Game Asylum - 3Dfx has never really been the lagger before; but it will be almost a year late on the 32-bit color bandwagon... What besides Voodoo3 do you have to tide us over?

Steve Schick - I guess we feel differently. We're proud of our products and how they perform on real games. We'll introduce new features when we can implement them the way we think they should be done and when they don't come as a compromise to overall performance.

Picture the scene. Granny has come visiting for Christmas. And just as happened last year, she's proved she ownz you at CTF and Quake2 DM, and has now started boasting about her aptitude for Quake on Skill 0. "Little kids? They suck, dear..." Get revenge. Ask her how quickly she thinks she could complete the whole game, killing every monster and uncovering every secret along the way. Then show her Quake done 100% Quick lite, in which the QdQ team complete the task in under forty-three minutes. It'll make you feel better, honest...

X-Mas Poll [12:15pm]
Christmas = everyone gone and nothing happening. So.. what better way to spend the holiday than to check out the 3DN front page and help answer the question that has been on the mind of millions for generations. Who says "Ho ho ho" better? Santa Claus or Jabba The Hutt?

However, the "obvious" push from Intel is to make consumers more CPU dependent for performance.  The trend of pushing more and more stuff onto dedicated chips has got to make Intel really nervous, since you can get away with a decent AMD K6-2 300 w/ a TNT and get great performance.  And when hardware manufacturers start doing more stuff off-CPU, then you can get an even slower CPU (assuming, of course, that game developers just don't start leveraging the CPU in other ways, which is very likely).

Tech Etc [10:15am]

OSP Tourney DM is a server-side only mod designed to facilitate match play for tournaments, whether LAN-based or online. It also has an enhanced regular DM mode for relaxed warmups and informal play.

Rather than having different specific mods used for various aspects of tournament play (i.e. Battle/GX for team play, Duel for 1v1, and even id DM for FFA qualifiers), the tourney mod was designed specifically to handle these modes of play with all of their unique requirements with the configurability of Lithium.

• Which CPU Next?
  FiringSquad.com has posted a great new article taking a hands on look with benchmarks at several CPU's of the future including Katmai and the AMD K-7. The K6-3 is in there too and of course our favorite Pentium2.
  
  
• AMD K6-3 Preview
  SharkyExtreme has posted a new preview of the AMD K6-3 which is looking pretty hot.
  
  

werd
Yeah, panties have begun to wad up already in anticipation of Quake3 just a month or so away. I just put some on myself so I could wad them up too. I'm gonna have to recommend you guys go out and by Starsiege Tribes to keep yourself occupied in the mean time. I'm telling you guys the game is cool.

Oh, and lay off the TF2 guys. Feel free to give Sierra hell though. Remember when the TF guys announced a Quake2 version and then never said another word and left everyone hanging? You can thank Sierra for that one. Check out the PlanetCrap thread if you're still upset.

Redline Demo [5:45pm]
Here you go, another new 3D Action game for you to play with. Grab the demo that was just released over at AVault:

This demo includes two REDLINE multi-player arenas: KILLCAGE and TRIAGONIZER. In these two arenas you will have access to up to 11 vehicles, each with its own unique weapons and characteristics. You will also have access to 10 weapons you may use while on foot. The object of the multi-player game is to stomp, kill and frag as many of your opponents as possible. The final release version of Redline will offer both single player missions and numerous multi-player arenas.

This is a beta multiplayer only demo

Q3Test Date? [2:55pm]
The always informative Quake3 Messageboard has a post from Plague who listened to the Lilith & Eve Show (Thanks Hex) in which Paul Steed apparently revealed a few more details about Quake3. Here is Plague's summary:

A.) He and Kenneth Scott will probably release a female player model pack after Q3:A ships.
B.) Q3:A is very playable right now and a lot of fun but some technical issues such as security must be worked out before a test could be released.
C) That test could be released in a month or so at best

Rumors have been flying around about a Quake3 demo early next year since the target release date announced by aCtivision was 1st quarter 1999. A Q3Test in late January or early February would be ideal timing to get the full game out after some tweaking at the end of March.

NT4 SBLive! Drivers [11:45am]
Thanks to SharkyExtreme for the word on new drivers for SBLive! & NT4 owners. Grab them from the Creative FTP

Starsiege Tribes [9:25am]
I finally got a good look at Starsiege Tribes over the weekend and I was damn impressed. The actual DM play probably wont do much for you but fans of Team Fortress will go apeshit in love with this game. Here is some footage that Dynamix sent out. If you are into the teamplay thing for 3D Shooter games this is seriously worth taking a look at.

Starsiege Tribes Gameplay Movie
56kbps (modem, single ISDN): [stream] [download ZIP] (664KB)
80kbps (dual ISDN, slow cable, xSDL): [stream] [download ZIP] (1.14MB)
220kbps (ethernet, fast cable, T1): [stream] [download ZIP] (3.06MB)

Team Fortress 2 [9:25am]
Of course since I mention TeamFortress above why not take a look at a new interview with Robin Walker of TF Software talking about the stand-alone sequel:

Q:The news has not been well-received by everyone. Is there a chance the decision will be reversed if the reaction is strong enough?

A: No. We are a bit taken aback by the the people who don't like the decision. The bottom line is that shipping TF2 as a standalone game means it will be a much better game than it could have been as an add-on.

In some ways, I think it's similar to when Valve made the decision to delay the release of Half-Life. Everyone got miffed. We said it'd make the game better. I think most people have agreed it was a good decision. I think the same thing will happen with this.

Robin is referring to the announcement that the plan for making TF2 an add-on for Half-Life has been ditched. You will have to pay full price for TF2 however you wont have to own Half-Life to play it. TF2 will still however be using the Half-Life tech as a base technology. Funny how the announcement wasnt made until after Half-Life had shipped and many people anticipating TF2 went out and bought Half-Life yes?

QuakeWorld v2.33-0005 [9:25am]
Check it out, another new version of QuakeWorld has been released over at QuakeWorld.net

Test release 2.33-0005 is now available. Changes are:

• Added cvar v_contentblend which allows disabling of the blend color in liquids, this works in GL as well (so GL users can control liquid blends independantly of polyblend).
• GL version: added -no8bit command line parameter to disable 8bit textures. This can improve submip visual quality.
• Fixed new mouse handling bug to let go of mouse cursour when alt-tabbing and the console wasn't down
• Some interal fixes to make cheating a bit harder
• Out of band disconnect (0x02) packet is now ignored.

Test release 2.33-0005 downloads:

• Windows 95/NT Client and Server Version 2.33-0005 (upgrade from previous releases only)
• Other platforms will soon follow

Myth2 Demo [9:25am]
Something to entertain you during the day today. The demo for Myth2 has been released. Here are a few of the download locations you can snag it from, Myth II Demo (42.7MB):

ftp.download.com ftp.thetechs.com ftp.cdrom.com ftp.epix.net ftp.saix.net

Daikatana Team [9:25am]
Ion Storm has announced the team movements and a pair of new level designers for the Daikatana team. Sam over at 3DN has a bit more critical view of things.

The infusion of new talent has also intensified excitement in the project as the team now moves into the ever-critical crunch mode.

Tech Etc [9:25am]

• Voodoo1 Drivers
  Got word in email yesterday of some new reference drivers for Voodoo1 cards. Sorry I can't credit ya bud but thanks to whoever it was for the mail. Sam says they are dated 2 weeks ago but im 99% sure they were never mentioned.
  
  
• Canopus TNT Drivers
  Ayup, new drivers from the Canopus guys for their TNT Spectra 2500 card. You can grab the big pack which includes some other toys for you to play with or the bare bones drivers. -VE (note: These are drivers for the japanese boards so um, dont cry if your machine blows up)
  
  
• Celery Overclocking
  Still thinking about grabbing a Celery300A and overclocking it to 450 or so? Go for it! An Abit BH6 plus a Celeron 300A is the biggest bang for the buck you can get with a computer upgrade during the holidays. Here is another guide for you guys who just arent so sure.
  
  

werd
Wow, I woke up this morning to a working internet. I'll catch you puds up with everything I missed yesterday and whatever nifty news comes up today.

It's freaking freezing here. I can't feel my legs! I CANT FEEL MY LEGS!!!

The Net Works! [5:45pm]
Looks like UU.NET has improved a bit, I can now get to about 75% of the net now and email appears to be fully working here. At least I got to give the Jennifer Love Hewitt special on MTV today my full attention. I'm a better man for it. Looks like nothing incredibly exciting happened today. A few driver updates, and word on stuff that isnt coming out tomorrow is about it.

Shack Screenshot Index [5:45pm]
In my time of not being able to get out to the net I decided to finally get around to starting that screenshot index/archive of images that have appeared on these pages over the past years. There are of course resources for many more screenshots elsewhere, but what the hell.

Quake3 [2:15pm]
Brian Hook made another appearance on IRC addressing a few more of the questions that have cropped up since all the details to be released last week. (The more answers they give, the more questions they create eh?) Here's a snip and a link to the log on VE:

<bwh> Who, exactly, wants to play on a server with rules they're not familiar with?  Much like playing on a server with oddball maps or weird mods. People just to tend to gravitate towards "standard" servers, or the hardcore crowd goes to the oddball servers  with high run speeds, weird mods, missing weapons, whatever

<phunk> how are the quake 3 rule sets going to be different from the qw or q2 rules?
<bwh> phunk: that is not decided at this time

<bwh> Okay, there are other "controversial" things that will be configurable, like
knockback and things like that, but I don't think those will really be modified that much, maybe by mods or whatever, but doubtful by server ops or end users.
<bwh> Audible footsteps is another thing that would fall under that classification.
And character classes (if you set damage and speed modifiers for all character classes to the same thing, then effectively you will only have a single class)

<bwh> phunk: correct. One thing people say is "well, if people want to change things, they should make a mod". But what they don't realize is that Q2 mods did NOT let you change something fundamental like the run speed (for prediction reasons). Since there is now a client side code (DLL or something else), then you can predict correctly since the server and client can now communicate about parameters.

So that is all fine and dandy. I'm guessing the default rules will however be Quake3 rules yes? The big question are what are those settings? As Hook said however those arent completely decided on. My guess would be even if they were decided on, id isnt going to tell just yet since they may change during tweaking and they wanna avoid a flame-a-thon in the mean time.

K6-3 [12:15pm]
So you dig on that alternative lifestyle and dont use Intel CPU's eh? You noticing that the K6-2 isnt quite up to snuff with the latest p2's cranking 504+mhz? This new K6-3 preview over at Anand's should make your day then:

Windows 98 has always been the Pentium II's domain in terms of overall performance simply because its L2 cache performance would increase with every clock increase, unlike the K6-2. With the L2 cache of the K6-3 being on-chip, Intel has been booted from the top of the charts, and replaced by the third generation K6 processor. At 350MHz, the K6-3 gives the Pentium II 450 and Celeron 450A a run for their money, at 400MHz AMD already has the fastest business processor, and at 450MHz, the K6-3 sees no competition at all. Even under Winstone 99, a benchmark that seems to perform better on Intel processors/chipsets, the K6-3 still comes out on top by a fairly large margin. An 8% performance differential exists between the K6-3 450 and a Pentium II 450 under Winstone 99, a difference that is expressed as a 12% gap under Winstone 98. The bottom line? The K6-3, clock for clock, is, without a doubt, faster than the Pentium II in business applications

3dfx Demo [12:15pm]
A new demo from the 3dfx guys has been posted on their website which gives you a good look at the difference between games running at 15/30/60fps and why you would want 60fps. Some cool split screen action even.

FAKK2 [12:15pm]
Word from Ritualistic is that FAKK2, the next project for Ritual Entertainment on the plate could possibly be a 3rd person POV action game. Ritual of course developed SIN which although bug ridden on initial release turned out pretty decent after some patching. The Ritualistic guys gathered this information from a recent visit to IRC by Levelord who likes to pop in once in a while to verbally abuse everyone :)

Speaking or Ritual & SIN, the SIN editing source code has been released as well. Ritualistic can cover you on that too if you are looking to do some editing.

Descent 4
With Descent3 just having made a net release only a month ago, word on Desent4 is already coming out of the wood works. The guys at Volition got the scoop:

Q: Why aren't you using the Descent 3 engine?
A: There are two reasons. We started on D4 in June, 1998 when the Descent 3 codebase was undergoing rapid change. This would have made it difficult to start adapting it for D4. The other thing is, we're adding some features that are quite different than Descent 3.

Q: Why did you start D4 so early? Why not wait until Descent 3 was completed?
A: We'd like to avoid the long delay between Descent releases. If a game takes 18-24 months to develop, you either have that long between releases, or you have to overlap development. We chose to overlap development.

New QIZMO
Another new version of QIZMO the QW Proxy has been released. The author is doing his darndest to please those anal retentive Americans by removing powerup timers, enemy location reports, and anything else the could possibly be abused. The enemy location report stuff was the big deal, you could basically tell whenever an enemy was around the corner.

New QW 2.33 Polyblend
A simple patch that has become a big favorite among many QW players. Suami's Polyblend patch for QuakeWorld which lets players who play QuakeWorld in software mode have the same advantage of clear vision underwater as the players who use GL. Grab the new version which works with the recent QuakeWorld v2.33 release

Connect = HOSED [9:45am]
Sitting here trying to get my email and go to other websites etc but apparently UU.NET has other plans. Trying to work out the problem now. Amazing I could FTP to the server. Check it out.

update: I've got a gameplan now. Should have you guys something that resembles updates within an hour.

werd
Well, I'm 100% news moocher today. All my email from the past 30 hours or so has been a casualty of war. Thanks to Hoonis for emailing me a few websites HTML since I cant get out to 90% of the net right now either. I wanna send a big kissmyass to UU.NET.

Unreal [7:25pm]
Tim Sweeny over at the Unreal Tech Page posted an update on Unreal v221

We're wrapping up the bug fixes and testing it internally now. It's near release, but it could take us 24-72 hours to go throught the final iterations of testing. The 221 patch just incorporates minor bug-fixes to 220 based on feedback from gamers; it doesn't contain any significant new features or optimizations

Heretic2 WalkThrough [7:25pm]
Everybody seems to love Heretic II.  But what if you're just no good at it? Whelp, Hexen2.com has a walkthough of the first four areas of the game.

Messiah Shots [7:25pm]
MessiahPress has grabbed some (nine) new shots of Shiny's hot tesselated game o' the moment, Messiah.

werd
Arent weekends just incredibly boring for news? Got sidetracked goofing around with arranging cable stuff. I even answered most of my emails when I got home today! Being forced to go watch that corporate sellout of a movie You've Got Mail tonight.