct any complaints/suggestions to me. I'm in the process of compiling everything into an organized list to send to Cosmos periodically, so he doesn't have to go through 500 different messageboard posts and emails.

TombRaider 2 Demo
The Eidos guys felt it was time to release another demo of their TombRaider game. This time we get to stare at Lara's butt in Venice. It's only 3.6megs so not such a bad download, just wait till your parents go out for the night and have a blast. Don't play with Lara too much though, I've seen one too many guys with hairy palms from this game.

Barrage Demo
A new demo of the Barrage game is now online. Just check out the PCRL and have fun.

QuakeWorld Tournies
With the word that Zoid is working on the final installment of QuakeWorld, and the recent huge surge of players moving to Quake1 QuakeWorld, a number of leagues are popping back up to give all these clans and players something to do:

PGL Haxors
I forgot to link this a few days ago but I figured this is something everyone saw coming. When you hold an online tournement, and there is large amounts of money involved, people are bound to do things that you just cant get away with in a LAN tournament. Check out this Next-Gen article describing players who were booted from the PGL this past week. (At least these are the guys who have been caught)

Hardware

The Views

Quake2 Land
All the things that are Quake2

werd
Weekends are cool.

 

Friday, April 23 4:41pm

Duke4 Shot -updated
George Broussard updated the ol' .plan file with news that we will finally be getting to check out another shot of the Duke4ever project . -VE

Against better judgement, but bowing to immense team pressure here, I think we will release a new DNF screen shot on our web site sometime tomorrow. ;)

This is the first public shot since last November or so, and a lot has changed (like the move to 100% 16 bit source art). I think you'll like what you'll see. We are still keeping 99% of the game shrouded in secrecy though, so don't expect too much. Just a taste of what's to come.

Amen
CaveDog, the guys who made that game half the world seems to be playing, Total Annihilation, has announced their 3D FPS game that has been under wraps for a while now. (Remember about 6 months ago when they were hiring 3d mappers?) -MeccaWorld

Amen: The Awakening (Scheduled for Summer 1999)

A 3D first-person action-adventure experience of epic proportions, Amen: The Awakening immerses players in an incredibly realistic and frightening world. Players will assume the role of a foolhardy British commando who is swept into an action-packed adventure that chronicles the end of human civilization, as we know it. Because of its attention to detail, scope and plot, Amen: The Awakening will appeal to the action crowd as well as fans of role-playing games and adventure games.

SiN, Half-Life, Unreal
Geoff Keighley wrote up this article on GameSlice talking about the possible delay of SiN. Ritual Entertainment has always been targeting the Spring of 1998 and has yet to announce otherwise. My favorite quote from the article has to be this paragraph:

Although the release dates for Half-Life and Sin seem to be somewhat up in the air, it appears as if
Epic’s Unreal is finally going to be released, as promised, by the end of June. Despite the fact that many are calling the game vaporware, it’s finally arriving, and will most likely deliver incredible visuals and addictive gameplay. As Epic announced a few weeks ago, the full game will be packaged with a beta version of the Unreal level editor. This is sure to turn Unreal into the latest add-on level craze, most likely even surpassing the popularity of Quake levels, due in part to its intuitive level editor.

I guess if you make enough release date promises, you are bound to hit one sooner or later...

Q2 Tourney
Check it, GamesCon / VRGN tourney tonight:

Ok everyone get ready, because Friday April 25 begins one of the best tourneys to be held online. Why is it so good? A stack of prizes, including a Creative Labs Voodoo2 w/ 12 megs, 2 copies of Unreal (when it gets released, of course), and a copy of Myth.

The details!
Where: EFNET or GAMESNET, in #gamescon When: 8pm EST if you can, but playing will guaranteed start at 9pm EST (this is to accomodate our friends on the west coast, who are 3 hours behind) How: A greeting message will appear when you enter the channel. Me (Blood) and sCary will be there. The greeting message will give you exact nstructions on how to submit your details, so I can pair you up, and hand you over to sCary who will set you up on a server.

Blood2
The official Blood2 - The Chosen page was updated yesterday -- even more screenshots and an update by Jay "Shade" Wilson -VE

QuakeWorld League
The QIL League is going strong with several matches played last night, and more scheduled for this weekend. (The r3v / LGC match Saturday night should be a humdinger)

Speaking of QuakeWorld, Zoid has been hard at work with the new Client. He recruited some NQ players to try it out, and for once they actually enjoyed it. This may finally cause the merging of the NQ and QW scenes into one unified group.

Clan Arena!
The most popular mod being played in the land of Quake1 (aside from TF and CTF) is Clan Arena. Clan Arena v1.3 is now available for download at:
http://www.planetquake.com/servers/arena This is a new version of the Clan Arena server that fixes minor bugs, and includes the Clan Arena source code!

If you have not yet tried Clan Arena, I emplore you, you *must* try this mod. It's better than sliced bread!

More Raven departures
Although aCtivision denies any problems with their in house development teams, there seems to be a constant flow of employees leaving. Check out the latest 2 guys to leave in this GameSpot article linked by our man Scott Miller.

LithTech
The engine formerly known as DirectEngine, the LithTech engine will be releasing another demo on April 30th. The new demo will include of course a bunch of new tools / compatibilties. Ther is no word on if it will feature that damned irritating "key" crap that wasted so much time. Nothing more irritating than downloading a 30 meg demo and having Monolith decide you arent cool enough to look at their engine.

GameLaunch
The program that will launch a program that will launch a program. GameLaunch handles all your 3d gaming needs. Check out the new version at www.gamelaunch.com Ther is support for tweaking your Voodoo1/2 boards in ther btw.

The Views

The LAN's
Couple announcments on the LAN scene:

Hardware

Q2 Mods
The daily dose of poison:

werd
Hi, I'm back. Anyone ever do that "pull my finger" joke and then couldnt follow through with it? It sucks so bad when you find that rare person who still has not heard that joke (usually a foreign dude) and then nothing happens. Then not only does he look like an idiot, but so do you.

 

Wednesday , April 22 7:48pm

MacQuakeWorld
It's here, finally the Mac guys can join in on the fun of QuakeWorld. Check out the Westlake Interactive website and snag your copy. Here is a quote:

This is the first public beta version of the Mac QuakeWorld client. The readme file enclosed with the archive explains more about setting up and using Mac QuakeWorld. Report bugs to qwbeta@westlakeinteractive.com, remember no technical support is provided for QuakeWorld, it is a free unsupported add-on for registered Quake owners.

GameSpy 3D beta2
A new version of GameSpy has been released over at www.gamespy.com if you are a registered user, have fun. If not, cough up the $20 you turd.

Blood2 Shots?
Billy thinks these are some new shots posted on Blood2: The Chosen site. I don't keep track of them myself, but if you are a LithTech / Blood2 fan, see for yourself. They do look pretty interesting though.

Forsaken
Forsaken is ahead of schedule! This Forsaken page has posted that the game will actually be out for you guys to play as soon as 2 days from now. The ultimate in 3D eye candy. (And poor texture alignments)

IE5.0
ZDNet has posted this little article talking about the next version of Internet Explorer. It seems they have figured out that people really dont like downloading 80megs for a web browser! omg! They must have hired some rocket scientests.

Magicman leaving Rogue
Steve Thoms, aka Magicman after only a short time spent at Rogue Entertainment is moving on to Nihilistic according to his .plan update:

Redwood's Rumor Mill...err...Redwood's 3D News had a small post about me leaving Rogue. Redwood knows his stuff...my last day at Rogue is approaching quickly. I will be joining the rest of the crew at Nihilistic early in May. I've had the best time working with this psychotic...err...friendly bunch here. But, I can't wait to get started building a new company and making a big impression in the game industry.

Riot Stuff
Craig Hubbard updated the Monolith site with this bit of info:

We'll be revamping the Riot site soon with new info on mecha, weapons (including on foot weapons), enemies, and major characters. Expect lots of cool images, too.

Also, for anyone in doubt, Riot is not a mech sim. It's an anime-inspired first person action game with mecha. You'll go from on foot areas to mecha areas--each mode featuring its own arsenal of 10 weapons (technically 23 in all, since each MCA has its own kickass melee weapon).

The difference between being on foot and in an MCA is that MCAs can take more relative damage, step on foot soldiers, transform, and have instrinsic special powers (still subject to playtesting, mind you).

Our MCAs stomp on space marines for breakfast and run circles around every lumbering, slow-ass, unmanueverable mech you've ever driven. ;)

GameWaves
Got this email you guys may be interested in:

On Wednesday April 22, the first RealAudio show from Game Waves will debut. Featuring the latest reports on industry news, demo and game reviews, game previews, and witty analysis of current gaming industry trends. Game Waves is normally scheduled to air live Wednesdays at 8pm Pacific, but this week's show is pre-recorded. Topics of the first show include:

+ Previews: Daikatana and Soldiers at War
+ Demo Reviews: Panzer Commander and Dominion: Storm Over Gift3
+ Game Review: Triple Play 99
+ Commentary: Computer game magazine ads and .plan files

Game Waves http://www.grcompany.com/GameWaves

The Views

It's an adventure IN DAYS on the Daily Dementia, with Part One of an interview with Jason Hall the CEO of Monolith talking about the LithTech Engine and Riot: Mobile Armor -- Which goes gold in July! In the Spotlight: Swarm & Renegade 3D; Blue does Half-Life; Scott Miller dips the toes again; Shuga Shack found; Imus & TC; Voodoo Extreme gets a facejob -- Running time: 16 minutes, 57 seconds

Hardware

Mods

Sites

werd
So like, I overslept today or something. Weird, wasnt up unusually late or anything.

Tuesday and Wednesday section updated, although I didnt get around to doing Monday's.

 

 

 

Tuesday, April 21 4:52pm

Daikatana Shots Explained
AVault has just posted this really juicy info straight from John Romero describing all of the new screenshots that he just released for you to gaze upon and be enlightened. Speaking of Romero, Tom Gladstone sends word that there is a "HUGE ASS" article on Mr. Ion Storm in this weeks issue of NewsWeek.

btw, Austin Powers, DVD, life is good. Someone find me Trojan War on DVD now..

Carmack on Trinity
This Trinity site has posted yet aother email response from John Carmack talking about his work on Quake2, here is a quote, check out the page for the rest of the email:

Quake 3 will be set up so that you can get a good speedup with dual processors. It will basically have one thread that does little more than make GL calls, while another thread handles basically everything else. Because the 3D card will become a bottleneck rather quickly, I don't see any value in doing a more scalable aproach.

John Carmack

Daikatana Shots
Saw over on Redwood's that John Romero from Ion Storm sent out several new great looking screenshots of Daikatana. Here are a pair of them for you to check out, you'll of course have to head on over to the Daikatana Cabana to check out the rest of them though. Very much worth the look.

Half-Life
Sierra sent out this press release earlie talking about their Summer titles, check out the Half-Life opening:

Half-Life - Summer 1998 Half-Life introduces a revolutionary leap in 3D first-person games by combining stunning technology enhancements with genre-breaking gameplay elements. Gamers are given opportunities to wreak havoc--in true action-game fashion--but they are also challenged to explore and strategize. Half-Life's strong story elements, advanced inventory system and story-integrated challenges create an experience never-before-seen in traditional "run-and-gun" action games. The result is an entirely immersive playing environment with intensely realistic life forms.

PC Games
Sigh, the "Quake2 Killers" crap is floating once again. Of course I guess the author of this article either has just no clue what is going on in the industry, or is actually fairly good and knows how to get himself a bit of attention. My vote is for the first one though.

New WinGlide
A new version of the cool util that will render Quake/Quake2 scenes on your 3dfx card and blit it back to your 2d card via a custom .dll. WinGlide has been updated once again with a new version that includes gamma correction. Note the best framerate you can really get with this util is in the 20's range, but it's still cool to mess around with.

GLDoom
Bruce Lewis, hard at work as always on his GLDoom project has posted an update that states he is *85%* finished with his port! Check it:

For those of you out there that want a gauge of how near to completion glDoom is, I'm about 85% done. Most of the sprite issues have been handled. I still need to implement better texture management, create a new font for the console and screen text, redo the menus (again) as texture mapped polygons, handle the intermission screens as well as the finale. There is also some work to be done on the geometry processing when creating the floors and ceilings as well as cleaning up the wall creation around moving sectors (changing the generator somewhat and adding a dynamic height check for wall polygons). Also, the dynamic lighting still has to be added as well as the distance queing. None of these by itself is a very big job. Taken together they add up to a fair amount of work left to do but nothing like what I started with. I would love to have it finished before E3 or at the very least in beta test by then.

LithTech
Mike Dussalt from Monolith made a .plan update talking about the recently renamed DirectEngine (now known as LithTech) He actually gives a date! End of April guys, April 30th to be exact. -Blue's

Hardware Land

First of all, it is 100% up to the motherboard manufacturer as to whether or not they will allow overclocking on their motherboards. The Supermicro BX boards will NOT allow overclocking using the 100MHz bus speed. If you have a Pentium II - 233, 266, or 300 it will run at a 66MHz bus speed regardless of what jumper setting you use. If you have a 350 or 400, it will run at either 350MHz or 400MHz. Basically, if you have a 66MHz Bus Pentium II processor, then you will run it at a 66MHz bus.

Now we have already seen that motherboards like the ABIT BX6, AOpen AX6B, and ASUS P2B will allow overclocking, but how far can you take your current chips? How about the newer Pentium II - 350 and 400? Let's break it down for all of you out there to enjoy:
From personal experience I've found that placing a Voodoo2 card in anything less than a Pentium II is a waste. For some reason I don't seem to get noticeable improvements in performance from a Voodoo2 unless it's in a Pentium II system. Pentium and Pentium MMX users should stick with the regular Voodoo card, which is a wonderful card. But also, don't expect a Voodoo card to make Unreal playable on a P100 - because it probably won't.

The Views

The Mods

Sites

werd
Back in the groove = daily sections updated again. I'll prolly go back and update yesterdays section as well. Gotta eat first though, check back before the end of the workday though :)

 

Monday, April 20 10:01pm

HexenWorld v0.12
Here you go kids, Activision's Steve Stringer bears the goodies:
- HW Client (6.20MB) http://www.hexenworld.com/files/hwcl_b12.exe
- HW Server (1.21MB) http://www.hexenworld.com/files/hwsv_b12.exe

This should be the final beta before we go "tin" (it's an unsupported release, after all) sometime in the next two weeks.
I'll post mirror locations for these files as usual, as they become available. Thanks to www.hexenworld.com of course.

The next QuakeWorld
With the recent resurgance in the QuakeWorld scene, (Quake2 players actaully coming to Quake Classic) Zoid has set to work to get the last few problems fixed in QuakeWorld. This includes a severely hardline on cheating. (Hard coded crc checks, making the use of cheat proxies, bots, hacked .bsp's, etc all no longer possible) Also more big news is the changing of the logon process for QW servers smaller, helping those people who get stuck at the "checking models" when connecting. Here is the .plan update:

As Rick Johnson mentioned in his plan, I am tinkering around with a new QuakeWorld version. Mostly just to address some of the nasty bugs that have shown up over the last few months and some security issues. Also, I'm taking a stab at defeating proxy bots, since they make life miserable. Proxies that don't "mess with the data" are still fine, tho. Map checksumming is in now, so hacked bsps are out of the picture as well.

Also, I'm using some of the new port allocation code from Quake2 in the new QW which will fix some people using brain dead NAT routers. I've also reduced the packet size to 1400 bytes (from 7000), which is another fix for broken routers (ones that don't handle fragmented UDP in this case). The packet size change does break a couple mods (notably, QWRing, which will have to be patched), but the change is for the better since it allows people to play who couldn't before.

And yes, the GLQuakeWorld sprite bug will be fixed. Sorry about that.

I'm also working on the next Quake2 version (currently 3.15). There are a lot of new features in it, some of the most notable being QW player movement (air control), autodownloading (with resume!), protocol optimizations for projectiles (the hyperblaster won't lag you as bad anymore), flood protection, Server IP banning and minor other fixes.

I also have a new version of Q2CTF in the works. Minor bug fixes, plus a full new competition mode with voted admins, map changing, timed match startups, etc. The match mode will certainly help with clan CTF matches. :)

I've also added two new operating systems for server ports: Solaris x86 and Linux Alpha. This brings the total to five: Win32, Linux i386, Solaris Sparc, Solaris x86 and Linux Alpha. BSDI will be support for the new QW release, but not for Q2 (since I hate a.out jump tables).

As usual, there's no date set for the release of all this. It's the old adage, "When It's Done." But I'm getting close to release on all of them.

In other news, I will be attending Gamescon in Vancouver on May 1st through the 3rd. I'll be speaking at the event about all things Quake, CTF and the online gaming community. I'm lucky that it's easy to attend, since Vancouver is where I'm living and working from. Be sure to check out the Gamescon homepage and sign up to join in the festivities. (I still can't believe m0user talked me into speaking at the event). I hope to have a great time there in May.

Keep in mind, this means all QW servers will have to update to the new version. The old QW servers and clients will no longer work.

The Views

Blood2 Info
Couple of bits for you homeboys to check out concerning Blood2
- There are a buttload of new screenshots of Blood2 available on the-chosen.com -VE
- Check out this recently updated Blood2 weapons list for those so inclined. -VE

Ion Storm
Thanks to Steve Miller (you guys still cutting records?) for the word that Ion Storm is featured in this recent Dallas Morning News article.

FAQ JOO

HexenWorld
Rick Johnson is of course still updating his .plan talking about his work on HexenWorld. It sounds like the release is coming "soon" or possibly even "real sooner"

Prey Update
Paul Schuytema over at 3DR has made a website update talking about what is just going down over there at Apogee land.

This is one of those rare Mondays that just crackles with excitement-a lot will be converging together this week, on both the tech and the content side of things. It's either that of the four cups of coffee that have my heart beating this morning.

Last week, Loyal gave us our first taste of the new Skinner. Loyal has been spending quite a lot of time converting his hybrid MFC
program to a pure PreyOS tool. Now, our artists can texture the characters right in any game environment they'd like, and actually see the game's dynamic lights effect the character as they work. We're really working towards a WYSIWYG paradigm with our tools, and its coming together quite nicely.

After much discussion, we rearranged the desks in the main Prey "pit"-now, virtually all of the content creators are facing west, in line with the spinning of the Earth. We're hoping that this will cut down on their "developer vertigo."

John's father, when he had some time on his hands a few months back, emailed me and asked if he could reproduce our Prey logo for John. I said sure, but I had no idea what he was up to. Last week, John brought in the masterpiece-a gigantic sculpture of our logo, done in welded steel, wood and plaster. Very cool indeed. I'm going to try to talk John's dad into doing another one for our office.

Last week, Ken Brown, executive editor of Computer Gaming World, stopped in for a visit. He was in town on another story (covering a non-action game from the Dallas area... imagine that?), and just stopped by for an off-the-record visit. I showed him Preditor in action, and I think he liked what he saw.

I just got off the phone with Sascha of KMFDM. He and Tim Skold will be burning a CD and a DAT tape for us tonight. A few weeks ago, they sent us their first CD, which explored some rough ideas for the Prey theme. Even though the music is still in the rough state, I'm pretty excited about the kick-ass tunes and level-play music we'll have for Prey.

Until soon... cheers,

.plan Wagon

SiN DM is fun, no doubt about that. We're going to add a lot of stuff and tweak the play considerably, but it's already so good that I haven't played QW for several weeks now (never play crappy Q2). A good example is the 1on1 map I made about a week ago - I just haven't been able to test it in 1on1 - whenever we start a server (and never set maxclients, of course ;)) it's full a few minutes later. 8 players in a small 1on1 map - talk about chaos :)

Hardware Land

The Patches

Sites

werd

Yea, back online again. I can't believe it.. nearly 40hours without updating the page, people thought I was dead or something. Things are back on track now and the updates will begin flowing at a happy rate once again.

btw, movie suggestion of the day: Trojan War. Jennifer Love Hewitt, yummy! For some reason a group of us actually watched that movie 3 times over the weekend. It's just got that great repeat value. (Yea, it's a rental video)

Older News Copyright Steven M. Gibson - VRGN