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Riot!
Next-Gen has posted an article that you guys
should check out if you are really curious on what the deal is with the Microsoft and
Monolith guys. As you all I'm sure remember Monolith released a engine demo of the
"DirectEngine" a few days ago in an attempt to find another publisher who digged
their work. This is apparently due to the fact that things with Microsoft have fallen
through. Sucks for them.
Dominion
I took a look at the Dominion demo last night
after getting home and feeling sorry for Charlie for a bit for getting his truck towed.
It's pretty cool looking. The graphics don't quite match up to the graphics in StarCraft,
but the game feel itself felt very good. It had that "solid" feel that a lot of
C&C players would enjoy. Make sure and give it a try over at www.ionstorm.com
ICQ v1.20
Seems everyone else is mentioning this, so why
can't I? Yea, a new version of ICQ has been released.
Thanks to Redwood for the email.
Q2 Stuff
Da Views
Well, a few interviews for you to read and
stuff.
FAQ JOO
Yea, you heard me.. now read these:
werd
Heh, get this.. Charlie got his truck towed
last night when a bunch of us were out for foodage and a movie. (Saw Lost in Space,
entertaining movie aside from the fact that half of the movie must have been filmed next
to a cheese factory) Well, anyways.. it was an incredible site.. The dude drove by a group
of 3 of us walking from where we parked up to Taco Cabana and we thought not much of it,
not realizing Charlie's truck was parked in the lot the truck pulled into. The incredible
thing? The dude pulled up to Charlie's truck, latched him, and begun pulling out with the
thing in under 10 seconds!? Damn.. that was kinda neet. Now I gotta drive Charlie's ass to
the pound today while he pays $118 to release his truck.
Btw, did I mention Charlie forgot his keys at the theatre that night too? He had to borrow my car to go back and get them. He also lost another set of keys 2 days ago.. heh. Someone should bake him a cake or something.
Oh, uh.. I tell you this because if something nifty happens, I won't be around till this evening. Sorry kids. :(
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Dominion Beta Released!
Yup, it's here. (Thanks Billy) The first ever
title to be released from Ion Storm. A RTS genre game which a lot of people have been
anticipating. Can it beat out Red Alert, Warcraft, and most recently StarCraft and
BattleZone? You be the judge. Check out the website here:
http://www.ionstorm.com/games/dominion_demo/default.htm
Half-Life Release in June
Thanks to Billy Wilson over at VooDoo Extreme for the word that Sierra's Half-Life project has been delayed yet again,
this time pushing the date back to early June. With this most recently delay, this has
pushed Ritual Entertainment's SiN to the front of the pack for Quake2 engine based games
scheduled for release. Assuming Ritual can stick to the date they currently have set
(close to E3) I'd gamble to say we are gonna see the two games released nearly head to
head now.
Monter Sound
Well, I bought a Diamond Monster Sound card
yesterday and figured this was worthy of a plug. It's a PCI sound card featuring "3D
Sound" and well, I was impressed. Why do I mention it? Well a couple of features
stood out that I think a lot of people would be interested in. First off, it helped my
Quake framerate by about 2% on my p2/300 system. I've been told that it helps people with
a p166 system by an even more noticeable amount. Another cool feature that I really like,
since it is a PCI card it can handle more than one sound request. So, when you are playing
Quake / QuakeWorld. you can have an MP3 playing in the background, or for example you can
be playing Quake and if someone msgs you on IRC, you will hear the beep.
Monolith and MS
The news that Microsoft will not be publishng
Riot: Mobile Armor has gone public. There is a big article on PC Gamer's website
giving the low down on just what happened. Funny that a project being called the
"Direct Engine" wont be published by Microsoft. This also explains the release
of the DirectEngine demo a couple of days ago by Monolith searching for a publisher for
their project. Monolith is considering self publishing now btw.
PVRSG Goes Silicon
The next generation PowerVR card looks like it
has completed design (According to the VE
Hardware page) and is now being pressed. The evaluation boards should be shipping
within a month, so we'll see some previews of the board in about 5 weeks. This is the same
card that actually impressed Tom of Tom's Hardware page along with Alex over at VE.
King John
Games.net has posted this article talking about John Romero
and his recent involvement in the Cyberathletic
League. The CPL has been a bit quiet recently but considering the recent commitments
that Mr. Romero has made to the league, they obviously have something up their sleeves. :)
Display Doctor v6.51
A new version of Display Doctor has already been reelased.
They still are doing that "universal windows driver" stuff which offers
directdraw acceleration and a lot of other nifty controls. (I like the refresh rate util
myself) It also comes with some performance monitor stuff to test and see if this util is
really helping out your video speed or not. Thanks again to Ant. A few couple of the fixes in this version are:
. Random lockups during booting of Windows on many systems.
. Fixed Win95 driver swap utility. It should now work & will correctly revert to the
old driver during uinstall.
.plan of the Day
Coolete .plan update of the day
was by Brian Hook concerning "why not get a M3?"
The thing about the Viper that sticks most in mind is that Carmack said something along the lines of "You should get a Viper, it suits your personality -- loud, obnoxious, crude, and nowhere close to subtle."
Serpent Rider Explained
Blaine has posted an explanation of
just what has happened in the Serpent Rider trilogy. This is more than likely in
response to John Romero's .plan update a week or so ago saying that they pretty much
screwed up the story with the announcement of Heretic2.
Asus RIVA GL Drivers
RivaZone
has word that Asus has released some new drivers for their RIVA128 based card which
implements the recently released OpenGL acceleration from nVidia. Here is a direct link
to the file, have fun kids.
Preview / Review Land
What everyone else is saying about the games
you play and the hardware you use:
"The whole industry will play crazy when Westwood comes with Alpha Blending, Anti-Aliasing, Z-Buffering and bilinear filterings."
"We will see a superb special effect game, no pixel will stay non animated on the screen."
"But it will be some more months till all RTS games will support 3d."
"Some units will reappear, some won't come back."
Q2 Stuff
Sites etc.
werd
Wonder what's up with that Dominion beta?
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PingTool
A new version of PingTool has been released.
Version 2.0 (with complete HexenWorld support) is out of beta and is available at the
PingTool site: http://pingtool.telefragged.com
Hexen2 Fix
The boys over at www.hexenworld.com have posted instructions no how to
get rid of an error that some people have been experiencing when playing the GL version of
HexenWorld. (Pretty much delete the meshes, but hey, some people need their hand held)
StarCraft
Next-Gen has posted their in depth look at StarCraft,
the verdict? StarCraft owns!
Dominion
The Stormtroopers.com
web page has been updated with news that the Dominion demo, a RTS game, and the first
title to ever be released by Ion Storm will be released within 24hours.
Well, 24 hours away, more or less. D-Day is tomorrow when ION Storm will release their Real Time Strategy game demo, Dominion: Storm over Gift3. Included in the demo will be single and multiplayer maps. So get ready you RTS fans for some serious ass kickin good times. We'll be hanging out
over in ION Storms IRC Server (www.ionstorm.com) most of the day tomorrow (friday) waiting for this puppy to be released. So get the demo and come try to spank us in it..we dare ya! You can join us in chat by pointing you IRC client (like mIRC) to /server www.ionstorm.com. We'll be in channel #ion. Or point your Web Browser to ION Storm's Live Online. It's almost time to....Suck It Down!
Quake3 & 3D Cards
Brian Hook over at id Software made a lengty .plan update
discussing the system requirements for the Quake3 project that they are all working on
over there. Pretty much, he says quit your bitching:
People have been sending me mail bitching and moaning about how Quake 3 won't run on their systems because their system doesn't meet Q3's stated minimum requirements. This is an unfortunate by product of technological progress. We are not purposefully and maliciously excluding people with P5/133 processors and PowerVR PCX2 accelerators, but we are faced with an age old dilemma - how do we offer something better to the people with pimped out systems without completely ruling out the large market with older systems?
The easy answer? We don't. Q3 will be released during a major transition point for the entire PC industry -- the transition from crap 3D acceleration to ubiquitous good 3D acceleration. This is tough, because if we wanted to expand our potential market greatly then we would have a software renderer, but that's just not reasonable for the degree of technology we will be exploiting. Most other engines coming out in similar time frames are also hardware only, and this is the cost of progress.
People bitched when VGA-only games came out, people bitched when Pentium only games came out, and people will bitch when hardware only games come out.
People just like to bitch.
For some of the real cool effects that John has done we're looking at lots and lots of passes. That means we need hardware with 2-4x the fill rate of today's hardware. Yes, we will still run on a Voodoo, but no, it won't be "awesome" on a Voodoo -- keep in mind that the Voodoo, as cool as it is, is a very very old 3D accelerator by this market's standards. It should run reasonably well with the Voodoo 2 -- about the same as a Voodoo ran Quake 2 is my guess, but we won't know until we have more definitive data.
We are stressing scalability a LOT, so we do want to have acceptable performance across a wide range of accelerators. Really fast accelerators should be able to run Q3 with real nice looking graphics at higher resolutions and with deeper color depths; older ones will run at an acceptable frame rate and with reduced features.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. If you want better graphics (Q3 is essentially Q2 + better graphics), then you have to pay the price in required performance. There's no dodging that bullet. DOOM was not as Wolf3D, and Quake was not as fast as DOOM, and Quake 2 was not as fast as Quake. But each successive generation definitely looked better.
Another thing....
People have complained that I'm endorsing the TNT without having tested it, showing an "obvious bias". This irks me to no end, since I specifically said I'm not endorsing it or even recommending it -- we don't have one, so I can't say if it rocks, sucks, or lies somewhere in between. The only reason I've mentioned the TNT and not rumored upcoming products from Rendition, 3Dfx, et. al. is because the TNT is the only _announced_ product that has great specs. NVidia is far from alone when it comes to cool new products coming out in the next 12 months, but TNT is the only chip I can comment on because it is the only one of the batch of next generation chips to be announced.
When Rendition and 3Dfx announce their next generation products, I'm sure I'll have something to say then too.
Uber Engine Features
Late yesterday evening Ritual posted a fake screenshot of the Uber Engine as a April fools
joke. Well along with the joke Gary McTaggart did let out some details on the Uber Engine
and some of the capabilities we can expect to see:
Direct Engine
For those of you who wasted your time the
other day downloading that Direct Engine demo
and never received a key from the team, I'm sorry. They apparently underestimated the
sheer number of people out there and bit off more than they could chew. yup, a few hours
of your net connect time, wasted. Check
out the post made on the message board.
Netscape v4.05
Ant sends along word that a new version of Netscape Communicator has been released. Apparently this version *finally* fixes the problem with underlining entire paragraphs is the font tag is set next to an href.
Preview / Review Land
What everyone else is saying about the games
you play and the hardware you use:
Q2 Patches
werd
Please excuse the typos if you find any, had to do an emergency keyboard replacement today. (I can't type on these damn "standard" keyboards, ive been using a MS Natural for so long now)
Oh, and thanks to Quake2.com for this cool page. which is a preview of their new design and the direction they will be taking the page. I'm getting all gushy inside after all these pages popping up. *blush* You are a sweet heart Nigel.
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The Word from Cash
John Cash made a .plan update concerning Zoid's work on Quake2, and um, telling us he cant tell us anything about Quake3.
Quake2
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I don't recall if we've ever just come out and said it, but Zoid is now "da man" for Quake2. We're still working with him as needed of course. I'm also making sure to keep aware of what he's doing this time so we don't end up with the situation where QW had a bunch of stuff that Q2 didn't. I won't steal the thunder, but we've got some good stuff in the next version.
Quake3
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What to say; what not to say. Hmmmm.... Unfortunately it's best not to say much right now. Just know that we have been listening, and will continue to listen, to what you all have to say.
PureCTF
Yup, they still make mods for Quake Classic. Version 1.30 of PureCTF for Quake has been released. If you are a real detective you should check the homepage since you are looking for a place to download it.
Da Q2 Patches
ThreeeDeee
Da Views
Cheezy April Fools Pages
Guess I should list these off for the easily
amused:
Sites
werd
Yea, rockin and rollin man. Gotta love it. Check out the weekly sections as they have been updated accordingly. (Today's demo won't be posted till late tonight though, hopefully we can get a better demo than the one I currently have ready)
Oh, um. I'll archive the news this afternoon. I didnt get a chance to yesterday (Tuesday = archive day usually)
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CrackWhore Contest
Paul Steed's CrackWhore Skin Pack Contest is underway and the page is of course hosted by our man Redwood over at Stomped. If you be an artist go make some skins or something, and check out the contest page for details.
H2 Mission Pack Shots
The guys at www.hexenworld.com have posted some more screenshots of the Hexen2 Mission Pack which has just started showing up on
More
Heh, ok.. this is an interesting trend, people manipulating my image for their own entertainment. Check this page out on the Quake Easel.
Unreal Movie?
Well, there was an AVI floating around of Unreal earlier this morning, but apparently there was some "unauthorized footage" contained in the movie. I'm not sure how this works out since it was made publically available on a German magazine's included CD. Check out Unreal Nation and read about what you didnt get to see.
Wheel of Time Update
The official Wheel of Time website has been updated once again with more development info
Hexen2 Mission Pack Ships
Word from aCtivision is that the Hexen2 Mission Pack, Portal of Praevus is now shipping. It will be available at all popular (and even some of the not so popular) computer stores. Keep an eye on www.hexenworld.com for more info.
Speaking of which, there is a preview of the mission pack posted here at Eidolon's Game Society. -Blue's
Rocking the Boat
Sgt. Hulka was out cruising the web one day when he came across a new company dedicated to making first person shoot'em up games. He had never heard of this new company, but he knew that a few of the people at Rebel Boat Rocker were 3D veterans, so he decided to ask Randy Pitchford a few questions about their attitude, their philosophy, and their new game(s). Read all about it at: http://www.vrgames.net
Heretic 2
Brian Pelletier made a lengthy .plan update answering several more questions concerning Heretic2. Here is part of it:
Why the name:
The story of Heretic 2 directly follows the events in Heretic. The reason Hexen wasn't named Heretic 2 was because the story didn't directly follow Heretic. Heretic, Hexen and Hexen 2 followed the story of the 3 Serpent Riders. Hexen took place 1000 years(or so) after Heretic and on an all together different world.
Heretic 2 now goes back to tell the tale of what happened to our hero after he defeated D'Sparil. And bring you back to reintorduce you to the world of Heretic. Heretic 2 seemed to be the name that fit the best.
How the game came to be:
Steve Raffel (one of Raven's founders) Came up with the idea to do Heretic 2 a couple years ago. And to do it from a 3rd PP. This was before Tomb Raider came out. Steve and I played around with the idea of bringing you back to the Heretic world and really making it a believable world that our character has his quest in. We wanted to do it 3PP because that would make it a challange for us. We are creative people here at Raven and because of that we like to challange ourselves creatively. THis job would bet real boring if every game we made was a FPS. So what we wanted to do was try something new and give the gamer a new playing experience. So we got the OK to do the game and I was given the lead to take to completion.
The Heretic FAQ has also been update to v0.4 and is now available at the new location thanks to Telefragged.
SiN
SiN news from Ritual Entertainment seems to be the flavor of the week. Check out part of this post from Beau Anderson on the HardCorps messageboard:
The truth is, nobody but we here at Ritual knows what Sin looks like at this moment. All the screenshots and monsters you have seen up until this point are old news as we have re-done most all of the monsters and weapons, re-vamped our skinning method, and the lighting model in the levels has changed drastically. Not to mention the special efects we have put in since receiving the Q2 code. Localized pain and damage is very cool, and has a lot of cool side affects that will push gameplay beyond what people now know. Can you imagine the ability to use the sniper rifle to zoom in on a guys left eye and shoot it out? That technology is in.
Q2 Patches
Da views
werd
One more addition to the stuff that sucks from yesterday. racist. ignorant puds. (Yea, just watched a bit of Jerry Springer.. heh)
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Heretic2 Preview
Something you guys should all take a look at. GameSlice has posted a short preview of Heretic2 from aCtivioon / Raven. Big thanks to Billy Wilson of VooDoo Extreme for this one. :)
The State of SiN
Mike "giggler" Wardwell passed along this statement to me concerning the recent rumors of Ritual Entertainment's SiN release date:
There is a rumor on the net about Ritual releasing Sin at Christmas as well as one saying we are wrapping things up and sending it out the door. Both are false. The game will be nearing its completion around E3 time, where we''ll be showing a fully functioning demo of Sin. Oh yeah, and sCary DOOD, nice hair cut.
Just a minor note, Mike got shafted on his haircut. I gave the barber chick his phone # though instead of mine, things should be pretty exciting for Mr. Wardwell this weekend.
Q2 Patches -updated
Prey
Got this email from Lithium of 3D Portal: "3D Realms has posted a great little journal about Paul Schuytema's daily activities, from sunrise to sunset. Be sure to read all about Paul's day. And just think, if you have the exact schedule as Paul and mimic his life to the tee, you too could be a spiffy game producer. :)"
HexenWorld CTF
Millennium is doing quite an incredible job on the skins for HexenWorld CTF. As much as they would like to keep the features of their little labor of love secret until they are ready to hit you over the head with this potentially great mod, a glimpse has been posted of the Paladin and the Necromancer in their spiffy new CTF attire!
Interviews
VooDoo2's
Gamespot UK has posted a comparison between the 2 VooDoo2 based cards from Diamond and Creative Labs. Thanks VE
Unreal
While you are over there, Gamespot UK has posted a preview of Unreal that is quite lengthy. To say they are excited about Unreal would be an understatement :)
HexenWorld
Word from Rick Johnson of Raven Software on the next release of HexenWorld should be the middle of this week with Mission pack support.
The next release of HW will be near the middle of this week, as we are adding support for the new character class from the mission pack and other things regarding the mission pack.
The way it will work: if the server has the mission pack installed, a client is eligible to play the new class, but only if the client has also purchased the mission pack. If the client has not, then he/she will only be able to see others play that class, and be restricted to the original 4 characters.
Qoole Hexen2 Beans
You can now make Hexen2levels with QOOLE, just go to this site http://studwww.rug.ac.be/~sdelrue/ and get the h2qoole.zip file, the txt in it explains it all
Level Design
Rust has just posted the first part of a design article he has been working on for awhile...its titled Natural Terrain within the Quake2 Engine and it has quotes and comments from designers such as: Levelord Eric Biessman Disruptor Paul Jaquays Drizzt Iikka Kernen thanks a bunch Shane 'Fishman' Sherman r u s t - Editing & Game Design http://www.planetquake.com/rust/
TeamFortress Tunes
An TF II audio demo (mp3 format)is up at http://www.planetquake.com/teamfortress/ You wanna know where to get an MP3 player? www.winamp.com of course you knob. Check out all the nifty skins and plugins while you are there.
Blood FAQ
A new version of the Blood FAQ has been posted with information pertaining to the recent 3dfx patch released by Monolith. -VE
Intel's Evil Plot
The guys at Intel are of course hard at work with several different CPU's under development. Tom's Hardware page has the lowdown on a few different chips of note that Intel has on the plate. While you are there, check out his article which is an overview of the entire industry at the moment and suggestions on what you should buy.
VRGN User Group
The monthly user group hosted by VRGN held last week was quite a success, with the
VooDoo2 being announced on Sharkman's page. American McGee will be attending next months
meeting to be held on the 11th down at the infomart.
Preview / Review Land
What everyone else is saying about the games
you play and the hardware you use:
Sites
werd
Sigh, some cute connection problems when I woke up this morning. My apologies.
Hey, got the haircut, the barber chick was hitting on me too, it was cool. giggler and the guys had to sit around waiting while this chick took twice as long to cut my hair as anyone elses while she told me stuff like "MMM mmm, if my daughter brought you home lookin like this.." etc... Fun.. heh
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Unreal & Direct3D
Unreal Nation has posted a statement from Tim Sweeney concerning the status of Direct3D and Unreal: -VE
Just saw this on the sweet ass Epic Trak - Epic Trak.
Direct3D code is in the works now (by an outside company) and it will be released if it's cool. At this point, it looks most likely that D3D support would come as a post-release patch, because of the amount of development and testing time remaining. We realize that the Riva 128, i740, and Rendition cards are cool and we'll get them supported in Unreal, though likely not in time for initial release.
For people without supported 3d hardware, Unreal's software rendering is still quite nice, especially if you have MMX. It supports colored lighting and fog, and the 16/32 bit color rendering is quite crisp compared to other 3D games.
Quake State
VooDoo Extreme's web thumb-dick Anders has posted something to their hardware site (an article really) called The Quake State. A collection of screenshots on various video cards showing the difference in visual quality between the cards. Although no V2 shots yet -- it's on it's way.
QuakeRally
Team Impact has released everything they were working on for the QuakeRally project for Quake1 that was never seen. This includes some of the nifty features they were working on like skid marks as well as a new map that was not released as well. You of course will have to download the full QuakeRally first, then the extra stuff as well. (Version 1.2)
Maybe if you're cool, you can play it on a VooDoo2 card, huh Jack? :)
Heretic2 Opinions
The guys at Raven Software, after seeing the large public reactions caused by the announcement of Heretic2 and the prospect of it being a 3rd person POV title is looking for opinions from the game players out there. There was a post on the HexenWorld messageboard from Raven employees asking to send mail to opinion@mail.ravensoft.com if you have some insightful input o the project.
FrogBot
Frogbot 0.05 has been released by the almighty Frog! -- This version has Kascam support (*VERY* cool), some grenade and rocket avoidance, tweaked goal selection AI, waypoints spiffed up a bit, a lot of new commands, and more! You guys better take this baby for a spin.. http://www.telefragged.com/metro
Quest
The newly revived Quest project has been updated with a new version on the homepage. Check it out at the new location thanks to frag.com. New feature in this version: Undo!
More Bot Stuff & Q2 Patches
Preview / Review Land
Competetions
werd
Everyone pray, off to get a haircut today.
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