go to www.shugashack.com for up to date news.
| Saturday, March 6 |
Quake3 & Linux [YESTERDAY]
Carried over from last night for you Slashdot monkeys: Shack handy man [R2]Hoonis has put together this great
article with a couple of paragraphs from John Carmack as well as an interview with
Zoid on the subject. The big news? Quake3 for linux will be sold in a box of its own!
Check it out:
All ports so far have been just for the heck of it, but we will be rolling out real commercial linux versions of several products in the next couple months. I think the market is good enough to make real money in now.
The linux boxes will definitely be on some store shelves. Places that have existing linux OS packages will probably have the game boxes.
-John Carmack
Multiplayer Games [1:50 pm]
There is an interesting new poll on the front page over at 3dnews.net which asks the question, are other companies
ripping id Software off? Honestly from what I've heard the Epic and id Software guys were
both working on their respective multiplayer games before either was aware of the other.
As for Turok Arena....
KingPin Demo Not Today [1:50 pm]
Had gotten word from the guys over at Gangland.org that the demo for KingPin, Xatrix Entertainment's Quake2 engine based thug life
gangster etc game demo should be out on the net today at 6pm EST. But guess what, it's not
coming out. It was a prank. :( Sorry folks that stuff happens.
Graeme Devine [1:55 pm]
There is a quick
interview with the new game design guru over at id
Software, Graeme Devine at the Nakedgamer web
page.
Dogweazle: What are your feelings towards the recent leak of the Quake 3 Arena IHV test?
GD: "It's a bit maddening, we're getting closer to q3test and our focus is on that, so I've tried to keep everyone here looking forward to that and on that rather than the leaked hardware test build. This was meant for hardware vendors to fix and improve their drivers, it was never intended for public play and the levels & code reflect that. Look at it this way -- how would George Lucas feel if Episode I came out without special effects and on a bootleg video copied from an AVI of a MPEG of a QuickTime filmed in someone's living room on their 13" B/W TV set? Well, that's how we feel."
TRIBES [11:55 am]
We'll just cover a bunch of TRIBES stuff today for fun ok?
Word from the 3DFiles.com guys of a TRIBES "superpatch" which will patch just about any version of
your TRIBES to the latest one. It weighs in at about 20megs but should be trouble free
for any of you folks who were having issues. Also, there is a UNIX only TRIBES stat tracker which sounds pretty cool. Lastly
Planetstarsiege has some Glide workarounds which should be of interest:
There are other work arounds to the 1.3 shadow issues besides reverting to a version 1.0, 1.1, or 1.2. The shadow issue only affects GLide users. You can play just fine with shadows on in either Software mode or OpenGL mode. The GLide problem only seems to be during a spawn. So you can also start a game in either software or OGL mode and then switch to GLide after you have spawned. Of course, you need to revert back to either software or OGL between matches and after you have died. Obviously not the most elegant work around, but it does get the job done.
KingPin & D3D? [11:55 am]
Check this out from the guys over ath PlanetKingPin. Saw it first at VE
At this point the jury is out on D3D. We currently support 3dfxGL and OpenGL (of course!), but we're looking right now at how that OpenGL implementation will work on cards other than the TNT/TNT2. Once we get the Matrox G200, ATI Rage 128 and Savage3D cards tested, we'll give you guys the results.
Voodoo3 Benchmarks Update [11:55 am]
I failed to mention that the Voodoo3
preview here at the Shack has been updated with the new benchmark images showing quite
a large gap in performance between the V2 SLI and the V3 3500. I previously would have
been hesitant to recommend a V3 to someone that already have a V2 SLI, but have a look at these new benchmarks
Views [11:45 am]
Tech [11:45 am]
werd
So I spent about 6 hours staring at this web page
waiting for the time to pass. Today is messageboard
moderator [R2]Huntsman's birthday! Make sure and send him a birthday card to huntsman@shugashack.com ok?
| Friday, March 5 |
Duke4 & Megadeth [6:35 pm]
Word has gotten out that the theme music for Duke4Ever from 3DRealms will be composed and performed by Megadeth (!)
Here is a quote or two:
From Megadeth's Official Site:The band has recorded the theme song for a future Duke Nukem video game. Further details have not yet been released, as is the case regarding with details on A Tout Le Monde II. More to come as it's released... Also,from 3DRealms:Well, I guess we couldn't expect this exciting news to not leak sooner or later. We've been working with Megadeth (and GT) to record the opening theme song for Duke Nukem Forever. So far, things kick ass, and they are going to record another version of the song soon. We'll release more info later regarding the song, but rest assured it will be cool.
Quake3 Shots? More? [4:25 pm]
Here you go, treat #1 for the day. id Software has updated their Quake3Arena web page with some more screenshots. You
have seen all of them here already except for these two which I believe are the coolest
damn shots yet. The one on the left is a level by Tim Willits which he recently made and
blew me away at my last visit. (Visually the most beautiful level in Quake3 in my eyes)
and the shot on the right is a nice semi-small 1on1 level by Brandon James I believe.
All the other shots that were online in past 2 days: shot1 shot2 shot3 shot4 shot5 shot6 Also, Ripside.com is back online and has a new editor shot and misc shot of a level by Paul Jaquays. I'll have all the shots in the screenshots index in a bit.
Check out the Quake3 messageboard too. (Being reset, check around 8pm EST)
TurokArena? [1:15 pm]
Wowzer, just got mail from Mark Kingsley about this story on
FGNOnline:
An Acclaim source has revealed that a new Turok game will arrive this December as planned, but it won't be called Turok 3. According to IGN64, Turok Arena is in the works. As the title suggests, the game will focus on multiplayer mayhem, including weapons and levels developed with four-player madness in mind. It is said Acclaim is also working on a Turok 3 title for release in 2000-2001 for Nintendo's next generation machine, though this is unsubstantiated.
note: I'm working on 4 different things at once right now. The messagebaords have been stable for several hours amazingly. Keep your eyes open this afternoon for a couple of "treats"
[POST COMMENT | READ COMMENTS]
OMG [3:25
pm]
My new browser homepage.
3DWeek [1:15 pm]
The ever entertaining 3DWeek continues over at GameSpot UK.
Today we've got a look at TeamFortress2
from Valve as well as Outcast.
Billy over at VE also spotted their review of TRIBES you
might want to check out.
TRIBES [1:15 pm]
Speaking of TRIBES, Datumplane has a OpenGL acceleration FAQ which
should help a few of you folks having problems. You can quite emailing me about it now :)
Planetstarsiege has an upgrade help
page online as well.
Reasons To Live? [2:15 pm]
What, the fact that Q3Test is coming out this month isnt
enough for you? Well then maybe this will
cheer ya up.
Anachrochat [1:15 pm]
Tonight, March 5th is March's Anachrochat. Tom Hall and his
team will be there to talk about Anachronox, ION Storm's upcoming 3D RPG. The chat starts
at 8pm CST (6PST 9EST), and you can get to the chat by logging into irc server www.ionstorm.com
PlayStation2 [9:15 am]
Ok, not the most on topic thing in the world but the PSX2 is
looking like the bizomb. ArsTechnica (very cool
page, new InWin Q500A Case
review there too) has gotten a hold of all kinds of new information on the console
system from being in contact with Sony. Also there are a couple of other articles you
might want to check out. Next-Gen talks to industry specialist.
As well as Sega's response
plans.
The Playstation II's CPU, jointly developed by Toshiba and SCE, is an enhanced version of the device described at ISSCC. The device has floating-point performance of 6.2 Gflops and a bus bandwidth of 3.2 Gbytes per second that's achieved through the use of Direct Rambus DRAM in two channels. Running at 300 MHz, SCE said the CPU's performance surpasses that of any personal computer.
TRIBES Master IP Changes [9:15 am]
Doh! The master server IP for TRIBES is changing. That is
always fun. Here is the lowdown straight from the homecuts. Make sure and check out Planetstarsiege for additional info.
Problems connecting to the master server? Or only getting a list of 8-9 servers? No IRC? Here is the deal: the IP addresses of our master server, and IRC server, were changed this morning. Unfortunately, we were not informed this was going to happen. It's caught us by surprise and is causing some problems. Those of you with version 1.2 or 1.3 of TRIBES should not have any problems finding or connecting to servers. TRIBES 1.0 clients will only see a small list of server (8 or 9). We are changing the DNS entries to correct the problem, but it may take until tomorrow evening before it all settles down. You can either wait for it to pop back up, or try upgrading to 1.3 . There is nothing we can do about the IRC server, if you are having problems connecting to IRC, it's because the IP address change hasn't propagated to your ISP. This will eventually happen, but could take up to 24hrs, doh! (for those that can't wait for their IRC fix, the new IRC IP is 209.1.233.139)
Views [9:15 am]
Tech [9:15 am]
werd
I failed to mention I was skipping the demo of the week yesterday. Sorry about
that. Since the completion of the QIL2 league not
much action has been going down.
*cough* Quake3 messageboard might be fixed, hold your breath *cough*
The Daikatana board is stable as always though.
| Thursday, March 4 |
Heretic2 EP [3:25 pm]
Word from Jake Simpson of Raven
is that the Heretic2 EP is indeed finished but it is being held up over at aCtivision because they are clogged up on that
end. Apparently products that actually create revenue have priority over free products
like the EP pack that Raven put together.
The EP. Is it just me or is this dragging on or what ? Well, it seems to be, even from our end. The current state of affairs is that we are done with the code for now, its in QA, its just a question of waiting for those guys to have at it. The problem here is that there are other projects in the pipeline for Activision that are revenue producing, so they get the QA teams first. And rightly so. However, it puts us in the situation of waiting for 'as and when' time from the testers. Annoying, but understandable. The EP can't go out un QA'd, no one wants a buggy product do they ?
New UnrealED [3:25 pm]
There is a shot of the new version of UnrealED
over at the Unreal Resources page. Looks like
they ganked the toolbar completely, going for shortcut key land. Good :) Take note of the
incredibly good taste in web pages by the guy who took that screenshot. Incredible! Saw
that at VE
3DWeek [1:25 pm]
The GameSpot UK 3DWeek feature continues.
There are some features on Daikatana and Duke4Ever that I hadnt
linked yet. Nothing can compare to that Prey preview though.
Sorry for the downtime. I'll be flying up to Maryland tomorrow to execute members of shack's webhosting staff.
Giants Footage [11:55 am]
Here ya go, footage from Giants. I havent checked it out
myself but a lot of people seem excited about it:
www.kabuto.net is proud to present the new mpg of Giants: Citizen Kabuto from Planet Moon Studios. It is approximatly 40 megs big and shows off the Meccaryn spaceship, The sea dragon that the Reapers can summon, Kabuto's shepard, Sea Reaper boats and much much more.
Descent3 & $50k? [11:55 am]
The GameLinks guys have a new Descent3 feature that
is pretty interesting. What is more interesting is this $50,000 Descent3 tournament
that AGN3D spotted on the Interplay page:
The $50,000 Descent 3 Tournament is an extended competition to determine the best Descent 3 pilot. The competition consists of three phases: Preliminary Rounds, Semi-Finals Tournament, and a Live Championship event.
Quake3 Screenshots [5:45 am]
Once again it is high-res Quake3 screenshot time! aCtivision slipped a wet one and the guys at Ripside.com were kind enough to hand out a zip file of
these choice images. Make sure and check out their page hosted by bomb.net I'm gonna only post 3 at a time basically because
you guys just kill my server whenever new shots go up. :) I'll post 3 more in like
24hours.
You'll recognize that first shot from a recent Dallas News article. I believe shot1 is from a level by Tim willits, shot2 is a level by Brandon James, and the 3rd shot is a level from Christian Antkow aka Disruptor.
Quake3 Voice [7:45 am]
Fully assimilated Texan Christian Antkow cranking out them
levels for Quake3 (and some sound work) caught the Q3messageboard on a good
day to post this word on that super cool voice announcer they have in Quake3:
Really glad ya'll like the voiceovers. We are planning on having global sounds played when a powerup is picked up (as some of ya'll have, *sigh*, already noticed with the "Quad Damage" voiceover). "In-vis-ibiliTY", "Re-GENER-ASHUN!", and so forth done in that low demonic voice (Voice by yours truly, filters and munging by Brandon), and we do presently have "reward" voiceovers for doing well with the carnage factor. We'll leave those combo's for ya'll to possibly discover in the test when it's released. (Goddamnit.. I used ya'll three times in one paragraph. I must becoming more Texan...)
Those P3 Serial #'s [7:45 am]
The always interesting ArsTechnica
(highly recommended page) has word of this New
York Time article taking a good look at that whole Pentium3 serial #
"scandal" I guess it can be called.
Voodoo3 Benchmarks [7:45 am]
Ok Marcus is gonna slave over wipping up some new graphics
for the Voodoo3 article to update the benchmarks on the article today. I
finished benchmarking my machine with the latest 3dfx drivers and here are the numbers I
came up with:
| Quake2 | Demo1 | Quake1 | demo1 |
| 640x480 | 120fps | 640x480 | 219fps |
| 800x600 | 116fps | 800x600 | 186fps |
| 1024x768 | 99fps | 1024x768 | 131fps |
| 1600x1200 | 45fps | 1600x1200 | 57fps |
Test machine: P2@464 Asus P2B-LS, 256megs cas3. 3dfx Voodoo3 3500. A wacky note. I found that the console transparency in Quake1 was affecting my benchmarks by a large margin. I added scr_conspeed 9999 and ;toggleconsole to the commands though and things improved a good amount. It was an oversight on my part to be manually toggling the console in previous benchmarks for Quake1. I assumed the impact was minimal at best. I screwed up :)
Views [7:45 am]
Tech [7:45 am]
Sources close to Matrox have confirmed that the first public showing of their next generation chip set, the G400, will be at GDC on March 16th. This will then be followed by a European showing only two days later at Cebit in 'sunny' Hannover Germany. Either way the secret will be out soon. Check back here for more details soon.
Gaming [8:15 am]
werd
Ok...well I spoke too soon. Sander busted out the heavy
artillery and fixed the messageboards
early. Check out shack.quake3
and shack.daikatana and if
the damn things ever break again I'm gonna uh.. be really upset. The problem seems to have
been tracked down.
Oh yeah, good morning. I'm hungry.
| Wednesday, March 3 |
John Carmack on Quake3 [7:35 pm]
John Carmack made
this .plan update on the Quake3 weapons in response to Thresh's recent comments at
FiringSquad:
On the issue of railgun firing rates -- we played with it for a while at the slower speed, but it has been put back to exactly Q2's rate of fire.
I do agree with Thresh that the way we had it initially (faster than Q2, but with the same damage) made it an overpowered weapon in the hands of highly skilled players, which is exactly what we should try to avoid.
An ideal game should give scores as close to directly proportional to the players reletive skills as possible. The better player should win in almost all cases, but the game will be more entertaining if the inferior players are not completely dominated.
Quake 1 had really bad characteristics that way -- Thresh can play extremely talented players and often prevent them from scoring a single point. We wouldn't put up with a conventional sport that commonly game scores of 20 to 1 in championship matches, and I don't think we should encourage it in our games.
Eliminating health items is probably the clearest way to prevent blowout games, but that has never been popular. Still, we should try to avoid weapon decisions that allow the hyper-skilled to pull even farther away from the rest of the crowd. They will still win, no matter what the weapons are, just not by as wide a margin.
Messageboards... [6:15 pm]
Sander hax0red some more on the messageboards. It's been
stable for like 15 minutes already! Check out shack.quake3 and shack.daikatana They are up
and down like a yo-yo. It looks like they wont be 100% stable again until the weekend when
we've got time to do a total re-do of the code. I'm really sorry about it. :(
TRIBES GL Patch Released [3:55 pm]
The OpenGL (among other things) Patch for Tribes has been
released. Here is a real quicky of what has been changed. Check out the full
readme for details. Thanks Dataumplane
-Pref::PlayerFOV can now be set to change the client's first person FOV.
-The server menu ban feature has been remove for voted admins, but is still available for Super Admins.
-The Join Server List now stores off game type between sessions. This allows filters based on game type to work when the client is first started without having to refresh the servers.
-Beta OpenGL support for i740 and TNT cards.
-Memory management has changed slightly to help reduce the amount of swap space being used by the client
Trying out the file scripts btw. There are manual links embedded in there as well. Hope it doesnt irritate you guys too much. Just want to test the script with a load, I wont be using it regularly.
Savage4 [3:55 pm]
Check out the AnandTech preview of the
Savage4 card. Spanky got to play with the Diamond Multimedia card and give us a darn
good idea of what the card will be capable of. I'd recommend just waiting for Quake3 and
all the web pages to bust out with some Quake3 benchmarks before buying anything new
though. You are making all of your hardware decisions based on how it will run Quake3..
right?
Deus Ex [3:55 pm]
Blue spotted this interview with
Witchboy who is working on the Ion Storm Deus Ex project.
Wisdom [3:15 pm]
Apparently I'm not all that sharp because the #)(U!@#_(@%$#
messageboards keep !#$(_!##U!( breaking every !#P$(U#@ 10 minutes. But maybe I can sucker
you guys into buying into some of my words of wisdom?
WinGlide [12:55 pm]
Check it out, a new version of WinGlide. You can play Quake2
in a window on your Voodoo2 and stuff. (Among many other cool things)
WinGlide v1.00 has been released. This version of WinGlide adds new capabilities to the Overlay WinGlide mode. It is now possible for Overlay WinGlide to clip overlays on video cards that use the ET6000 chipset and this version of Overlay WinGlide can work with video cards that use the PERMEDIA 2 chipset. No changes have been made to the other WinGlide modes in this release.
Sorry for dissapearing for a few hours. I was actually out in the sun for a bit. It was strange.
TRIBES Mod [12:55 pm]
Insomniax version 0.6b has been released for TRIBES and is
available for download at PlanetStarsiege
In Addition to what was in the previous Versions, 0.6b adds a new backpack, weapon, and Vehicle. The backpack is called a "Heat Sink" which removes the heat signature from your Jet Pack. No more Rockets up the kiester! The computer cannot track you by heat signature when wearing this pack. If a turret is manually fired it WILL hit you. This just stops the computer from finding you without help.
Voodoo3 [8:40 am]
As you guys all know a new mini-GL driver came out from 3dfx
yesterday. Well I got a hold of some new drivers for the Voodoo3 card as well and paired
up with that new mini-GL I've seen quite an improvement in benchmarks. So much so that I'm
going to have to re-vamp the Voodoo3
preview that was posted here a little while ago. A couple of numbers I've just gotten
on a p2-464 w/256 ram. (Conservative ram timings in the bios)
Quake2 121fps @ 640x480 demo1.
Quake1 199fps @ 640x480 demo2.
Quake1 145fps @ 800x600 demo2.
I'll run through the benchmarks some more today. That was a huge jump in 800x600 scores for Quake1.
3DWeek [8:20 am]
If you havent checked out the GameSpotUK 3DWeek I'd
recommend having a look. They are doing a pretty darn good job. The most recent additions
are previews of Prey
*cough* and Unreal
Tournament.
WereWolf [8:20 am]
The Werewolf Apocalypse web page
has been updated with a bit on the Unreal technology based werewolf game they have in
development. They have added to the The Heart of Gaia
prequel story, two new
screenshots, the fourth Travis Rants,
talking about character development, and a new BBS where you can rant back. I
got the mail as well but Blue dug up all the links :)
Mech Warrior 3 [8:20 am]
Next-Generation has posted a pretty good article
taking a look at the next game in the Mech Warrior series to be coming our way. They talk
with a bunch of the higher-ups of the company and bust out with several cool looking screenshots.
So Zipper just started with a clean slate?
"That's right - no code was transferred. Zipper started with its own game engine, GameZ, and developed all of the game software and art assets. The design was also started over, however, we obviously worked with the treasure trove of design information on BattleTech, and FASA oversaw the story element and reviewed our work periodically."
Heretic2 EP [8:20 am]
Phoebus from aCtivision made a post to the Hereticii.com forums with a bit of
info on the status of the H2 Expansion Pack. Saw that on Blues.
Right now, the EP is done. Jake (The Gent) Simpson has finished with the coding that I observed him working on first-hand yesterday. The EP has been turned over to QA for one, hopefully final session of bug inspection. But this won't be a week-long QA thing - although, obviously no one involved is about to release a buggy EP, which is why this process has gone on as long as it has. But as you can tell, things are wrapping up, and you should be playing the EP VERY soon now!
Speaking of Raven Software, they have a help wanted ad going right now with 3 openings.
More on GLTRIBES [8:20 am]
All kinds of noise on just where is that OpenGL patch for
TRIBES. PlanetStarsiege has word from Tim
Gift addressing the many "concerns" as we'll call them.
... don't take it personally if 1.3 doesn't get released today. We did put the build together yesterday (Monday), but these things don't just fly out the door. It needs to go through our final QA cycle and through a Sierra corporate approval process before we are allowed to release it to the web. Next time I'll be a little more explicit: "we'll start the build on Monday, but don't expect it until it's released". (It usually doesn't take more than a couple days).
Views [8:15 am]
Tech [8:15 am]
werd
Well it looks like it wasnt such a bad time for me to be MIA
yesterday, we ended up updating the kernel on the old webserver. Things should be a bit
faster now. Amazingly the Quake3
& Daikatana
messageboards have been stable for several hours also. Whooda thunk?
Ok that stuff above should keep you covered for the morning update. I've still got some email to plow through etc though so some more stuff should be online in an hour or two.
| Tuesday , March 2 |
K7 Preview [11:59:59:99 pm] - Marcus 'Majesty' Yam
Oh yea, s'about time there is some talk about this whack K7.
Intel has been (smartly) flooding the news with Pentium III bits and promotion.
Newly registered Storm3D has posted a good general overview of what the K7 should be like, and how it will perform.
Oh yeah, and at the bottom of the article, there is a whisper about K8.
I dig that FPU:
The K7 has three pipelines, a load/store pipeline, an integer pipeline, and a FP pipeline. Each pipeline is capable of executing three microinstructions per cycle, and they are fed by three equally powerful decoder units acting in parallel. All nine execution units are dynamically scheduled for out-of-order execution.
The FP pipeline is the most improved of the three since the K6. The first pipeline can do floating-point addition as well as 3DNow!/MMX instructions. The second pipeline does multiplication, 3DNow!, and MMX, and the final one handles floating-point loads and stores.
The integer pipelines are 10 stages long, and the FP pipelines are 15 stages long. Many of these cycles are devoted to dealing with the intricacies of the x86 architecture, but in the end, the overhead is not particularly high, since all the stages can execute in parallel. These extremely long pipelines allow higher clock speeds to be achieved. Floating-point instructions have a latency of 4 clocks, and since they are triple-issue, they K7 beats the P6 in both throughput and latency.
The K7 can buffer an amazing 72 instructions for execution. It can handle 32 simultaneous load misses. Its integer scheduler can store up to 15 instructions, and its FP scheduler can store up to 36. These numbers are not arbitrary -- they were chosen to provide maximum performance for a certain amount of die space.
New 3Dfx Mini-GL [7:55 pm] - Marcus 'Majesty' Yam
Man, no full ICD yet?! Oh well, there's a new mini-gl
for games based on the Quake and/or Quake 2 engine(s). Grab it right here. Thanks Gautam!
GLTRIBES [12:55 pm]
PlanetStarsiege.com
has just posted four brand new exclusive screenshots of TRIBES running in OpenGL. These
shots are taken from various maps on a TNT based card. shot1, shot2, shot3, shot4
MIA [12:55
pm]
I'm going to be out of the house for most of the evening
today, hopefully Marcus or Clay will pick up the slack while I'm out in case something
crazy goofy happens.
Daikatana [7:25 am]
Bobby "Xcalibur" Pavlock, a level designer working
on Daikatana for Ion Storm. (E2M1 in fact right now) has been running through the new
Shack Daikatana
messageboard. Here is part of his response to the many common questions and concerns.
The reason there is an M-player demo only is due to a deal between Eidos and Mplayer. Of course we all at ION want everyone to see it, and can't wait to be able to play against people on GameSpy servers or whatnot, but hey, we're just the developers. Besides, it ends up working out for the better for you guys, because it only means that there will be alot more cool stuff in the public demo release than there is in the Mplayer version.
Map-wise, episode 1 is done and in beta. While alot of the map work was done before the new team got here, there was still a shitload of work to "finish" the maps. And at the same time as finishing E1 maps, we were trying to get the DM demo maps completely done, both of which were more or less done from scratch. The same goes for the remaining 3 episodes. Some of the maps only require alot of polish and tweaking, but some of them are either completely unusable and have to be completely redone, or are having to have large chunks totally reworked. But noone can question the work ethic of the level design team here now. We are all busting some serious ass, working insane hours, trying to get shit done, and it's all for you.
Many of you like to wonder what the hell has been going on here at ION for the last 2-3 years, that has caused Daikatana to be so late. Perhaps you should direct your questions to the ION ex-employees who were working here during that time, as the team now is alot different and can not be held responsible for what did/didn't happen during that time. (Before anyone goes off, this is not directed at the Bloodshot guys, but ALL of the ex-ION employees who worked here during Daikatana's development, as only they know what did/didn't happen).
<snip>
Bobby also talks a bit about the somewhat poor state of affairs between developers and gamers now days. I'm gonna have to 100% agree with homeboy on this one. It's a bummer.
Ass-Wack Links [9:25 am]
Oh yeah... Just because I'm an absolute jerk I'm gonna keep
calling the Wack-Ass
links page Wednesday.htm to confuse the hell out of you guys, even though I'm updating
it on Tuesday now. Is it working? I bet you dont even know what is going to happen next...
Muahahahaha!
Unreal Tournament [4:45 am]
Morning spanks. Cliffy from Epic sent along these 3
screenshots of Unreal Tournament to wake you up.
 |
 |
 |
| shot1 | shot2 | shot3 |
shot1: The new default weapon (the enforcer, you can get 2 of them for some John Woo action) and our muzzle flashes, literally leaping out of the Minigun. This pic takes place in Frigate, an Assault map where a team of players must storm a battleship and activate the cannons so the boat may leave the harbor.
shot2: Action shot of Teamplay DM. Shows the Shockrifle and the mingun flare from the back. It isn't a sprite, it is a mesh. This level is called Orion's Barricade and is a floating castle above a raging electrical storm. Try to avoid falling off.
shot3: Armour effect, shows if you have the Shieldbelt. The effect is colour coded for teammates. In this shot you can see the Shock Rifle's nifty effects. Feels great to knock someone on their ass with this one. The level is the tutorial for our Assault gametype, where you must infiltrate an underground base and destroy a prototype tank with your team of commandos
GLTRIBES [7:25 am]
Dynamix's Dave Moore has another
.plan update on the oh so hot topic of the GL TRIBES patch.
A couple of clarifications to my earlier .plan update. I omitted mention of the Permidia3 and the Rage 128. Both of these seem quite promising for TRIBES, and as soon as I have boards, I'll make a status update on them. Also, I've received a passel of eMails that have convinced me that I need to reiterate that we are NOT blaming id for our current problems. As I noted in an earlier .plan, were it not for them, we'd be doing all this in DirectX 3, and I would be contemplating how to remove the Thermopane windows from my office for the quick trip to ground level. My apologies to id for not making this clear enough before.
Late breaking developments re: OpenGL make it look like we'll have some sort of decision on our final direction for TRIBES wide card support within the week, stay tuned.
Views [8:15 am]
Tech [8:15 am]
Gaming [8:15 am]
werd
Erm, we've been administering CPR to the messageboard. Sander is working on another overhaul. Cross your fingers
and maybe the server wont blow up. Only had about 1 hour of down time yesterday, wee!
| Monday , March 1 |
Q3A Weapons [10:35 pm] - Marcus 'Majesty' Yam
Thresh at FS gives the low down on the weapons in Q3A. This is based on
his visit to id little while back. Thresh has some new info (at least to me) on why
the feel of the RL in Q2 just isn't up to snuff:
One particular thing I'm extremely proud of (sorry if I sound boastful) is that after debating with Carmack, we managed to figure out why the Quake 2 RL felt "lagged" as compared to the Quake 1 RL. I tried explaining the feeling to him, that the Quake 2 RL felt like it was firing the rocket slightly slower than the original's.. but he couldn't quite figure out what I was trying to say. So I loaded up Q2, asked him to fire the rockets a few times, then immediately loaded Quake 1 and asked him to do the same.
After a little thinking and more description from me about what was going on, Carmack suddenly exclaimed, "Oh, I know what it might be!" He proceeded to load up the Quake and Quake 2 code... and found that Quake's rockets had an additional 50ms of prediction added on top of it. Meaning, as you hit fire, the rocket actually comes out 50ms ahead of you... and not directly out of your body. In Quake 2 and Q3 (at the time), it came out of your body... which attributed to the more "lagged" feel. Carmack then changed it, and there was an immediate difference in the way the RL felt.
Any chance that you might want to know more about Q3A weapons? How about power-ups? Then you must have a gander at the Shack Weapon and power-up run-down.
Slave Zero demo [8:35 pm] - Marcus 'Majesty' Yam
Hey, Games.net has scored the Slave Zero demo, which hangs
around 54MBs. I'm downloading pretty quick, so you want to get this ASAP before it's
flogged to death. Click
here to download!
Large 3M PMS review [7:35 pm] - Marcus 'Majesty' Yam
Y'know, if you paid $40 for one of these new large 3M pads,
you have way too much money (or you are a sucker). Either way, you need to donate
some to the Majesty Foundation. Wanna know whether it's worth blowin' 40 bucks?
Read the review on Palpy,
and please give :P
Metabyte PGC Tech [6:05 pm]
Formerly known as that "TNT SLI thing" Metabyte
has released the white paper
giving out a bunch of information on just what the technology is and how it works. Here's
a bit. Thanks Gangland.org
The pair of Wicked3D PGC video boards can be in either of two configurations. Since there currently is no motherboard with more than one AGP slot, Wicked3D PGC supports one AGP and one PCI or two PCI configurations. In the one AGP and one PCI configuration, the AGP card will function as a PCI card running at the faster 66MHz-bus speed. Testing indicates that with current games/applications, the performance difference between the AGP and PCI versions of a particular video card is very minor.
Savage4 [4:55 pm]
Creative Labs has announced their new
Savage4 based 2D/3D accelerator. Yet another video card to consider when looking for that
perfect Quake3 accelerator :) Saw that at VE
Creative Technology Ltd. (Nasdaq: CREAF - news), the leading provider of multimedia hardware for the PC, further penetrates the graphics card market with the introduction of its 3D Blaster(TM) Savage4, the latest addition to Creative's award-winning 3D Blaster family. Designed with the budget-conscious PC gamer in mind, the 3D Blaster Savage4 is available at retail for the breakthrough price of US$129.99
More Unreal [4:55 pm]
PlanetUnreal has
a big ol' update from Mark Rein givin up all the info on just what they are up to and why
the mythical 221 patch for Unreal wont be called 221 anymore.
So why was this delayed for so long? As you know we're currently working on Unreal Tournament which uses an updated version of the Unreal Engine. It was always a key design goal that the improvements we made to the engine for Unreal Tournament would be implemented as updates to Unreal itself. In this way we could continue to maintain and improve the original Unreal game as we developed new engine features.
This meant that at some point we needed to temporarily stop engine-related development on Unreal Tournament to test the new functionality with Unreal. Things have been going along so well on Unreal Tournament that it was difficult to force ourselves to concentrate on testing the original Unreal with the new code. We also got into a little bit of feature creep. Once we added one new feature, the next feature seemed like an easy step and so on and so forth until we couldn't stop. We apologize for this. We will try to be more disciplined in the future.
Unreal Tournament [2:15 pm]
GameSpot UK sent out word of their 3D Action week a few days
ago and have just recently posted an interview with
Jay Wilbur, biz dood for Epic Games. Blue also
spotted the image gallery
which features a few shots I dont recognize, but I cant confirm if they are new or not.
Also, the Quake3 and Daikatana messageboards are fixed.. again.. No word on the Daikatana demo yet.
Buy a Pentium3? [12:45 pm]
Have a look at this lengthy
Technews article giving the lowdown on the Pentium3. ArsTechnica has a pretty good P3 battle royale
btw.
The Pentium III processor went on sale last week, and the one you may want to buy comes out in September. While Intel's latest processor will improve the quality of video, audio, and multimedia on PCs through its new "SIMD" processor instructions, some analysts and observers believe that the premier benefit of upgrading to a Pentium III machine won't appear for seven months.
By then, Intel will be shipping a new version of the Pentium III, code-named Coppermine, which will run at 600 MHz and contain new architectural improvements that boost performance.
New id Design Guru [12:15 pm]
I had a chance to meet up with Mr. Devine during my most
recent visit to id. Went out to eat with him and Tim Willits actually. id Software has
just now put out a press
release announcing the addition of the new man on campus. A very cool and personable
guy. :)
MESQUITE, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 1, 1999--Graeme Devine has been appointed id Software's new Designer.
Devine brings his experience as co-founder and CEO of Trilobyte, Inc. and has produced titles such as The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour. Only 3 PC titles have sold more than 2 million copies, The 7th Guest, MYST and DOOM
Speaking of press releases. Check out this one that Amer @ SE dug up. Yeah, you can lead the thug life and play Quake2 after all.
SIN & 3DNow! [12:15 pm]
A .plan update from
Mark Dochterman should clear up any confusion you folks had about the recent v1.3
patch for SIN you can grab from www.ritualistic.com
Drakan [11:45 am]
The ever popular new Drakan screenshots. www.drakan.net is just pumping more and more out. I've
got a few in my screenshots section as well.
Rainbow6 [11:35 am]
The Rainbow 6
Retreat has posted its latest issue of their interactive interview with Red Storm.
This week it covers topics such as: new maps, R6 cheats, online play, and a sequel
question. I also wanted to remind you that the R6 Retreat has its contest to win a copy of
Eagle Watch is still going on until March 6th!
LMCTF For Q2 Final [11:35 am]
Saw this one on Blues.
It's out, the *final* version of LMCTF for Quake2.
LMCTF was the first mod that really sucked me into playing Q2 so I recommend you puds
check it out. Loki's Minion Capture The Flag for the acronym challenged :)
Suck! [11:45 am]
Yup, it sucks. I've got documented proof! In case there was
any doubt in the world concerning my ability to whine like a little bitch, this should
answer the skeptics. Check out the suckage
of the week.
Daikatana Demo? [4:15 am]
Looks like the Daikatana demo
didnt hit the "late February" deadline, but we've got a .plan
update from Romero stating that it should be out pretty darn soon.
The modem interpolation bug was fixed just a couple hours ago. We're finishing off some remaining polish and sending it off to MPlayer for their final testing phase. We will be releasing the demo in the Practice Area of MPlayer first (limited release), then into the Tournament Area when Practice is through with their testing. When it gets into the Tournament Area, everyone can download it and try it out.
About a month or so later, we will put up the Internet Deathmatch Demo release so you can play over LAN as well and start up your own servers. Just remember: this demo is only for the first episode of Daikatana's deathmatch. Each of the remaining 3 episodes have their own different deathmatch feel because the weapons are all different. It's like 4 deathmatch games in one. (And one single-player game in one. :)
We've been working hard on getting this demo together and I hope everyone likes it. Sure, it's taken us a little longer to get polished, but it will be worth the wait. No use releasing a shab demo.
So keep your eyes open yet some more today. Maybe we'll get lucky?
Quake3 IHV Test Leaked [8:15 am]
It seems an IHV test version of Quake3 somehow
got leaked onto the net a few days ago. Just in the past 12 hours or so it has become
widely spread. It is not a very good indication of what the finished product will be. Here
is the official word from Anna Kang of id Software
that she sent to Blue.
A version of the IHV (independent hardware vendor) test has been leaked . The leaked version is used for the sole purpose of internal testing and contains no real levels. It serves no purpose other than for hardware vendors to test and optimize features such as multitexture and compiled vertex array implementation. It contains no playable maps. Some maps are specific for testing oversixed textures, extreme texture aspect ratios, and high polygon outputs (much higher than normal maps). We hope the public is aware that this leaked test is useless to them and illegal to have in their possession. This material was given under NDA and its sole purpose for distribution was for hardware vendors to test out various features. We're flattered that so many people are interested in getting their hands on the game, but what is out now is not a game, nor is it the test that will be out in about a month. Trying to play the IHV test will only lead to frustration.
Please keep the emails on this subject to a minimum, I already woke up to an extra hundred. Here are a few answers to the common questions though:
Question1: How did it get leaked?
Answer: From a hardware vendor most likely. Many of the hardware folks out there working on 3D chipsets have been working with id Software to optimize their drivers for Quake3.
Question2: Whats up with <insert weapon>?
Answer: Those are not the final weapons. In fact the weapons in the test and the version I saw dated just a few days afterwards while up at id had already changed. Don't go emailing id Software saying so and so sucks.
Question3: How do I get it to work?
Answer: I am not tech support, and certainly not tech support for an illegal copy of an unfinished game.
Question4: Link my screenshots / review?
Answer: Visit my friends website, www.spa.org and give them all the details. We'll get you taken care of.
If you want to know what the game is like, have a look at my Quake3 preview.
Quake Source Code [8:15 am]
Billy over at VoodooExtreme
got word from John Carmack of id Software on just
what the plans are for releasing the source code for Quake. Looks like we gotta wait for
all the Quake engine games to be completed first of all. Anachronox (awesome looking) from
Ion Storm should be the last one out the gate.
"I can guarantee that I will be releasing the Quake source code, the only question is the timing. I don't intend to release it until all of the initial licensee projects have shipped. Anachronox looks to be the last one out, so pull for their completion..."
John Carmack
TrueGamers [4:15 am]
The much anticipated Truegamers.com
has finally opened up with lots of features including an interview with Dan Hammans aka
RIX.
Views [8:15 am]
Tech [8:15 am]
werd
I uhm, forgot to change this from the morning update.
It's changed now though.
| Sunday , February 28 |
SharkyExtreme @ Metabyte [3:15 am]
Check out the SharkyExtreme report
after visiting Metabyte to get a closer look at that whole pairing up your video cards.
Kinda like SLI V2's, but not.
We go straight to the source and come back impressed. Of the many things we saw were a 3-monitor, EyeScream setup of Quake 2. The article includes reactions from all the big names as well as news of possible "SLI" implementations on other chipsets
KingPin Demo Status [9:15 am]
The homeys at Gangland.org
have the latest on the KingPin demo many of us are getting all excited about. Here is a
post from the CEO of Xatrix Entertainment to the msgboard over there.
Just wanted to drop a quick note and apologize for my absence from the boards of late. Every waking moment has been applied to getting the demo ready to go, so as soon as that's finished I'll be back to answer any questions.
We made some terrific progress over the past few days, and managed to kill some of the nasty memory bugs that have been holding things up. Today is the day I go back in to try and break everything again; hopefully, I will not be successful in my attempt!
Will update everyone in a few days on the demo status.
Daikatana Demo? [9:15 am]
Speaking of demos, anyone wanna place bets on the release of
the Daikatana demo? They have about 15hours from the time of this posting to get it out
the door. Someone posted to the Daikatana messageboard that they are working on a "modem
interpolation bug" right now but the rest of it looks golden. I'm gonna be around all
day today (Putting together a bigass TV stand, house cleaning) I'll have info asap, and of
course keep an eye on www.ionstorm.com as well.
Soldier of Fortune [9:15 am]
3DGaming.net has put together a great preview of the
Quake2 engine based Soldier of Fortune title coming our way from Raven Software. Those
screenshots are lookin sexy!
Raven has a great deal of experience with the Q2 engine, and has planned some ambitious changes for SoF. From the sounds of it, very little of the engine has gone unchanged. Q2 is notorious for being bad at rendering outdoor environments, but Raven says that they have succeeded in adapting the engine to that type of gameplay. Given their success in using the Q2 engine for the third-person perspective Heretic II, there is no reason to doubt this. In fact, many of the lessons from Heretic II will find their way into SoF. The game will be hardware only and support resolutions up to 1600x1200. The system requirements are tentative, but it should be playable on a 200Mhz Pentium with 32Mb and either Direct 3D or OpenGL. The game will ship with an editor, the source for all custom DLL and many of the utilities used to create SoF
Descent4 [9:15 am]
Wha? Yeah Descent3 hasnt even been released yet and the Volition guys are already
talking about Descent4. Looks like they are'nt gonna do the multiplayer thing ala
Quake3/Unreal Tournament though. Bah
Descent 4 will not surprisingly feature multiplay capability, following in the footsteps of an increasing number of first-person shooters. "As to what people prefer, I think there will still be plenty of people who don't play multiplayer games," Kulas volunteered. "But there are many people who only care about multiplayer games and we have to satisfy both camps. I do think we'll be offering interesting innovations in the single player game, and I'll consider Descent 4 a failure if people don't think the single player game is great."
Multiplayer Legalities [9:15 am]
Saw this one at AGN3D and
thought it would be of interest. CGO has posted their Over the Net column, talking
about the possibility of legal advances threatening the quality of online gaming. Here's
the info:
RTime is one of the first companies to stake out legal ground on online networking technology So... any of you ever noticed lately that the 'Net is slowly becoming more and more commercialized and regimented? Not sure? Well, think back to the early days when the web was basically a series of personal home pages all interlinking, with a couple of indexing directories such as Yahoo. As time's gone by and the web's population has grown, all sorts of corporations have begun to look at the 'Net with an eye to making money. Some have tried to move existing retail businesses to the web, while others have attempted to create new niches and stake out the high ground. In all cases, these companies have used every weapon possible to defend their turf, including filing patents on anything and everything that could one day be considered a competitive advantage. This patenting trend has now finally found its way to the games industry, and I must admit I have my reservations.
Views [9:15 am]
werd
So I've stooped to a new low. Yesterday evening I mail ordered a mousepad for $40.
$40 for a freaking mousepad. I was thinking about going to get a tattoo on my forehead
this afternoon that says "please rip me off, I buy any overpriced computer related
products" I've got a fairly big forehead, pretty sure it would fit.
Also, I got skittles to be different today as my desk treat of choice. Erm.. I swear I used to like these things. It's too much work chewing them though now days.
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