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More Q2 Utils

id Software has released some more tools for you to play with while goofin around in Quake2. Here is the .plan update from Disruptor:

I uploaded some files to help you all get started with creating player models. You can view them in TexPaint (which John released the source for yesterday), and if you have a 24bit GL card, you can even use TexPaint to paint on the models. They are located at; ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/pmodels_12_12.zip I've included the base.tri from each the male and player model along with one LBM to get you started with, as well as one of their crouching and standing frames. I was also going to upload the conversion utility I hacked together that we used to convert maps from Quake I to Quake II format, but after giving it futher thought, it was really a moot point. QE4 can read in Quake I maps, and you are going to need to retexutre all your maps anyway (My program didn't handle that as all our QI format maps already contained Q2 texture names). The program didn't handle converting entities from one type to another because we didn't need that functionality (again, everything in the QI format maps were already using the new Q2 entities.)

Keep in mind that you need a GL Card that supports 24bit textures. (Permidia 2 for example) but that 3dfx card of yours just aint gonna cut it.

Qoole Beans v2.3

Just when you thought you were safe from the beans, another version of Qoole has been released with Quake2 support. You can use the textures, colored lighting effects, and a lot of the other features of Quake2 already. Of course the GL version of Qoole has been updated as well.

Q2 Mods

Only takes a day or so for people to already start making mods for Quake2. As talked about a while back with Quake2 using DLL's, there is a serious security issue. As in, DLL's = people can put out mods with hidden uses.

Stuff like grabbing your Eudora or WS_FTP .ini files which contain the encrypted passswords via ftp without you even knowing about it and sending them to the grubby programmers hands is not out of the question. So.. the moral is um.. If you arent sure of the source of the mod, be wary.

Jawed Karim already threw together a mod which accessed the PC Speaker just as a demonstration of the possibilities of DLL's.

If you are interested in making your own mods though, (and have a compiler) Check out Inside3D's Quake2 Programming Tutorial Also SumFuka has posted 4 more basic tutorials to help out those fledgling programmers.

Mike Wilson

Everyone is wondering just what is up with Mike Wilson and that new g.o.d. company that he is working on. Well, there is an interview with him on GameSpot. He says that they will announce all the "big names" that have already signed on with the company, they are just waiting on a few more people to commit before announcing the big list. Thanks CiDcO

Speaking of GameSpot, they have posted 10 questions for John Carmack (not answered) They are um, pretty good although a couple of the questions are just goofy and a waste of time. (Fluff questions)

GL Guide

Gamers Extreme has posted a GL Guide of their own which is pretty damn good. (Not as good as my GL Guide though if I do say so myself.. <g>)

Speaking of which, there is word from Canopus that the Pure3D is in such high demand that they cant even make them fast enough to get them out there. "Due to overwhelming demand, orders placed after December 10, 1997 will not ship in time for Christmas. New orders will ship by January 12, 1998." -VooDoo

Quake2 Tips

Blue is really on the ball with his great Quake2 help / questions / faq's / tips etc section over there at his page. I was going to try to make something similar but he seems to have it covered pretty damn well already. Great job Steve.

GibStats II

Um, read the mail, I'm lazy. :)

GibStats II (http://www.planetquake.com/gibstats/) has been released. Should be the first Stats prog for Quake II. There is also a dedicated server mod for Quake II coming. New features: - Quake II support - some interface enhancements - many bugs killed - Dedicated Log Standard implemented Soon (within a week) there is going to be a gamex86.dll mod which outputs a log in the new Log Standard (details: at http://www.planetquake.com/gibstats/ ) , including information about weapon and time of frag within the game. This mod will be for the dedicated server.

CTF v2.0+ Release

Ron Mercer sent out this email to all of us:

CTF Plus Version 2.0 has been released at http://loc.gamesnet.net/ctfplus. This new version lets you see the weapon a player is carrying. It also adds a menu-driven ompetition Mode, tossed powerups, and tons more.

Q2 Debates

Few forums etc for you guys to see other opinions on Quake2:

• Ben Kieran has posted this little Doom2 vs. Quake2 article that is interesting.
• ELM has started this moderated Quake2 Forum (BBS Style) for all you guys to post / discuss on.
• GameSpy.com has added a Quake2 section to their support board.

Speaking of GameSpy, was checking out the latest OGR magazine and there is a full page article talking about GameSpy3D owning the industry and becoming the "defacto standard for internet gaming" I'd have to agree already. :)

Prey Stuff

• GameCenter has posted the first edition of the Prey Developers Journal with Paul S. of 3D Realms, Project Manager. -Blue's
• Paul has also updated his .plan with a little bit on the development. Actually they ran across a bug in a Microsoft product.. oh my..

Unreal Stuff

• Stonage of Unreal Nation took a trip over to Digital Extremes last month. (The guys contracted by Epic to help with the art work for Unreal) and has just finished up his lengthy report of everything that he witnessed while he was there including yet another bit of praise for the yet to be released UnrealED. Check it out.
• Unreal.com has posted another monster profile with those neet little animated .gif files of the dudes running through his frames etc and that wire frame stuff as well. Check out the Mercenary.

.plan Wagon

What all the homeys are sayin:

• Charlie Wiederhold here at Ritual Entertainment seems to blush when I tell him what I think of guys who drive trucks. His dad was a cop too.. oh he loves to be teased though.. I can see it. :) Oh, and he split that bigass map of his into 2 maps.
• Paul Steed of id Software made a .plan update talking about High-res versions of the Quake2 movie intros / cut scenes etc. He says some of the effects he did were after they dropped down the resolution though so it will take a bit of work.
• Brian Hook is updating his .plan as always, he found a bug in the code luckily before all of his benchmarking was done which could have adversly affected the results. He also scored himself a nice new system. :)

3D Card Stuff

Few things of note for you guys who own a 3D accelerator or are thinking about buying one:

• GameSpot has updated their 3D card showdown with the addition of permidia 2 cards and one other card as well. -VooDoo
• Zanshin has posted a review of the Diamond Stealth II card, also there is an overclocking utility avialable there on PlanetQuake.
• VMan has released a pretty cool 3dfx enhanced screensaver that you might wanna look at. -VooDoo

.plan Wagon -Updated

What all the homeys are sayin:

• Tim Willits has updated his .plan giving a big thanks to everyone for their hard work including a thanks to Romero who updated his .plan earlier stating his love of Quake2. Tim also tells the tale of how a map is passed around at id while being worked on to become the finished product. (Not always just one guy doing one map)

I want to publicly thank and congratulate all the designers here that worked so hard to make such an awesome game. No one person could have done what the team did. We have become so strong as a team and I believe we work so wonderfully together that I can not wait until we get started on the mission pack.

• Disruptor is updating his .plan about the current bug squashing situation with Quake2.
• Dave Taylor of crack.com (Formerly of id Software) has a brief mention of Quake2 in his .plan (whic he constantly updates btw)
• Don't forget to check out Brian Hook's continually updated .plan file, his work log has returned as well!

Powerball v1.1

"Powerball version 1.1 has been released at our new digs on Planetquake! www.planetquake.com/powerball is the place to be! This release sports new levels, a few bug fixes, and QuakeWorld support! Enjoy! "

GameSpy v1.5

w00, finally have Quake2 support in GameSpy. (Pretty fast work boys) Version 1.5 was released on the homepage at www.gamespy.com last night. (I was feeling sick yesterday, sorry, it's probably a tumor) So here is the new version for registered users. Thanks Fargo.

Q2 Code Public

John Carmack updated his .plan with word that all you hax0rs have some new stuff to play with. Start making those Q2 mods! (<cough> Clan Arena <cough>) Thanks _Quinn

The Quake 2 public code release is up at: ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/source/q2source_12_11.zip This source code distribution is only for hard-core people that are going to spend a lot of time pouring over it. This is NOT a how-to-make-levels-for-q2 type dsitribution! This should keep a bunch of you busy for a while. :) ------------------------- and to quote Christian: "I just upload, as per Carmack's request, all the BSP tools, the source to QE4, the source to TexPaint and all the GAME.DLL source."

ION Confirms Mike Wilson's Departure

The ION Storm website has been updated with a statement:

It’s official. Mike "Evil" Wilson has resigned his position as ION Storm CEO to devote himself wholly to his newest venture, a cooperative game publishing company called g.o.d. (Gathering of Developers), g.o.d. is an alliance of several top-tier developers and will "aim to establish the new status-quo in developer/publisher relations," according to Wilson. "ION Storm has been a blast, and I know that it will be something that I will always be proud of having been a part of," Mike said, "but my goals and vision of developer-driven publishing do not currently work for ION Storm, due to their multi-title commitments to Eidos. I would love to start Gathering of Developers with ION Storm as a founding developer, but I just can't wait for us to release 6-8 products. The stars are aligned for something very special, and the time is now." Mike embarks on his new project with the full blessing of ION Storm. "Mike is a very driven individual with a unique perspective and genuine beliefs of how things can be done better in this industry as far as the publishing side goes," said John Romero, who now assumes the title of CEO. "I invited him to ION Storm to help us establish an identity of our own and to ensure that the world is anxiously awaiting our first products. He has accomplished that mission, and is off to pursue his own dream of a developer-owned publishing co-op... I wish him the best and can't wait to see what happens." All of us at ION Storm wish Mike the very best of luck in his new endeavor.

Q2 Colored Skins

Hopefully this will become a standard for teamplay. Although the skins in Quake2 are probably the most incredible bit of skin work I have ever seen in a released product (No Shit! They are awesome!) They dont contrast enough for quick teamplay. I already crank my teamates enough when they are bright yellow, who knows how it will be when they are cammy color.. heh. Here is the email from Chris:

To address the problem of teamplay in Quake 2, as colors have been taken out and the skins are hard to tell apart from a distance, I have created a pack of 14 skins for the 14 basic colors (0-13) from Quake. The files containing them is available at http://www.lookup.com/Homepages/75294/q2_color_skins/clrskn10.zip and the file size is 251k. Also, the readme.txt is at http://www.lookup.com/Homepages/75294/q2_color_skins/readme.txt Thanks. Chris Pimlott / Moebius of Dark Requiem & SIK

Qoole Beans

New versions of Qoole and GLQoole are available on the www.qoole.com homepage. Btw, The guys over at Qoole sent me a couple of CD's a while back and if you do buy the registered version, it comes with some pretty useful videos etc that can teach you the basics of making Quake levels. They are up to version 2.20 now.

PingTool v1.5

If you are a non-conformist and wish to use something other than GameSpy, PingTool v1.5 is now out, and also has Quake2 support as well.

Doom Movie

Just saw a link on Blue's page to this article on Next-Gen stating that Tri-Star pictures is actually getting the Doom Movie underway.. wow.. 4yrs now?

My Gripe with Q2

Figured I should post this because it's bugging the hell out of me. The controls in Q2 are ick. If you may remember the Q2test that was released a while ago had a really sloppy feel to the controls. This was due to the fact that the input from the keyboard was only being sampled at 10hz. Which meant you could be as lagged as up to 50ms, just to yourself Stack that on top of internet play, and ick. Now, what they did in the release version was to use prediction code to smooth this out. Not my idea of cool. If you want to know what is being "smoothed over" with client prediction, try typing cl_predict 0 at the console while playing in single player mode, it will give you an idea of just how responsive the controls really are. Overall I love the game, superb levels, weapon balance seems pretty good, I dig it to no end.. but I PRAY that they fix this control issue. I imagine it may have something to do with the 200+ players capability, but I tell you what, Ill choose precise controls over that any day.

Site Hosting

Everyone needs a home for their pride and joy Quake website right? Here is the email I got from Matt Black:

Termination Central is hosting Quake related sites(Quake news/info, Clans, Quake2 news/info, and Mod Developers)...Services: cgi, perl, pop mail, 10+ diskspace, and Advertisements on main page. See Page for Details.

Need to Gesture?

Taylor, aka [APr]VampHntrD sent me this useful alias for what may prove to be important in future team games. Gestures: (also thanks to Walter Elly for a minor fix)

//QUIK-GESTURE(tm) alias gesture1 "bind EXECUTE_KEY wave" alias gesture2 "bind EXECUTE_KEY wave 1" alias gesture3 "bind EXECUTE_KEY wave 2" alias gesture4 "bind EXECUTE_KEY wave 3" alias gesture5 "bind EXECUTE_KEY wave 4" alias bind1 "gesture1; echo Flipoff Prepared; bind TOGGLE_KEY bind2" alias bind2 "gesture2; echo Salute Prepared; bind TOGGLE_KEY bind3" alias bind3 "gesture3; echo Taunt Prepared; bind TOGGLE_KEY bind4" alias bind4 "gesture4; echo Wave Prepared; bind TOGGLE_KEY bind5" alias bind5 "gesture5; echo Point Prepared; bind TOGGLE_KEY bind1" bind TOGGLE_KEY bind1

Q2 Icons

A couple of different Icons for Quake2 o n your desktop to check out. this zip file with about 2 dozen, and this single cool one.

Q2 Reviews

Still havent gotten a CD? Well read what everyone else is saying about the game you want to play. :)

• Redwood has posted his impressions of the full version of Quake2
• John Romero updated his .plan with a really good review of Quake2 that I tend to agree with. (mostly)
• OGR has posted their review.
• CyberTimes has a review for you to read.
• Gamesmania has a review for you to read too!
• Games Online has another review if you are still curios.
• Kuhas' negative Quake2 review is posted for all you guys who love to bitch. :)

Mike Wilson leaves Ion Storm

Next-Gen has broken the news that Mike Wilson formerly of Ion Storm has left as bis guy there to work on a new company, g.o.d. . (Gathering of Developers) John Romero will be taking Mike Wilson's spot at Ion as CEO.

Interviews -Updated

What all the homeys are sayin:

• The *was* only interview I know of today, so it *had* it's own headline. Paul Steed answered some questions over at NAWC.
• Impulse1 (re-opened again?) has an interview with Disruptor of id Software.
• Blue of BluesNews got on the other side of the mic to answer some questions with Gamers Extreme. (Great site btw)

The Bug List

Disruptor was up late last night working on the Q2 bug list for you guys to check out. There are a few questions answered in there as well, so if you are having a problem or think there is a bug, check it out. -fRy

I worked on the bug page tonight, and think I got everything working well. I decided to "Do it right" and used a database in order to store everything, and just wrote a CGI to present the information to you (God I love SQL. It's much easier to manage things this way =) I'll go and tidy things up when I get in later today, add some more verbage and add a link to the bug submission form. --- Please check out; http://satan.idsoftware.com/cgi-win/bugs.exe --- This is the new permanent location of the bug page. If you have a bug to report, PLEASE check the page first, and if it's not on there, feel free to e-mail me. I'll be updating the page as I get reports. The bugs page also includes workarounds and notes about some of the problems that have been reported.

DC-Con Cyberathlete Endorsed.

Kind of what the headline implies, The CAL set of rules are spreading quite fast. here is snip of the press release, and click here to read the full release.

The Cyberathlete Organization, the first professional computer game players organization in the world, announced the declaration of DC-Con4 as an official Cyberathlete Endorsed Tournament (CET). DC-Con is a bi-annual computer gaming conference, specializing in Quake and other networkable games, held near Washington, D.C.  "Our intention in working with the Cyberathlete Organization," said Amr "LuNcH" Rafie, head of Public Relations for DC-Con4, "is to insure that our tourneys comply as closely as possible with the CPL standards promoted by Cyberathletes."

KeyGrip Demo Server

Wow.. check this out.. KeyGrip is gettin pretty incredible:

The new version of KeyGrip has just been released on the KeyGrip for Quake page: http://www.planetquake.com/keygrip/ ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/quake/planetquake/keygrip/keygrip16.zip The new version includes many enhancements, most notably a built in demo server. This server allows you to preview the demo in real time with VCR like controls. You can even control the playback from WITHIN quake.. see a good frag? rewind, watch it again, in frame-by-frame.. More importantly, this gives serious demo editors a very simple and accurate way to make cuts. The demo server also includes the ability to allow freedom of view and freedom of movement. This means that you can FLY AROUND inside the demo while it is playing! Must see to believe! KeyGrip for Quake is the fastest, most advanced, and easiest to use Quake demo editor available. The new version is even faster, and has tons of other great features as well.

Requiem Update

Just got this email from Requiem, still hard at work on his Quake patch:

Requiem Front End does it all! Calculate different server, deathmatch, teamplay and bot modes all from the front end, and then it automatically saves it for you. Run dedicated or listen servers, connect to other servers QW or otherwise. Even saves your favourite command line options. :) A must have for all Requiem fans. - R E Q U I E M - http://www.planetquake.com/requiem

Q2 banned in Germany

Interesting article on GameCenter talking about the banning of Q2 in germany. thanks Walkingcarpet.

Q2 Secrets

A couple of the more interesting secrets that people have discovered in Quake2:

• The "hall of id" at the end boss level. There are pictures of everyone who worked on Quake2.
• This "carmack's head" model that Trey Harrison over at Crack.com found somehow.
• www.cadvision.com/rizzen not sure if anyone else has found this yet, there is a "bonus" level in quake2, its soo funny... its like a nintendo bonus lvl, where you have a certain amount of time to collect all the points on the bonus lvl, in q2 i think the time is 30 seconds... you just run around collecting shit. i found this lvl on factory.cfg lvl 1, its in the little waterfall, with the nice green lighting around it, you just rjump into the top of the waterfall and you enter the bonus lvl -Leloo
• btw... one more cheat sent along by Walter Elly is the g_unlimited_ammo 1. Take a guess what the code does. I'll give you 2 tries.

Preview / Review Land

What everyone else is saying about the games you play and the hardware you use:

• N64.com has a preview of Quake for the Nintendo64. -Blue's
• Operation 3DFX has a review of the Emotion 3D VooDoo Rush card.

.plan Wagon

What all the homeys are sayin:

• Joe Selinski here at Ritual has the weekly Sin press coverage update. I'm figuring we'll work out our plot for world domination in 7 - 10 days.
• Brian Hook over at id Software is talking about the wonders that is VooDoo2 and plans for testing other 3d vid cards.
• Disruptor of course is working hard on the Quake2 bug stuff, the man never rests.

Not enough Q2 Yet?

Yeesh.. ok.. here are a few more tips that have been passed around for your Quake2'ing pleasure:

• I noticed that all of the render console commands currently work while connected as a client.. stuff like sw_drawflat and I imagine the drawworld and entities commands work as well.. drawflat is entertaining at least. :)
• Sykosys sent out some email with a tip on how to get the sound working on Crystal Audio cards. At the console type: "s_wavonly 1" followed by "snd_restart".
• Disruptor updated his .plan talking about what they have discovered so far since the Q2 release:

- "Connection Refused" does not necessarily mean that the server is full as I previously stated. Looks like there is an issue with servers not properly clearing out clients who have disconnected. I'll get the lowdown on this later on today (ie: you get a "connection refused" when there are 4/12 people on a server) - MouseWheel issues. MWHEELUP/DOWN don't seem to work very well. Will bounce this off Brian Servers sending you data even though you've disconnected from the server - NT Users getting lagged sound. Try setting "s_mixahead" to 0.5 or something. (I use 0.2 on my NT system) This is a known issue with the way NT handles WAVs - "NET_SendPacket ERROR: WSAEWOULDBLOCK" trying to connect to a server? Fails to connect Tweaking TCP/IP packet size in the Windows registry + Quake II == BAD. Will bounce this off John

• The id Software web site has had a bit of a makeover to commemorate the release of Quake2. Looks great, as Walter always does pro work. -Blue's
• Will Smith has opened up his own Quake2 Screenshot page for you guys to check out.
• If you just dont believe in a computer predicting movement, then you can turn off prediction with the cl_predict 0 command at the console. Heck, try it even in single player mode, feels like crap, but hey.. if that's what you are into.. -Blue's

Cash!

John Cash, lead programmer on the Quake2 project sent out this email, you should just use cmdlist and cvarlist at the console if you wanna get all the commands.

A quick tidbit that will hopefully save people a some time. There are two commands in QuakeII called "cmdlist" and "cvarlist". As their names (hopefully) imply, they print out lists of all the commands and all the cvars in the game. Note that they only list what iscurrently active, so if you haven't started a game (and therefore have not loaded gamex86.dll) then none of that DLL's commands or cvars will be listed yet.

Q2 Dedicated Servers

John Carmack updated his .plan file with news that um. there was a slight booboo in the net code that was released with Quake2:

BIG BUG IN Q2 NETWORKING! If you run multiplayer servers, download: ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/q2_306.zip A serious bug got through... I thought the QuakeWorld master server code was completely disabled, because I was planning on putting a modified architecture in place in the point release. It turns out that the code is still in there, sending heartbeats to a unix machine here at id that isn't even running a master server. That wouldn't normally be an issue -- a packet every five minutes from all the servers. Except.... Cyrix has a new processor that is significantly faster at single precision floating point calculations if you don't do any double precision calculations anywhere. Quake had always kept its timebase as a double precision seconds value, but I agreed to change it over to an integer millisecond timer to allow the global setting of single precision mode. We went through and changed all the uses of it that we found, but the routine that sends heartbeats to the master servers was missed. So, instead of sending a packet every 300 seconds, it is sending one every 300 MILLISECONDS. Oops. To a server, it won't really make a difference. A tiny extra packet three times a second is a fraction of the bandwidth of a player. However, if there are thousands of network games in progress, that is a LOT of packets flooding idsoftware.com. So, please download the new executable if you are going to run any servers (even servers started through the menus). ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/q2_306.zip This isn't the real point release -- there are no new features or bugfixes. I just went back to the release codebase and recompiled with one function commented out so we wouldn't have to worry about introducing new bugs with our current untested code. Btw, all bug reports should go to Christian (xian@idsoftware.com), NOT to me, Brian, or Cash! We need a central point to funnel things through. Hopefully we can set up a web page or something to make public what we know about, so we can cut down on email traffic.

Disruptor updated his .plan file with instructions on how to set a lot of the variables that people have been curious about with Q2 servers:

I've recieved a number of e-mails from people wondering how to set the various deathmatch flags for a dedicated server. The following bitflag info will be included in the game.dll "when it's released". Add up all the values you want on your server, and pop them into the <b>dmflags</b> cvar when you start your dedicated server. For example, If I wanted to run a server that had weapons stay like in Quake DM3 rules, along with using spawn furthest for player respawns, I'd add 4 (DF_WEAPONS_STAY) and 512 (DF_SPAWN_FARTHEST) to derrive 516. Therefore, I'd execute quake2 +set dedicated 1 +set dmflags 516 +maxclients blah blah blah... Hope this helps #define DF_NO_HEALTH 1 #define DF_NO_ITEMS 2 #define DF_WEAPONS_STAY 4 #define DF_NO_FALLING 8 #define DF_INSTANT_ITEMS 16 #define DF_SAME_LEVEL 32 #define DF_SKINTEAMS 64 #define DF_MODELTEAMS 128 #define DF_FRIENDLY_FIRE 256 #define DF_SPAWN_FARTHEST 512 #define DF_FORCE_RESPAWN 1024 #define DF_NO_ARMOR 2048

Christian also updated with a couple of bugs that have already been found in the release, keep an eye on his .plan file for future stuff like this.

BSP v0.87a

Thanks Rodney Burns for the word that a new version of BSP (Quake1 level editor) has been released.

The newest version of BSP, version .87a, has just been released at the BSP Headquarters ( http://bsphq.telefragged.com ). This version features editing support for Quake2 (whenever the compiling utilities are released by id, that is) and a system for handling multiple game/tc editing configurations.

Server Listings

Here are the 3 current Q2 server listings that I know of:

• PlanetQuake has opened up a Quake2 Server list.
• Gameaholic.com has opened up their advanced Q2 Server List. Which has templates for adding your own servers.
• Telefragged's List.
• e' Munch's List.

Q2 Cheats Etc

Well, as expected everyone is running Q2 through those hex editors etc trying to find out every single console command known to man. I'll make it simple for you guys though, here is every command you need:
god
give all
sw_mipcap
fov
noclip

Generally, most of the commands from Quake1 are carried over to Quake2, except they have been seperated with different prefixes for GL_ SW_ CL_ etc. Just play around, it's not very difficult to figure out. Of course.. you can head on over to OGR and check out their more extensive list.

Q2 Proxy

For all you guys stuck behind a firewall or for some other reason just really get off when you use a proxy, here is a Quake2 Proxy for you to use. It covers Linux, Sun, Win32 and a couple of other platforms. -Blue's

Q2 Reviews

A couple more reviews for you guys to read on Quake2 if you havent gotten a copy yet.

• GameSpot has posted their impressions.
• NextGen has posted their impressions.
• Ultra Game Players has posted their impressions.

3D Cards by Hook

Brian Hook is updating his .plan file running through just about every single respectable 3D video card on the market and running benchmarks on them. (Or well, we thought they were respectable until we saw those results.. heh) He has gone through about 4 or 5 so far and is hoping to have the entire batch of cards finished by the end of the week. Note, he did the .plan update at 4.15am.. heh.

After the Fall TC Released

Here is the email I got from Dave "HotFat" Biggs, their TC has finally hit the net!:

Well it was a little later than expected due to our ftp server going down as well as the phone company crashing10 minutes before I was going to upload the final. Anyway it's now at http://www.planetquake.com/atf. At the moment it's onlt at planetquake and an austrlaian site but I'll add mirrors as they become available 16 Huge Levels! (had to cut 2 out) over 100 new models! Hundreds of new sounds! All new Textures! Features that Quake 2 doesn't even have! 18 Meg Zip File 50 Meg Pak

Suck

It was updated LATE LATE last nigh.. sorry I took so long.. been a bit busy around here, I'll let you guys know whats up tomorrow probably.

More Monkeys?

Ritual Entertainment has just hired a hot new programmer to flesh out the already incredible team. Scott Alden, formerly of 3dfx Interactive. Check out the Ritual News page for the full press release.

Quake2 Servers

Well, until there is some sort of master server list and GameSpy support with Quake2, we are all gonna have to suffer with doing this stuff manually. Here is a list of servers though being done by hand, and then of course like I mentioned earlier, VRGames has posted their own Quake2 servers now.

Update: DONT EMAIL ME SERVER IP'S. I am not Ironman, or Pipo or whatever. Check out these 2 server lists, (one and two) or read Disruptor's .plan file if you are looking for Quake2 servers. Here is the final list of servers that i will be posting:

Quake2 is Out!

You guys should be able to find Quake2 on shelves around the nation about now. So head on down to your local mall or wherever you buy you computer games and snag a copy. id Software should have a server going tonight, as well as those guys at www.vrgames.net

I was even emailed that Quake2 made the Wall Street Journal Marketplace cover section in todays paper. Big big big.. Can't wait to play it!

Also, AVault is already on the ball with posting a review of the full version of Quake2. (Already!)

Blahbalicious

Those wacky kids Avatar and Wendigo have put together a simply great Quake movie for you guys to check out. It's in the spirit of the beloved classic Operation Bayshield, but with several short sketches. Check out the homepage to find out more about it. Yes, this is the same Avatar who released Target Quake no less than a week ago, the dude works hard. :)

There was a irc release party for this demo last night, but um.. I was asleep. :)

Trinity + OpenGL

VooDoo Extreme posted this quote of John Carmack talking about Trinity and how Mr. Carmack is happy happy joy joy now with Microsoft. Or well, at least for now.. :)

>"I just read that Microsoft has finally announced that they plan to fully support OpenGL for Windows95 and NT. I'm curious to know if full support for OpenGL in Windows impacts the direction that you plan to take the Trinity engine. Have you given much thought to what direction you would go at that level of the engine design? OpenGL, DirectX, or something else? I have been saying "OpenGL only" for trinity since the begining." It looks like it is actually going to work out ok now. John Carmack

Clan Arena v1.2

Clan Arena v1.2 has been released. (This is my current Quake patch addiction, every night.. ugh.. can't.. stay... away..) Grab the new version here and put up a server! It's amazing looking at the arena tab in GameSpy and I notice that the Clan Arena servers are always the ones that are packed. (Even maxed out on spectators!) So.. we need those servers!

GL Port Stuff

As we've all noticed, Zanshin's GLQuake Dojo hasnt been very active lately, well homeboy is back now from his court case. Things didnt go completely his way in court, but from what I read on Blue's page, apparently we will be seeing portions of his OpenGL work available sometime soon.

Speaking of this stuff, I didnt mention yesterday that the GL Underground group, also working on stuff similar to what Zanshin was doing has fallen through, but they left permission for all beta testers that they had to release the work. Now.. who here was a beta tester, gimme!

Suckage

Hm.. something that really sucks.. when that dumbass webmaster over in Dallas doesnt update his stuff that sucks section. (Thanks morbid) It'll be updated today, apologies.

Hey, at least I've been updating before noon every day.. cut me some slack!

Virtua Fighter Patch

A couple of patches etc for you guys to download and check out, ok.. well 1 at least. :AVault has posted a Direct 3D patch for Virtua Fighter that is way cool.

Preview / Review Land

What everyone else is saying about the games you play and the hardware you use:

• Lucas Arts has posted a preview of their Mysteries of Sith Jedi Knight add on pack. Jedi Knight.. yum.. probably the best single player game I have played to date. :)
• AVault (as mentioned earlier) has posted a review of the full version of Quake2. -Angel
• OGR has posted a review of Nuclear Strike that is pretty interesting.
• VooDoo Extreme has a review of the Permidia 2 based Graphics Blaster.
• Games Domain is apparently not very thrilled with Tomb Raider 2. -Blue
• Redox Portal has a review of the YPOD Doom TC for Quake.

Interviews

A couple of interviews for you guys to read:

• The Malice team (Epochalypse) is interviewed over at NAWC.
• EBWorld.com will be hosting an online interview / chat session with John Romero on the 16th of this month.
• Tom Mustaine answered some questions over at Bokatu's Realm of Sin.

.plan Wagon

What all the homeys are sayin

• Charlie over here at Ritual is still pounding away on his huge DM map for Sin. We are actually gonna run around the thing hopefully late this week.
• George Broussard of 3DRealms has an update in his .plan giving information about Jack Mathew's work on the next Shadow Warrior 3dfx patch, The Quake2 tech dump, and talk of www.gamegirlz.com and sexism at 3DR.

Microsoft + OpenGL?

I'll be damned, someone must have taken a pair of balls, packaged them and shipped them over to Microsoft to use. (Along with a brain) check out this press release from Microsoft posted on Blue's page. (I'm feeling lazy tonight)

Brian Hook, programmer at id Software has also made a lengthy .plan update talking about all the things that can still go wrong in this move, although it is a step in the right direction for sure. Here is a quote:

...A more formal and complete statement from game developers will likely be forthcoming in the next couple weeks. But the fact remains the same: it's now okay to write OpenGL drivers for Windows, and thus it's now okay to write games using OpenGL. And we hope that Quake2 is a testament to OpenGL's applicability for games.

Need a job? -Updated

First:
o HELP WANTED. I'm looking for a dedicated gamer who's involved in the scene, knows what they are talking about, and understands how the whole gaming community works (Quake *AND* other games). Good writing skills (such as product reviews) are a MUST. Good HTML skills are a big bonus.
This is a FULL TIME, PAYING job. You'd get paid to do what you love best:
Hang out in the game community, make friends with lots of webmasters, write product reviews, etc. Relocation to warm, sunny California is probably a must, but if you really rule, it's possible we could work around it.
Interested? I hope so! Email me at onethumb@quakecentral.com Please talk about yourself (brag all you want, it'll help), send an example of
your writing skills (or a URL or something), and let me know how you fit into the community.

Second:
Source: Embrionic Files Url: http://www.qa.com/emb
Quantum Axcess is looking for some talented texture artists to possibly work on a future commericial add-on/total conversion. Contact Embrionic for full details.....

PlanetQuake Q2 Lists

PlanetQuake has opened up the Q2 Mailing lists pages after getting bombarded with people filling up the max clients for the initial opening a few days ago. If you are still interested in these topics, check out the page and sign up.

American DM

Mr. McGee, a level designer over at id Software updated his .plan talking about some DM maps you can expect to see for Quake2:

Just finished work on a DM4 type map for Quake2. I built a map called DM4_V2 a while back and was hoping to release it at some point. It contains most of the same elements and features that made DM4 such an enjoyable 2~4 map, but it didn't come off as well. So I started work on something pretty much from scratch and I am happy with the way it turned out. Since one on one play in a small map is my favorite type of DM I had to make sure that there was at least one really good 2 player DM map done. Starting work on a map that is inspired by DM2. I love lava and I really love watching people die in lava, so I felt that doing another map similar to DM2 would be a good idea. Mostly I am going to carry over the central lava pit idea and then work from scratch. Hopefully these two maps will be as well recieved as the original DM2 and DM4.

Rocket Arena FINAL

The last version of Rocket Arena has been released on the homepage. Here is the email I got from crt. (also thanks to JuJu)

Final Arena for Quake 1 has been released on the Rocket Arena page: http://www.planetquake.com/servers/arena/ The client download is 7MB and includes 46 maps!! 20 Maps from Previous RA 9 Maps from Telefragged Arena 17 Maps new to Final Arena ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/quake/planetquake/servers/arena/farena12.zip The server download includes both Normal Quake and Quakeworld progs, as well as the Rocket Arena QC SOURCE CODE. ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/quake/planetquake/servers/arena/fasrv12.zip We recieved over 150 maps submitted for Final Arena and picked out the ones we thought people would enjoy most. There is a great variety, and every map has a unique "feature" to it. Have fun and good fragging!

Here is the file locally courtesy of the Shack. :)

Jedi Knews

Yea, ok.. bad joke, here ya go though, an email I received from www.jediknight.net with some latest info on what is going on in the world of Jedi:

Code Alliance from DarkJedi.Com has released an updated .3DO Converter: (147K) Description: This new version fixes the problem of "invisible" outputted models, adds OBJ Input and Output, adds DXF Output, fixes scaling bug, and adds support for two-sided Jedi Knight faces. And there was an interesting new force power released today from Author "Max" that is entitled "Force Point Of View" ... (4K) This force allows you to substitute Force Blinding with a force POV which allows you to see through the eyes of your victim... Hope you all had a great weekend... Enjoying a cold Heineken and toasting ya'll. :-) Regards, Aristotle http://www.jediknight.net

Die By The Sword Demo

AVault has posted a new demo of Die By The Sword. It's pretty damn good looking from the screenshots you can see on the homepage, and 3dfx enhanced among other things. The demo is 11.9megs. -VooDoo

Trinity?

For everyone really wonderin just what the origins of the code name Trinity for the next-gen engine being developed by id Software are, well, there is a river here in Texas called the Trinity river, as stated on Trinity: The Site. This is similar to what Intel does with their CPU's while in development.

Q2 Release Party Coverage -Updated

Here are all the reports / recaps, whatever from the release party that was a big success held in California a couple of days ago. lots of pictures etc also.

• Redwood has returned from LA with his story of the time he had at the release party.
• GameSpot has posted a short blurb with 8 pictures or so talking about the release party. Including pictures of the elusive Thresh and Kornelia.
• PlanetQuake, via Fargo has posted what is probably the best review of the events. Well done as always Fargo. :)
• GameFan has posted a short review, along with pictures.
• Activision with the "BigEye" coverage, a few pictures, not much else.
• TeamFortress News, bye Mr.Gibbed has a bit about the event as well.

Preview / Review Land

What everyone else is saying about the games you play and the hardware you use:

• AVault has posted a review of HeavyGear by Activision. It's another Mech style game goin head to head with Mechwarrior 3.
• Ramshackle, the place we all first got the Omicron bot from, has a review of the bot posted now. It's a solid fair review which talks about both the strengths and shortcommings of the bot.
• Operation 3DFX has posted a review of the Future vs. Fantasy v4.0 TC for Quake.
• Tom's Hardware Guide has posted more hardware stuff (imagine that!) this time covering new motherboards for p2's. (socket 8)

.plan Wagon

The id guys are into the .plan thing as of late considering their big project is just hitting the shelves now. here is what the homeys are sayin:

• Disruptor made a couple of updates, first starting a Q2 server for all those people in Denmark, then recanting it after finding out just how many warez monkeys had the balls to play on the id server with pirated copies. In the end.. the Q2 server will be back online Tuesday this week. (tomorrow) The server will be at 192.246.40.37
• KillMe over at id made a rare .plan update talking about all the stuff he plans to do to get in trouble over at id, as well as talk of a 10,000 brush map he is working on made for 4 teams.
• Brian Hook has posted another essay talking about his feelings of people who present two different personalites online and in person. He isnt sure if it's a good thing or not. Oh, and apparently this mostly only applies to men. Women dont seem to suffer from this "problem"

Q2 Release Party Coverage

Here are all the reports / recaps, whatever from the release party that was a big success held in California a couple of days ago. lots of pictures etc also.

• PlanetQuake, via Fargo has posted what is probably the best review of the events. Well done as always Fargo. :)
• GameFan has posted a short review, along with pictures.
• Activision with the "BigEye" coverage, a few pictures, not much else.
• TeamFortress News, bye Mr.Gibbed has a bit about the event as well.

Other Quake2 Stuff

Hm, while we are at it.. here are a couple more things Quake2 related that you guys might wanna see:

• Apparently Quake2 is floating around already overseas. Dance's page has some screenshots of some DM action.
• Operation 3DFX has posted the release notes for Quake2 as well.
• Gamesmania is hosting a Quake2 contest that you may want to enter. Just answer Triva Questions.
• Don't forget the Stomped contest that I mentioned the other day.
• AVault has posted the winner of their Quake2 giveaway held earlier.

Omicron Bot

The "exclusivity" of the Omicron Bot has been lifted a bit early. (Thanks Blue for the icq) If you are stuck on a modem and have no lan, but want some decent DM practice, grab this bot. It should help your shaft aim quite a bit, the sucker moves!

3dfx Drivers

Dave Lister sent word that 3dfx has posted some new drivers for everyone to download if you happen to own a card:

• Voodoo Graphics D3D drivers v2.14 available from http://www.3dfx.com/software/d3rtvg.exe
• Rush drivers for single-card boards at http://www.3dfx.com/software/download_vrdispdrv.html
• Rush drivers for double card boards at http://www.3dfx.com/software/download_vrdispdrvd.html

PGL Rankings

The PGL page has posted the rankings for the first official PGL season for Quake. What I'm looking forward to is how they actually play the season, anyone find any documentation on who plays who? -Beazer