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Sunday, August 30

SHOGO & 3D [2:22pm]
Mike Dussalt updated his .plan file discussing SHOGO and different 3D accelerators.

Rendition V2100 and V2200 - these cards work flawlessly but are a little slow.

Voodoo1 - good performance, still our main focus.
Voodoo2 - even better.

Riva 128 - just recently this got working perfectly, I added some stuff so the cracking between polies isn't as noticeable on this card so it works pretty well.

Zaero Shots [2:22pm]
From Blue: There are four exclusive New Zaero Screenshots on John "Dirty Harry" Callaham's Web Page showing off this upcoming Quake II add-on.

Messiah! [11:22am]
Gamers Alliance has posted a "fisrt look" at Messiah that I recommend you all check out. Good stuff, can't wait for the game!

So basically, Shiny's goal was to get away from games where the place is empty when you shoot everyone… Instead, They want to make a game that feels really chilling… So basically the concept for Messiah is DISABLING some of your enemies… Not just shooting everything and clearing out a map.

Nocturne Shots [9:02am]
From Blue: The Nocturne page is up on the Gathering of Developers showing off a couple of new screenshots from the upcoming Nocturne, TRI and g.o.d.'s gift to third-person action adventure gaming that sounds rooted in Lovecraftian horror.

Intel Roadmap [9:02am]
Cyrellis posted news about a ZDnet report on Intel's plans for 1999. It covered stuff like IEEE, JX chipset, Rambus RAM and more

That Voodoo2 Rev3 Thing [9:02am]
Sharky posted some info on the Voodoo2 Rev3, here it is.

We've given the rev 3 technology to all of our hardware affliliates. To our knowledge, no one's picked up the design yet, but because we have so many companies making Voodoo2 products, it's difficult to know what's going on at every one of them.

GL & Glide Unreal [9:02am]
Bjorn 3D has an email from Keith Z. Leonard of Dreamfroge (maker of Unreal's GL port) about comparisons between Glide Unreal and GLUnreal.

This is NOT a valid comparison.

#1 the 3Dfx card was running a Glide Port which is specific for that card, and all of the game data in unreal is formatted for 3Dfx cards. The OpenGL driver has to spend time reformatting all of the game data for OpenGL/Rendition. ie converting 8 bit textures to 16 bit all the time.

#2 the monster 3D has a higher fill rate than the v2100

#3 The low frame rate is due to the extreme amount of texture changes at the most difficult part of the fly through. 400 or so texture changes occur per frame at that part of the fly trough, and OpenGL texture state changes are expensive, whereas Glide texture state changes are much cheaper. This is because OpenGL is a "clean" API and Glide is a "dirty" API. OpenGL spends time making sure that what glUnreal is doing is valid.

Heretic2.com [6:42am]
Heretic2.com launched with some fire works, the following features were included.

SHOGO Stuff [6:42am]
Billy over at VE3D is packed with Shogo news today. Over on Shadows of Reality's home page, he spotted some info on a Shogo mission pack. There is also another high res Shogo shot over at VE3D.

As anyone following the SoR development knows, we are still a very small development house, and that the project has yet to find a steady flow of funding. We have been mostly getting by on our good will, or industry contacts and our growing fanbase. Well, we have taken the first step to move in with the big dogs. The Shadows of Reality team formally announces that several of the developers will be working on the first Shogo:MAD mission pack as part of the team being organized by Instant Access. Stephen Adkins, SoR Producer, will be a lead programmer on the project. David Gallay, SoR Lead Designer, will be doing level design and possible some 2D art design.

Worldcraft Pro [9:02am]
From Blue: This Computer Games Coming Soon page on EB World has an intriguing mention of a product called Worldcraft Pro said to be due in
November.

Views [11:14am]

Tech Etc [11:14am]

werd
Valve just sent me some screenshots to integrate into my Half-Life article since my "point man" over there is attending to a family emergency. Hopefully assuming things go as planned I'll have the article to you guys Monda/Tuesday. (Didnt I say that last week? ugh)

 

Saturday, August 29

aCtive Channel [1:22pm]
Just for the hell of it I put a link to make this page an IE channel for all the IE users out there in the left frame. It's about a 45/45 split right now between browsers. (I use both browsers btw, each one has advantages) My first experimentation with this stuff. So if you go blind or die or something, that sucks. Not my fault though.

Unreal Shareware [11:02am]
The boys at PlanetUnreal sent word of a post by Mark Rein about Unreal shareware

We decided a little while ago to wait until the multiplayer was in a good state before releasing the demo. The delay in releasing the demo will also allow us to incorporate:

1. OpenGL and D3D support meaning a whole bunch of cards will be supported
2. A bunch of minor fixes
3. A bunch of server improvements
4. Easier server finding
5. Support for more downloadable stuff
6. Faster loading and most importantly:
7. Solid multiplayer

We know we screwed up on the multiplayer. You guys remind of it everyday . But it will soon be fixed and once it is THEN we can get to the task of releasing a proper shareware version.

Also mentioned was this:

Just so you guys know the next multiplayer patch will also incorporate the multitexture patch, support for OpenGL, support for the D3D patch (when released) and a fix to work with the latest Glide reference drivers. This should (no promises) be out in the next week.

3DGaming.net Article [11:02am]
Ever pushing the envelope of pointless commentary and witty yet redundant debates, our own Sub_Ubi prostrates himself at the feet of the gods of trivial knowledge and innane banter to bring us a divinely inspired debate topic of truly mediocre proportions.

QW v2.3 Stuff [11:02am]
A couple of things to play with in the new GL QuakeWorld v2.3 Client sent along by 3Fingers of VE.

QuakeWorld 2.30 has a couple of cool new features:

1. By selecting "crosshair 2", you can variably adjust the color of the crosshair by select values between 0-255 with the command: "crosshaircolor". I played with the colors a while a decided I liked the bright yellow crosshair so I added this to my QW autoexec.cfg: crosshaircolor "195"

2. A new command called "gl_cshiftpercent" (default 100) has been added to adjust the degree of blend you see when you have gl_polyblend set to "1". When you set gl_polyblend to "1" you will see your screen change color when you get quad or any powerup, take damage, pickup items and jump into the water etc. You can adjust how much of a color change you see by selecting a value between 0 and 100 for gl_cshiftpercent. A value of 100 would be the normal gl_polyblend 1 setting you have always seen. A value of 0 for gl_cshiftpercent would be the same as setting gl_polyblend to "0" (no color change). If you set gl_cshiftpercent to about "10", then you would just see a slight amount of color change to your screen when you get quad or any powerup, take damage, pickup items and jump into the water etc. If you have gl_polyblend set to "0" then this will turn off the color blend and gl_cshiftpercent will not have any effect regardless of the gl_cshiftpercent value you select.

Messiah Shots [8:32am]
Game-Interviews.com has gotten a hold of a few new screenshots of Messiah that they scored from the Shiny boys. The shots were intended to be included with a recent interview that was posted with Dave Perry, but didnt make it in time for the posting. Very cool looking, as always. -VE

MotorHead Demo [8:32am]
A nifty new game demo for you to play with this weekend. Check out Motorhead.

Motorhead is a game where speed makes the difference. Set in the near future, all the action takes place at the six venues of the Transatlantic Speed League™. Venues range from downtown highways to abandoned mining facilities and success is rewarded with additional cars and courses.

Unreal & D3D [8:32am]
Mark Rein just loves that messageboard. He has slapped up another post discussing Unreal and Direct3D

Unreal's D3D driver is up and running and is now getting close to being able to be released for testing! Yesterday I finally got to play Unreal under an alpha version of our D3D driver on a Matrox G200 card. The framerate was excellent and the visual quality was superb. Other than a few occasional visual flaws (which are still being worked out) it looked amazing and played fantastically.

The Microsoft DirectX support guys are helping us iron out a few problems, test it against some other cards and work with the IHV's to iron out driver problems on the IHV side. Fortunately the driver issues on the Direct3D IHV side are nowhere near as problematic as they were on OpenGL so it shouldn't be too much longer before we're ready for a beta release. I'll speculate that we'll release our D3D driver in beta form for testing purposes within 2 weeks. There will probably still be some issues to get worked out, for example memory usage seems a little higher, but people will be able to test it and we'll keep working on the outstanding issues while they do.

Speaking of which, SharkyExtreme has posted some D3D Shots of Unreal.

QuakeWorld v2.3 Released [10:02pm]
Download it now. I got to do a little bit of guest webmastering at www.quakeworld.net just for the release, fun. Here is Zoid's .plan update, and release notes.

The long awaited Quakeworld version 2.30 has been released. Head over to http://www.quakeworld.net/ for download information. The main archive for QuakeWorld can be found at ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com / idstuff/quakeworld/

my insert: www.shugashack.com/quakeworld/

2.30 doesn't introduce a lot of new features over 2.29 (the most notable is the packet loss meter on the scoreboard), but mostly consists of "behind the scenes" fixes from the 2.29 BETA. All servers should upgrade to 2.30.

This will end the current situation of 2.1, 2.21 and 2.29 server differences. The 2.30 version covers all the bases and offers all the functionality of the previous versions. Assuming that no major bugs show up in this 2.30 release (one can only hope murphy doesn't rear his ugly head), this will probably be the last QuakeWorld release. QuakeWorld has been an amazing project from John Carmack's early origins, to over a year of tweaking at Jack 'morbid' Mathews and my hands. It is one of the most complete and best first person internet gaming experience available today. It's been a pleasure working on it and keeping in contact and participating with the thousands of players. Thanks to all for your feedback and requests in helping me build a great product.

Views [8:34am]

Tech Etc [8:34am]

werd
Oh, to address the little "debate" going on which I keep getting email about. this page has existed in 1 incarnation or another for over 3 years. a URL history lesson:
www.rockisland.com/~phook/scary
www.canweb.net/~smiles/
www.quakehole.com
www.hipnotic.com/news.htm
www.ritual.com/news.shtml
scary.vrgames.net
www.shugashack.com <--- woo.

Fun huh? None of those urls work anymore, aside from the ritual url, which instead of forwarding to my page forwards to another page at ritual.

 

Friday, August 28

New 3DNow! Q2 Drivers [10:02pm]
AMD has released their 3DNow Drivers for Quake 2 v3.17. Thanks Billy ilson of Voodoo Extreme for the note.

DreamWorks Shots [10:02pm]
Amer from Cyrellis and Sharky from Sharkyextreme visited Dreamworks this past weekend. Anyway, Amer has put up four photographs from the visit. Unfortunately, they aren't very informative, unless you have a fetish for the top of Sharky's head. If you do... There's nothing wrong with that!

Romero's .plan [1:52pm]
Here you go, kind of expected but Romero updated his .plan about the little charade last night.

Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. I take full responsibility for last night's confusion -- maybe I shouldn't have taken that morbid picture for Texas Monthly magazine, because someone apparently called the Dallas PD and heard that a John Romero got shot last night. Coupled with the actual picture, you have yourself a news story (although a false one).

RealTime 3D [12:32pm]
I happened to run in to one of the developers working on RealTime3D last night and he pointed me to his website which was updated just the other day with some nifty screenshots. You guys gotta check this stuff out

JQuan 3D [12:32pm]
Seven new JQuan Screen Shots are up on the JQuan site. JQuan is a 3D engine project that currently supports colored lighting, 16 bit color (24 bit w/MMX), dynamic lighting, dynamic levels, and multiplayer play. Snagged this from Blue via 3D Action Gamers.

That Romero Thing [12:32pm]
Hrm, I'm just curious. The official line from AVault / Ion is that there was a mixup with identity from the police department, yet sources at the police department deny any part of this or any John Romero being killed last night. Add to that the fact that the picture from Texas Montly was being handed out BY an Ion employee, before things were dispelled as just rumors. Draw your own conclusions. It just doesnt seem to add up. Here is the 3rd story, fresh from www.ionstorm.com

The stories apparently were rooted in an article in the current issue of Texas Monthly, which was accompanied by a grisly (but faked) photo of Romero ‘s cold, dead body.

Ok, so now it wasnt a police mixup, but just some rumors started from those pictures. Interesting. Also to note, some interesting traffic patterns on my website last night from places you might not expect. Don't worry, this is the last you'll hear from me about this, I just wanted to get everything out there that I know. Lastly, check out the Loonygames article.

Neet [12:32pm]
Kinda slow, so I figured might as well post this:

I found the new european money, the Euro's official symbol on the microdoft website, it looks just like a Quake 2 symbol rotated 90 degrees clockwise. Funny as hell. here's the link: http://microsoft.com/windows/euro.asp

Someone wake me up if anything exciting happens.

Spank! [11:02am]
Back, stuff comin atcha real soon like. The undercarriage is great, thanks for askin. Here is a few more bits of news to nibble on. I think I'm gonna throw a few benchmarks of this Banshee I just got out, assuming the drivers I'm running are stable. (hint Jack)

Tech Etc [11:14am]

Weekly [11:02am]
What, you thought I forgot or something? The reasons to live have shown up. I'm looking to bring back a few words of wisdom in the near future, as we all know just how experienced and wise guys in their early 20's are.

Views [11:14am]

TF2 Hires [9:12am]
Saw this one on Blues, Two new map designers have been hired on Teamfortress2. Alex 'Hobbit' Manilov (author of the famed RangerBase DM level for Quake, among others), and Mackey 'Avatar' McCandlish author of many innovative Quake projects, including a side-scroller, and co-creator of the Blahbalicious movie Check out www.contaminated.net for more info.

AMEN Info [9:12am]
The boys at CaveDog have updated their website with lots of info on AMEN:

Cavedog has revamped the official website for AMEN: The Awakening http://amen.cavedog.com just hours ago. New information concerning the story, the engine, and more has been released. The engine is being built totally from scratch, the game will require a 3D card so much effects are expected as well. The lead designer has started a design journal which he'll update to keep people up-to-date on what's happening with the project. CaveNews www.cavenews.com has the information and our take on this newly released information.

S3 Virge Quake! [9:12am]
Hehe, you gotta love this. Check out Tom Browne's work with getting GLQuake to work on the beloved S3 Virge chipset, and an interesting util for you guys to check out. S3Quake Wrapper for DX v6 s3quake_dx6.zip

Well, Quake on the ViRGE family isn't going to advance dramatically, since the chipsets have finally had their day. You can now pick up a 4Mb AGP GX2 with TV output for 27GBP, while I've seen 8Mb SDRAM i740's as going for as little as 39GBP. Even a branded 4Mb Permedia 2 in Dixons (of all places) is a mere 50GBP. I can't see S3 doing any more driver revisions unless a serious bug is uncovered somewhere.

Romero Not Dead [late]
I just got home to find out this post on AVault on this. Here is the quote from their page:

The Adrenaline Vault has learned tonight from sources at Ion Storm that John Romero, the creator of hits like Doom and Quake and Chairman of Ion Storm and the Cyberathlete Professional League was killed tonight from a gunshot wound to the head.

We will be adding more details as they become available. The Adrenaline Vault's staff sends their best wishes to John's family and friends.

Here is a quote I just got 2nd hand:

www.avault.com plans to make a retraction on their web page from their false reports of John Romero's death. The Dallas police were given incorrect infomation. Chief Billsworth: "When we heard John Romero died, we immediately got on the horn to find out. It turned out it was another John Romero, not related to the more well known one."

This had been confirmed by 2 Ion employees. I don't know either way now though. Apparently even the Ion employees were misinformed as well, which lead to the confusion. There was also a picture even circulating from a recent Texas Montly Magazine to add to the hysteria.

Either way, I have no 100% confirmation. I will be sticking around tonight until I do.

Lastly, Rumble sent me this:

I spoke to the Dallas Police Department. They report that there were no #19's (shootings) and no #27's (deaths) in the last 12 hours, and that the name Romero is not in the database regarding any police report in the Dallas County..... You can quote me quoting the Dallas P.D. if you like.

I also spoke to the Dallas Morning News (who know when I take a shit before I do) and the police department where John lives, and neither of them have any information on said report either...

I am researching this because I consider John to be somewhat of a friend and want the facts printed as quickly as possible. I spoke directly to the correct authority at each source. and Have just confirmed the lack of any report with KXAS the NBC affiliate in Dallas....

To finish it all off, here is the promised update from AVault retracting the story.

werd
I put the Romero stuff in todays news since most people missed all the excitement last night. Broke just about every traffic record on my page in that 1 hour period from those reloads. Next week we kill someone from id or Apogee yes?

 

Thursday, August 27

Dr Sleep [6:24pm]
StormTroopers posted an interview with ex-Daikatana level designer John "Dr Sleep" Anderson.

Stormtroopers has a new interview up with Ex-Ion level designer John Anderson (Dr Sleep) entitled "Dr Sleep - Just Fitting In". The interview discusses Sleep's recent departure from Ion, his Ion experiences, and what he is up to now.

Sharky & Banshee [6:24pm]
Alex (Sharky) over at SharkyExtreme posted part II of his sneak peak at 3Dfx's Banshee. This time he included benchmarks with AMD's K6-2

Frag II Registration [6:24pm]
Registration is now open for Frag II to be held in Dallas TX. $5,000 up for grabs for the 1st place winner in the Q2 LAN tournament.

PC Data Top 10 [12:24pm]
PC Data announced the top-selling PC games for the week of August 9-15. Reclaiming the top spot, once again, is GT Interactive's Deer Hunter. Rounding out the top five are StarCraft, Rocky Mountain Trophy Hunter, Cabela's Big Game Hunter and Unreal -OGR

Even More Views [12:24pm]

More Messiah [11:58am]
Saw on Cyrellis that Messiah World has posted 4 new screenshots of Messiah of all things. Even got themselves a nifty presentation.

Wack Links! [10:28am]
It's up! praise be! More twisted stuff on the internet for you guys to look at.

Q2 & Cheating [7:24am]
As many veteran players know, cheating amongst some of the "supposed" best players in Q2 is a bit more common than you might expect. Loki's CTF page has posted a response due to some overzealous players assuming they were already working on an anti-cheating mod

In reference to a rather premature announcement made by an overly enthusiastic third party :-) we would like to explain the mysterious Liga.net project. We haven't officially started work for a mod called Liga (German for league), which features one on one DM play. It isn't even an LM project but something a few members of our team were approached to do. While we are discussing the feasibility of making it difficult for people to cheat, an apology goes to Zoid, Cash and id software for any inference that we were going to solve bot problems they were "unable" to fix, we're just exploring the possibilities of making it harder and less rewarding. I'll keep you posted should we decide to "sign" anything.

Genocide 4 [7:24am]
Registration is now open for the QuakeWorld Clan Genocide 4 tournament. There are already about 40 clans signed up so far for what is promised to be the largest, most tracked, and most competetive Quake1 tournament to be held to date. For the curious I'm participating with R3V East.

Unreal & 3D [7:24am]
Mark Rein made another post to the message boards about Unreal and 3D accelerators.

Right now the only one we're supporting is are cards based on the Rendition V2000 series. That includes the Diamond S220 and Hercules Thriller 3D. I'm sure there are others based on that chipset but those are the two which come to mind.

DemoPlay [7:24am]
A new version of Demoplay has been released. There is now support for SIN, Hexen, and HexenWorld. It's a nifty little util that I'd recommend installing if you are into watching Quake/Quake2 etc demos.

More Views [7:24am]

Requiem's engine was designed from the ground up (or deeper, if you consider the layers of hell) to maximize the gameplay experience with fiery (pun intended) features like RigiSoft's hybrid models, skeletal animation, and hardware-handled transitions.

More Tech Etc [7:24am]

What? [5:44am]
I miss anything? Doin some late night news mambo now. Also, the weekly demo link has been fixed. Btw, windows that dont roll all the way down in the back seat suck ass. WTF is up with that? Here is a summary of stuff I missed.

Unreal & S3 [5:24am]
S3 put out a little PR late yesterday about Unreal being optimized for the Savage3D. Following S3's RP about Unreal being optimized for Savage 3D, NGO slapped up a report about it. The focus of this report sets on 32bit true color rendering and Savage 3D's ability to process large textures quickly due to S3's texture compression technology.

SoF Multiplayer [5:24am]
Kenn Hoekstra made an update to his .plan file regarding multiplayer mods for Soldier of Fortune, Raven's upcoming action game using the Quake engine. Thanks to Blue for this info.

Alrighty...in light of the focus on the multiplayer experience for Soldier of Fortune, if people could send me a list of their top three favorite Quake/Quake II multiplayer mods (Capture The Flag etc.) so I can get a list of what people like, I'd be really interested to get it! Of course there is no guarantee of what the future will bring with time constraints and the like, but if there are clear faves then maybe we can try to incorporate them. This is in NO WAY a promise that SoF will ship with ready to play mods, but if we know what people would like to see, if the opportunity presents itself, we will know where development time can be best spent... =) Send your comments/suggestions to me at khoekstra@mail.ravensoft.com Thanks people

Heavy Gear II [5:24am]
The aCtivision page has posted some more info on Heavy Gear II which is looking peachy

News Feature: Jump Jets
Here are three new screen shots from HGII designer Dave Nash, showing off Heavy Gear II's jump jet feature. Jump jets provide a quick downward burst of thrust, which allows a pilot to propel their war machine up and over obstacles. A skilled pilot will find mulitple uses for jump jets--evading fire, surprising enemies, leaping over walls or buildings, or springing out of an underwater hiding place. Click on the thumbnails to see the full images.

Views [5:24am]

Tech Etc [5:24am]

Sites
Havent done this in a bit:

werd
I've gotten a number of emails about the Half-Life preview I did for visiting Valve. I've had it done for several days now, but my point man over at Valve has a family emergency and is out of town. Due to Valve showing me some confidential material during my visit, the preview has to be given the once over to make sure I'm not giving out any information that is not meant for public consumption. Hopefully things go well with my good friend, and I wish him the best. I've emailed Gabe to see if he wants to take over and get this thing pushed out before it's outdated. :)

 

Wednesday, August 26

Prax Shot[8:04am]
Jason Zelsnack has posted a nifty image in his .plan file of the Dune Buggy in progress from Prax War

Here's a screen shot of the duneBuggy which I promised a while back. The textures are not finished, and it isn't lit. Also the shock absorber sprites need to be billboarded, and the "level" is just some silly little test "level" with speed bumps and terrain. You can't tell in the picture, but the guy actually turns the steering wheel and when you move the gun around the head tracks fifty percent of the motion.

Secret Ops! [8:04am]
Gamecenter has posted a 10MB Secret Ops trailer here, to help build up the excitement for their exclusive early premiere of the first installment of the game. Secret Ops clearly uses the Prophecy Engine, which is hardly a bad thing. The "cinematics" all use the game engine... so this is likely to be the only movie you ever see from the game. Still, with an engine that looks this good, that's not realy much of a problem.

This exclusive 'engagement' is only available from C|Net at www.download.com . While you can go directly to download.com, we will also activate the link to download.com from the Secret Ops website as well (it will be the only download source that is 'live')

Of course Secret Ops will also be 'in general release' from Origin (and other sites around the country) on Thursday August 27th as previously announced.

200KBps High-Quality Version [streaming] [download ZIP] (1.43MB)

SHOGO Movie [8:04am]
As everyone knows, the big SHOGO movie was scheduled to be released around now, and it was. Sam over at 3DNews.net was hard at work and converted the movie to all kinds of things for us. Check it out

200KBps High-Quality Version [streaming] [download ZIP] (2.7MB)
112KBps Medium-Quality Version [streaming] [download ZIP] (1.1MB)
56KBps Low-Quality Version [streaming] [download ZIP] (631KB)
Shogo "New Movie", 200KBps [streaming] [download ZIP] (1.9MB)

Blue has posted the big files. 78MB AVI and the 28MB AVI versions. Also speaking of Monolith, Billy over at VE did a bit of Q&A with John Jack

Billy: Have you (Monolith) began to look past the LithTech engine, possibly at a LithTech2 engine? What I'm basically trying to say is: what's next, after Shogo (and Blood2) and after the LithTech engine?

John Jack: Shogo will ship with LithTech 1.0, and Blood2 will probably use LT1.1 We're currently looking at what projects the Blood2 and Shogo teams will be working on after they finish up Blood2 and Shogo. <snip>

Amen [8:04am]
AVault slapped up a preview of AMEN: The Awakening. Cavedog Entertainment, the same people who brought us Total Annihilation is working on this title. Here's a taste.

Gamers will take on the role of Bishop Six, a commando from a super-secret division of the British SAS. True to the spirit of the game, frag-festing the opposition is not his preferred MOD. He is the kind of resourceful soldier who is three steps ahead of the carnage, forging paths around pools of blood instead of splashing through them with puerile glee. At first, people who prefer more gore than smarts might not appreciate this agile tactician, but in time, the intense drama will turn their hearts

Weekly Demos [8:04am]
Got a 2on2 demo from the POV of Gustoff and CZM versus some *cough* anonymous players. We'll just say the 2 guys on the losing end of this demo arent used to losing. Also got a 3on3 demo from my POV using a new say_team script. I was missing about 4 important binds as I found out during the match. Snag em from the demos section! Btw, I'm putting the finishing touches on my config pages to give you guys a graphic representation and downloadable config stuff. Need to work out this new script though, so prolly wont be up till the weekend.

Views [11:24am]

Tech Etc [11:24am]

werd
I know I'm askin for it, but which .plan tracker guys? I've gotten a number of emails asking me to switch to QuakeFinger recently. There are of course a few changes I asked to be made if I were to switch. I currently prefer the Stomped tracker.

 

Tuesday, August 25

Ritual Stuff [10:54pm]
Ritualistic has finally gotten a makeover and is looking much better. Also, RitNews has posted an interview with Scott Alden, one of the 3 programmers at Ritual.

Bok: Is anyone at Ritual working on the Uber Engine or is that on hold or scrapped?

We've really been focusing on Sin, so I'm not really sure what's going on with UberEngine. That doesn't mean the UberEngine is dead, it's just on hold.

Work At ION [9:34pm]
After the departure of Dr Sleep from ION Storm, John Romero made this .plan update

Good luck, Dr. Sleep and Xatrix. The stop was short but fun while it lasted.
Now to find a fast monster of a map designer. Anyone have any leads, send 'em my way: romero@ionstorm.com . Thanks.

Half-Life Release Date [7:04pm]
Lisa Mennet of Valve Software posted to the Contaminated.net message forum concerning the pending release date of Half-Life:

"Guys: I want to give you an update before people get too anxious over the course of the week, waiting for an announcement from Sierra/Valve. It looks like the announcement Sierra was alluding to at their party last week is actually going to happen at ECTS, which is in London over Labor Day weekend. We're going to be talking about our developer support plans and give a status report on Half-Life and Team Fortress 2. (Half-Life won't be shipping in August.)

We know how impatient you all are to play Half-Life and we want to repay your enthusiasm with a fantastic game. We're all in extreme crunch mode and will be until ship....we're as anxious to play the final version as you are. Thanks for continuing to support us through the tough final push toward gold."

Prey Designer Journal [11:24am]
From Redwood's 3D Realms has posted the 6th Prey Designer journal thanks to a Gamecenter snafu. Check out The Road to hell is paved with Demo CDs.

Weekly [12:30pm]
It be posted.

More Views [11:24am]

ATI OpenGL ICD [11:24am]
From Blue: "The ATI Technologies Inc. Beta Driver Pre-Releases page has posted RAGE PRO TURBO Beta "OpenGL ICD" Windows 95/98 Display Driver Version: Lonsdale b37f, a full Windows 95/98 driver set with an integrated OpenGL ICD component and DirectX 6 support (DX6 required). Check out the release notes.

EverQuest Shots [8:50am]
A few new screenshots of EverQuest were posted yesterday. Here are a pair of them. Check out the Everquest.com or www.screenshots.net for the rest.

Wheel of Time [8:50am]
The weekly Wheel of Time update has been posted.

Scott has dived into his duties as lead ld. He's doing everything from framing new screenshots (for some upcoming previews) to managing the efforts of the other designers. He's constructing his single-player level based on the Fortress of the Forsaken, he's sculpting the Shadar Logoth primitives, he's optimizing the existing work (maps and effects), and--occasionally--getting some sleep (weakling!)

What? [8:30am]
*sniffle* yea, I missed you guys for most of the day yesterday, I'm sorry. I also wanna apologize for that ad on the left. It should only be there for a month or two to help me dig my way out of debt. I'll pull it after that, honest. Oh, and I'll be around all day today. :)

Unreal Update [5:20am]
Mr. Sweeney over there at Epic has made a big old update to the Unreal Technology page discussing all the hard work he is doing trying to make the game oh so much better for us to play. Blue quoted the part I imagine most of you are interested in as well, here it is:

Multiplayer Woes

The bad news is that the growth of Internet Unreal gaming--servers, players, teams, and competitions--continues to be held back by the performance problems many gamers are having with Unreal on low-bandwidth connections (mostly modem connections, but some even on ISDN lines). One recent sign of the frustration showed up on the Portal, a cool Unreal site:

"With the lackluster performance of Unreal's Multiplayer Internet games, many players are feeling discouraged. Especially when expectations have built up to such a high level in anticipation of the release of Unreal. This discouragement has found itself with Cabless, founder of Portal. Cabless has, therefor, decided to pass the reigns of Portal on to Gadget Factor while he presses other interests."

Believe me, these shortcomings are very much on our minds, and improving Internet play is the team's top priority. The next patch will offer some improvements in this area, and there's more to come. After the patch, there will be a rewrite of Unreal's low-level game protocol, which will incorporate some major new bandwidth improvements, based on the stats I've been collecting lately during 28.8K and 56K gameplay lately. We aren't going to stop until Internet play is very competitive.

GL Unreal [5:20am]
Hopefully this page will answer all the questions you may have about running the new OpenGL port of Unreal on your machine and what you need to do to get it to run on various types of hardware. -3DAG

Dr. Sleep Leaves ION [5:20am]
Argh, I missed this yesterday but Dr. Sleep has apparently left Ion Storm yesterday to head off and work for Xatrix Entertainment. No real word on the reasoning behind this but there is a Tribute to Dr Sleep on the Ion Storm website, and a Q&A with John Romero asking about his departure. Of course, the general line is the departure was amicable.

StormTroopers: Will there be any further delays in Daikatana with Sleep's departure?
John Romero: We shall see.

Banshee! [5:20am]
Billy over at VE asked Jack "Official 3dfx Hooker" Mathews a question about the Banshee a few people have. What can you do with a Banshee (aside from the obvious) that a V2 cant do?

Well, you can do shadows by rendering them into a texture, assuming the texture is at the ground plane, then applying that texture to various geometry... Though I haven't tried this to see how well it works.

Exactly as I suspected! :)

Ultimate Quake Poll Results [5:20am]
With what looks like a large percentage of overseas voting, Methos Ultimate Quake Poll has come to a conclusion with some interesting results. Here are a few of the stats I digged on:

HPB or LowPing? LPB: 39% HPB: 61%
GL or Software? SOFT: 69% GL: 31%
QW or NetQuake? QW: 70% NQ 30%

Views [5:24am]

Tech Etc [5:24am]

In this Edition of Hardware Therapy, we cover USENET's view on the upcoming TNT cards from STB, Diamond and Creative, Tom's fight with S3, the infamous BuyCOMP $163 Diamond Monster 3D II along with a ton more news and views from the hardware newsgroups

werd
HACK! Stale Doritos! ACK!

Waiting... on.. Valve... to... send.. me... screenshots.... so.. I... can... post... this... stinking... review....

 

Monday, August 24

New Unreal GL Patch [8:10pm]
Rendition posted a newer version of OpenGL patch for Unreal. This new version offers 4 tp 5 fps boost due to the removal of some debugging code. Grab the new patch here

Black & White [8:10pm]
Black and White Wire published an interview with Peter Molyneux (Lionhead). This interview is for Black and White, Lionhead's upcoming game. Here's a snippet.

Q:\> Will B&W require or support 3D Accelerators?

A:\> Yes it will the best machine to run "Black & White" on will be a P200 + accelerator. Although if the demand is there we might produce a software version

Heavy Gear2 Movie [8:10pm]
Phoebus sent word that Activision posted a new movie for Heavy Gear II, you can find the links to it here. This movie contains actual gameplay footage and cutscene clips from the game. It was most recently played in Activision's booth at the Gen Con trade show. The movie is 5.37mb, zipped

Banshee Info [8:10pm]
Billy over at VE3D got a mail from 3Dfx about some cool Banshee feature. Here is the juicy stuff.

Here's something cool that the Banshee can do. It's called "texturing from a renderable surface." It's actually pretty neat. Basically you can create a surface (in Glide or D3D) that you mark for rendering that can be a valid texture size (256x256, 128x128, that kind of stuff). Then you draw what you want to that surface. Now, you can mark your back buffer for rendering, and mark that surface you just made for texturing. Now you can draw a triangle with that. Really cool stuff. Now people can render their own shadow textures, or do kinds of predator effects and stuff.

Quake3 Sound Track [8:10pm]
Blue posted on his site that Tudish said Bill Leeb (Delerium and FLA) will be doing the Quake III: Arena sound track. Here is the whole thing from Tudish .

the latest issue of the ezine "hard wired" that comes out of the uk includes an interview with bill leeb, discussing such things as the latest fla album, and where he feels its going, as well as his current musical interests (he mentions massive attack as being a personal favorite, and how the next delerium may follow in its footsteps). the biggest news he reveals, however, is the confirmation that he is, indeed, doing the music for the final installation in the quake trilogy, quake iii: arena. excellent, excellent news...quake fans the world over will now get the music that such an incredible game so greatly deserved.

The Online Community Future [7:58am]
Check out the new article on Gamers Alliance which talks about the evolution of "the community" and discusses Clanring, CPL & PGL.

Not only that, but Thresh has taken it upon himself to launch a marketing strategy against Angel Munoz of the CPL. Don't get me wrong here, the CPL certainly has its own set of problems, but to me when I go to the PGL site and read an editorial by a Dennis Fong who pretends not be affiliated with Death Row and Gamer's Extreme and the PGL at the same time and calls Angel Munoz a "pimp" while laying down his own load of bias, I get depressed and remember the Dennis Fong of old, playing in T3 like the rest and having a good time.

Suckage [9:48am]
The morning suckage has been posted. You would think this stuff is hard to come up with after a while, but I guess there is just an endless supply of stuff to bitch about in our wonderful world.

SIN & Half-Life Scripting [7:58am]
Charlie Wiederhold, level designer at Ritual, made a post to the HardCorps Message board which may clarify things a bit for you guys making those SIN vs Half-Life comparisons

...So, to answer your comments... there really (at least from what I can tell from Half Life) isn't any difference between Sin and Half Life as far as the capabilities of character scripting and what you can and can't do with it. If you have the proper animations, you can do the actions.

Hope that helps clear up some of the confusion people might have between the character scripting in these two games. We may be handling things slightly differently from a technical standpoint, but the end result is the same for the most part.

Now, how the character scripting affects these two games and the way you play it is quite possibly handled much differently, but that's like pointing out that the weapons are going to be different too. :)

JK Mission Pack [7:58am]
There is a new free mission pack for Jedi Knight over at JediKnight.net which is 3 large levels for you to download and check out. Good stuff.

3 new levels with an engaging plot
5 new cutscenes
3 new enemies-Throwtrooper, Speeder Tusken and Sand Person.

Views [7:54am]

Tech Etc [7:54am]

werd
Wanna see a monkey?

 

Sunday, August 23

ScreeShotage [8:44pm]
CaveNews has posted a high resolution screenshot that originally appeared in a GameCenter article a little while ago. There are 4 shots there total, all of which look nifty. After that check out the new screenshots SharkyExtreme has posted of Barrage.

Heretic2 @ GamesMania [8:44pm]
The boys over at GamesMania kicked off a sneak peek of Raven's Heretic II. Here's a snippet.

The second most impressive element of the H2 pre-alpha is the weaponry and spell effects. With the coloured lighting of the Quake II engine, the game doesn't lack flash. One of the coolest weapons is an angry red arrow that explodes and causes this strange red rain to fall, damaging anyone underneath. A good defensive spell is a blue ring that Corvus fires from his body, spreading out around him. Keep that one in mind when you're surrounded.

Half-Life Movie [6:54am]
Got email from the guys over at SleepNever Central that they have posted a new Half-Life mpeg. The video was included on the CD with this months PC Accelerator magazine. Here is a shot of it. Also, I emailed the webmaster about posting a local copy, noticing his server was already choking a bit. Here's a local copy.

Ultimate Quake Poll [6:54am]
Today is the final day to cast your vote in the Ultimate Quake Poll. Send in who you think is the best Quake1 players in the world in tons of different categories.

Carmageddon2 Demo [6:54am]
Well, I wasnt around yesterday evening for this one. Sorry. I'll quote PCRL on this one "Carmageddon II (site1, site2)is the stunning sequel to what many would consider is the world's best driving game, but this time it's bigger and better, and this time it's personal. It's not about manic driving this time, it's about cold calculated skill. This time Max Damage is clinically insane. " 3DNews.net has posted the translation for the setup keys btw. Also, if you want to drive using all the cars check this out also from 3DN

If you are interested, it is entirely possible to get the any of the other cars from the demo (excluding the truck, for some reason) as the one you drive. All you have to do is change one line in the GENERAL.TXT file (in the data directory). After the file reads '//Cars to use as defaults:' change the line following (it should read 'EAGLE3.TXT') to whichever car you want (you can find the names of the cars in the data/cars/ directory). As I said earlier, any attempt to get the truck, at least on my part, ended with the demo locking up the on the title screen.

Mouse Issues [6:54am]
Via 3Fingers Jack Mathews mentions something that Blue touched on a while ago. Get a USB Mouse!

The mouse sampling problem is not fixed by dinput and stuff. It is just that for PS/2 port mice and serial mice, Windows only takes in the data at 40Hz. This could be because they don't want the 16 bit mouse driver to strangle the system, or that anything above 40Hz clogs the system with interrupts or something, but if you want to play smoothly, you can either cap your fps at 40 or buy a USB mouse. I measured the USB mouse updates and got between 75Hz and 80Hz sample rate. This makes Quake and Quake 2 infinitely smoother.

Having used a friends computer while visiting Canada last week I can say the difference is extremely noticeable. Once my ass gets out of debt a USB MS Intellipoint mouse is #1 on my list of computer stuff to buy.

Views [6:54am]

Tech Etc [6:54am]

If you go into the Advanced Options menu under Rendering/OpenGL Rendering Support you'll find bWireFrame and if this is set to true you will be able to run the game with OpenGL acceleration (fullscreen). Now this is not a playable solution but it's at least a peek at what kind of performance we might see when the Permedia2 OpenGL patch is released.

werd
Hell, I've even spell checked my Half-Life preview now. I'll bug the guys at Valve a bit more today and see if they ever wanna send me some screenshots. They are super busy right now doing extensive play testing etc so it's cool.

Oh my! Cyrellis updated their lnks section! I wonder what prompted him to do that...

 

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