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Quake2
Yea yea.. more rumors about the Quake2 point release coming "soon" Just so you know I've gotten mysterious "tips" abou tthe point release nearing release a couple of times. But, since everyone is riding my ass to post about it, UGP has posted a little blurb saying that they think the Quake2 point release could be out on the net within 48hours even. Here ya go.
SiN
Levelord has posted a lengthy discussion of the development of characters for Ritual Entertainment's SiN project over at www.ogr.com There are a couple other articles on OGR from the Levelord for you to check out while you are there.
Unreal
The boys over at OGR are still at it posting screenshots of the day for Unreal until they post the big Unreal preview they are working on sometime next week.
Prey
The third posting of the designers journal for Prey by 3D Realms is now online over at www.gamecenter.com As always there are a couple of new screenshots as well as a pic of one of the models halfway skinned in their skin editor.
Patches
Preview / Review Land
What everyone else is saying about the games you play and the hardware you use:
Interviews
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Trinity Test Model
Paul Steed, a member of the Quake Modeling Assoc. and Resident Modeler at ID software today sent a picture of a just finished a model for Carmack's tests while developing Trinity. She's exactly 5000 faces and her base skin will be 512 x 256. It was also noted that "we will also have a specular and glow map for the characters with the specular also serving as an opacity map as needed" (ps) For more information on the QMA check out http://qma.nationalquake.com. Here is one of the shots: (Thanks Brad Herman)
Carmack's 3D Review
John Carmack of id Software, in response to a lot of email he has been receiving has given his "state of the union" address of sorts concerning the 3D market. Below is a snipped up version of what he said. Here is the full .plan update:
I have been getting a lot of mail with questions about the intel i740 today, so here is a general update on the state of 3D cards as they relate to quake engine games. 3DLabs permedia II
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Good throughput, poor fillrate, fair quality, fair features.
Power VR PCX2
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Poor throughput, good fillrate, fair quality, poor features, low price.Rendition v2100 / v2200
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Good throughput, good fillrate, very good quality, good features.
A good all around chip. Not quite voodoo1 performance, but close.
v2100 is simply better than everything else in the $99 price range.
Rendition should be shipping a full ICD OpenGL, which will make an 8mb v2200 a very good board for people doing 3D development work.NVidia Riva 128
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Very good throughput, very good fillrate, fair quality, fair features.
The fastest fill rate currently shipping, but it varies quite a bit based
on texture size. On large textures it is slightly slower than voodoo, but
on smaller textures it is over twice as fast.
3DFX Voodoo 1
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Good throughput, good fillrate, good quality, good features.
Highly tuned minidriver. They have a full ICD in alpha, but they are being
slow about moving it into production. Because of the add-in board nature
of the 3dfx, the ICD won't be useful for things like running level editors,
but it would at least guarantee that any new features added to quake engine
games won't require revving the minidriver to add new functionality.
3DFX Voodoo 2
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Excellent throughput, excellent fillrate, good quality, excellent features.
As with any voodoo solution, you also give up the ability to run 3D
applications on your desktop. For pure gamers, that isn't an issue, but
for hobbyists that may be interested in using 3D tools it may have some
weight.
Intel i740
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Good throughput, good fillrate, good quality, good features.
The Coven
Six new screenshots of the commercial Quake II deathmatch pack, Disposable Heroes, have just been posted on the Coven website, including previews of three new levels now nearing completion. Check out the Coven website at http://www.planetquake.com/TheCoven
CNN
CNN has a 2 part feature about on-line gaming. Part 1 is about the games (including Quake / Quake2), and Part 2 is about the services (such as MPlayer and Battle.Net) Here's the URL: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9802/11/online_gaming_part1/ Thanks Slacker.
Intel I740
Thanks to Redwood for sending along these several links to news stories concerning Intel's new 3D chipset.
VooDoo2
Mysteries of the Sith Demo
It's out finally. A demo of the Jedi Knight mission pack, Mysteries of the Sith. Everything I've seen / heard about this thing is that it rocks your world.
Drivers
Preview / Review Land
What everyone else is saying about the game you play and the hardware you use:
Interviews
Patches
.plan Wagon
Sites
Guess I'll start covering a bit of site moving's openings. Don't really enjoy this since I'm sure it'll kick up the mail count a bit, but I guess it's a responsibility or something. Blech.
werd
Sorry about yesterday, you guys don't even want to know. It just sucked. It was worse than a tumor.
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HxenWorld
Th www.hexenworld.com page has posted the "Diary of a tester" with some insight into the development of the HexenWorld project.
Unreal
OGR has decided that nobody can get sick of screenshots. They will be posting a new screenshot every day of Unreal on their "Screenshot of the day" page until they post the big preview they have written up of Unreal next week.
PlanetQuake
A couple of cool things over at www.planetquake.com for you to look at:
VooDoo2
With shipments beginning on February 20, 1998, Creative is meeting the demands of PC gamers well ahead of industry expectations.
The 3D Blaster Voodoo2 line-up consists of two models:
* A fully-equipped 12MB version - the maximum configuration possible - with an estimated street price of US$299.
* A powerful 8MB version with an estimated street price of US$229.
Both models include very high speed, single cycle DRAM and deliver
* a phenomenal three million triangles per second
* 90 million (180 million pixels in SLI configuration) dual-textured, bilinear-filtered, per-pixel MIP-mapped, alpha-blended, Z-buffered pixels per second.Visit http://www.soundblaster.com/pressroom/1998/p980210.html to read the full press release. More information will be available soon!
Preview / Review Land
What everyone else is saying about the games you play and the hardware you use:
Patches
Interviews
.plan Wagon
What all the homecuts are sayin:
The current issue of Next Generation has an interview with Brian Moriarty, Mplayer's "head of game design". In the interview, Brain states "Quake is a big hit, but Myst completely blows it away. Quake is almost irrelevant compared to Myst and Riven in terms of sales numbers..."
Now I doubt that Brian is trying to slam id or Quake in any way, and I'm not trying to put him down here, but the entire notion that Quake is not in the same league as Myst and Riven from a sales standpoint is laughable. Since Broderbund released Myst, we have released DOOM, DOOM II, Ultimate DOOM, Final DOOM, Master Levels for DOOM II, Quake, both Quake Mission Packs and Quake II. DOOM has been ported to every console and operating system under the sun and is the subject of motion picture efforts from Tri-Star. A proper comparison would look at the sales and exposure of all of these titles and then determine which games truly have a broader appeal. Myst may be the best selling *game*, but DOOM is a much more popular franchise. I expect that in a couple of years I will be able to make the same comparison between the Quake franchise and Riven.
I think Brian will lead Mplayer in the wrong direction if he is hoping to build the business on the shoulders of games like Myst and Riven. Online gaming is a business driven by game enthusiasts, not people who call checkers their idea of a great multiplayer game.
Speaking of Mplayer, they have also posted an announcement talking about the snagging of a deal with Epic for Unreal. -Red's.
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Ion Storm Licenses Unreal
Woah, big news. It looks like Ion Storm, who is also of course licensing the Quake engine from id Software for 3 projects that we know of, has now licensed the Unreal engine from Epic Megagames to work on another new project. Check out the article on BusinessWire.
Lori Mezoff of TSI was nice enough to forward me the full press release as well.
BSP v0.92
Should have mentioned this one last night, but I was busy playin with the new ISDN. :) A new version of what is generally considered the most popular Quake / Quake2 level editor on the net has been released. There are several changes in this version so make sure and grab it. Head over to BSP Headquarters.
Blood2 FAQ
An updated version of the Blood2 FAQ is now avaialble. Blood2 will be based on the "Direct Engine" or something like that.
Preview / Review Land
What everyone else is saying about the games you play and the hardware you use:
Hardware
HexenWorld
Couple of items of note on the Hexen2World front:
This has been an idea I've been tossing around what if in deathmatch, there was a way for you to achieve weapons from other classes? In other words, it would be possible for a single player to have all 16 weapons. Again, I'm just looking for feedback, and in no way suggesting that I may have time to implement it (need to make sure I cover myself :) )
Patches
Stuff that you can download off the internet and put on your computer.
Interviews
.plan Wagon
What all the homecuts are sayin:
Message Board
The Unreal message board is back online again. It went down for a while thanks to immature losers with nothing better to do than spam crap on the board. They have a moderator now though so things should be peachy.
werd
Well, the phone company showed up a day early (!) and setup my ISDN line, It caused me to have to run over to Ritual and mooch their fax machine and setup my account. I'm not sure what the huge deal is with setting up ISDN. It took me all of um, 3 minutes to setup. I didnt even read the instructions. Hm, switch type, spid #, yur set.
Hey, notice that the .plan tracker is finally working? I honestly dunno why it wasnt working before, but thanks to dwoemer of www.planetquake.com for somehow fixing it.
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Carmack does Vegas
Heh, this one is quite amusing, apparently John Carmack, lead programmer over at id Software played a bit of blackjack while in Vegas. He won $20,000 in one sitting. Check it:
Just got back from the Q2 wrap party in vegas that Activision threw for us.
Having a reasonable grounding in statistics and probability and no belief in luck, fate, karma, or god(s), the only casino game that interests me is blackjack.
Playing blackjack properly is a test of personal discipline. It takes a small amount of skill to know the right plays and count the cards, but the hard part is making yourself consistantly behave like a robot, rather than succumbing to your "gut instincts".
I play a basic high/low count, but I scale my bets widely -- up to 20 to 1 in some cases. Its not like I'm trying to make a living at it, so the chance of getting kicked out doesn't bother me too much.
I won $20,000 at the tables, which I am donating to the Free Software Foundation. I have been meaning to do something for the FSF for a long time. Quake was deployed on a dos port of FSF software, and both DOOM and Quake were developed on NEXTSTEP, which uses many FSF based tools. I don't subscribe to all the FSF dogma, but I have clearly benefited from their efforts.
FvF for Quake2
FvF II: Heroes of Genocide preliminary screenshots are availble. The first screenshot <fvf2-1s.jpg (thumbnailed)> shows the new M16 5.56mm Assault Rifle. The second image <fvf2-2s.jpg (thumbnailed)> shows the new Plasma Artillery Launcher. There will be approx. 21 new weapons in FvF2 when completed.
Unreal
Tim Sweeney, lead programmer on Epic Megagames Unreal project is quoted here talking about the Intel 3D chip in Techweb. -VooDoo
"While many hardcore gamers have great 3-D accelerators like 3dfx's Voodoo chip set, the large majority of consumers do not have capable 3-D hardware," said Tim Sweeney, founder and chairman of Epic MegaGames (Rockville, Md.). "So, we are optimizing [our games] for two separate targets: hardware rendering on PCs with 3dfx-class accelerators such as Voodoo and [Nvidia's] Riva 128; and software rendering on PCs with only MMX."
QNM
Considered a "must have" for anyone who digs those colored nicknames. Quake Name Maker has been updated to beta 3. Check out the homepage and grab yours.
C.R.Bot v0.99a for Q2.
The C.R.Bot has reached v0.99a for Quake2, which will be the final version you can get your hands on before the point release by id. This version contains many bug fixes, along with a couple new features:
Grab your copy courtesy of the guys at www.planetquake.com (I'd love to host files, but not till I have a real connect. Phone company was supposed to come on Friday, but postoned until tomorrow now, bah)
Preview / Review Land
What everyone else is saying about the games you play and the hardware you use:
Patches
More toys:
Screenshots Galore
Ok, this is just wacky. Screenshots from anyone and everyone, here ya go:
Interviews
.plan Wagon
What all the homeys are sayin:
werd
Omg! I think the page has actually been stable and working for everyone all weekend. That means I'll touch up an dupdate the weekly sections once again since everyone can see them. (I know I said that before, but then the server started dying constantly) Keep your fingers crossed. :)
Oh, btw, I started working on my Clan Homepage. dig on the Clan R3V page. Sorry we aren't accepting any new members. Feel free to come challenge us on gamesnet #clan_r3v though. (Not for the next couple of days though)
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