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Sunday, July 26

SIN Demo Released [10:11pm]
The SIN demo from Ritual Entertainment has just been released. For more details on SIN check out www.ritual.com SIN is based loosely on the Quake2 engine but with huge technology improvements including 16 bit color, full scripting language, and an actual storyline among other things. Here is a list of download sites: Oh, and check out GameCenters blurb

A SIN DM Server is already running at sin.lithium.com

Here is the readme.htm that is included in the demo.

/www.gamespot.com/sin_demo.exe
ftp3.download.com/pub/win95/games/Sin_Demo.exe
planetquake/iles/sin/demo/pq/Sin_Demo.exe
ftp.livewire.com.au//Sin_Demo.exe
ftp.questnet.net.au/Sin_Demo.exe
ftp://sin.lithium.com/Sin_Demo.exe
PlanetQuake MIrror List

No email sucks.

Keep an eye on the page, I'll have a list of download sites here ASAP.

Is This Thing On? [2:23pm]
RIX has won the CPL tournament over Gollum on DM6. Things on my end took longer than expected, I still havent gotten out to eat yet even.

I apologize for the page being down over the weekend, sucked huh? I still dont seem to be getting email and have other various problems that will be addressed this evening.

 

Saturday, July 25

Still at CPL [2:03pm]
Well, I've found myself in the final 16 players of the tournament so am still in it. Didnt really expect to make it this far considering its a netquake tournament, but oh well. Sorry. :)

werd
I'll get back to you guys after my match. Gotta play Thorn (seed #2) .. heh. I have a feeling I'll be free to make more updates in about 20minutes.

 

Friday, July 24

SIN AVI #4 [8:03pm]
The largest SIN AVI to be released yet from GameCenter, this AVI weighs in at a big old 10.2 megs. The demo version of SIN is scheduled to be released this Sunday, with Activision announcing that there will be a SIN tournament to be held at the CPL tourney going on in Texas that very same day.

Also, don't miss our earlier SiN movies in Game News, as Gamecenter celebrates the official SiN demo launch, Sinday, Bloody, Sinday, on Sunday, July 26, at 10 a.m. PT.

OMG! [3:59pm]
Can you believe it? actual updates while at a LAN party.. omg! Fonts are acting a little wacky and I dont really have time to deal with those, I'll have another update later tonight. The CPL prelims are ahead of schedule so they paused them for a while and John Carmack is speaking right now about Quake Arena.

PGL Season 3 [3:59pm]
The PGL has finally announced season 3 of their online gaming league. There is $20,000 worth of hardware as well as $70,000 cash as prizes.

In addition, the PGL is providing additional prize monies for Season 3, such that $20,000 in cash will be awarded in each of the two 1-on-1 categories, as opposed to $15,000 per category in previous seasons. With the championships of the new Action Teamplay (Quake clans) category also occurring at the Season 3 live finals, a total of $70,000 in cash and more than $30,000 in prizes will be distributed during the league's third season

Blood2 Weapons [3:59pm]
Jay Wilson of Monolith updated his .plan file with some information about the weapons to be included in Blood2 that may be of interest.

We haven't really announced this anywhere, other than simply mentioning that we were in the trimming and cutting stages of development, but since I see regular posts on the Blood forum about the number of weapons in B2 I'll make it official.

We've cut a few weapons from that original list of 30. Some were cut because of time, but most were cut because of redundancy and game balance. Basically, we eliminated any weapons that didn't serve a unique function, seemed out of place, etc. Our trimmed down list consists of 21 weapons.

Almost all the announced weapons have remained. There are a few that we changed cosmetically. For example, the rocket/grenade launcher is now the Napalm Launcher, an improved version of Blood's original weapon of fire and destruction. Rest assured that these changes will only improve Blood 2 as a game, since they will allow us to spend more time perfecting and balancing the weapons that have made the cut.

Also, we're keeping some of the best remnants of those that didn't make the cut, we may still re-work them for a Blood 2 add-on. We'll be doing an update to the weapon's page on the B2 site in the not too distant future to show off the improvements we've made. It is our goal to make the most awesome and powerful arsenal ever seen in a 3D shooter, and I think we are well on our way to that goal. :)

More Matrox MG200 [3:59pm]
OGR has posted their look at the new 2D/3D Matrox MG200 based Mystique.

Matrox has long been an interesting participant in the home and business video market. Beginning with the Millenium, Matrox has been considered by a rather large number of people to be the company to look to if you want to pick up a powerful but economical video card for business purposes. With high quality and high speed 2D, Matrox has remained the mainstream business leader for quite a long time. The only time in recent history where Matrox has seriously faltered was in the production of the original Mystique, a generally fast first generation 3D accelerator with great 2D Directdraw speed (it actually mattered back then quite a bit).

More Views [1:44am]

CPL Coverage [1:44am]
Almost forgot to link different pages you can check out for coverage of the big CPL event going down right now here in Dallas. first page is of course CSN then also check out the AVault coverage of the event as well.

Leprechaun's PGL Interview [1:44am]
Wow, as many of you may remember there was a small "incedent" with a player cheating at the PGL finals and the officials not stopping the match. The guy on the losing end of the little incedent was Andy "leprechaun" Vajda. Check out the interview over at CSN

Blizzard Exodus [1:44am]
A huge number of employees have left Blizzard Entertainment according to a story posted on Next-Gen. These are the guys behind Warcraft, Diablo, and all that great stuff.

While each of these individuals has made valuable contributions to our products, Blizzard's success has never been attributed to any individual or small group of individuals," said Mike Morhaime, president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment. "Our goal today is no different than it was yesterday or even five years ago. Blizzard remains focused on creating the best games in the world, and I am confident that we have the team in place to reach that vision.

Amen Interview [1:44am]
Svenska 3Dfx has posted an interview with the development team from Amen, Cavedog.

What kind of 3D engine are you going to use in Amen? Can you tell us something about it? Does it have a name?

You may have noticed that we have not said much about our engine; that is because from the very beginning we set out to make a great GAME. Our engine IS awesome and state-of-the-art, but it's the game that matters. It's name is simply, the "Amengine". But if you REALLY want buzz-words... its got a skelital animation system, a portal-based rendering engine, a dynamic light system where any and all lights in the world can be toggled on and off, a powerful physics engine where objects can have real momentum, an incredibly user friendly world editor, etc, etc.

SIN AVI #3 [1:44am]
GameCenter has posted a 3rd AVI with footage of SIN which looks pretty durn cool.

Unreal & nVidia [1:44am]
Mark Rein of Epic has made a post to the megaboard describing how Unreal will get along with some of the RIVA chipset cards.

Here are my comments on this thread and the screen shots NVIDIA released. First of all I consider myself to be an expert on judging Unreal screen shots. I've been doing that for about 4 years now! The visual quality of the TNT is stunning. I've got to say that the Unreal screen shots produced on the Riva TNT are on par with the BEST I've ever seen - they maybe even edge our the previous winner (PVRSG) by a hair. I won't know for sure until I see it running live but the screen shots are certainly very, very good. This shows the huge difference between 16bit (Voodoo & Voodoo2) cards and 24/32 bit (TNT, PVRSG) cards. When I look at the transparent fire engine effects on the force-field holding the shield and the coronas on the flames in front of the castle I see amazing visual quality. Way to go NVIDIA!

Bots in Q2 [1:44am]
From what I understand talking to Zoid, aimbots are no longer possible in the latest version of Q2. Here's an email I got though

Tejaz3D has done a short article on the existence of hacked player "bots", being used on the internet, while playing quake2. Not only does the article proclaim the possibility, there's also a short CTF demo the reader can download to prove it.

Views [1:44am]

Tech [1:44am]

werd
All kinds of stuff going on. I've got internet access and I'm bringing my computer to the CPL event tomorrow though, so updates will happen around noon.

 

Thursday, July 23

I'm Lame
Today... I played Quake.

 

Wednesday, July 22

3DLabs & Bump Mapping [10:54am]
After reading what Gary McTaggart posted in his .plan file yesterday talking about bump mapping and what the PowerVR guys are up to, Jean Salvati of 3DLabs dropped me some email with information about the Permedia3 that is pretty interesting:

...So here is some information on the Direct3D bump mapping modes  implemented in PERMEDIA 3.

The "preferred" bump mapping method with PERMEDIA 3 in Direct3D 6 is  the bump map embossing method mentioned by Gary McTaggart. From what I  understand, 3Dfx and NVIDIA are also pushing this method.

In addition to the fact that it gives very nice results, the embossing  method has two advantages. First, it can be emulated on almost any  chip (using several passes in most cases). Second, the basic algorithm  has been known for a while, and it's well documented: for example,  there is an OpenGL tutorial with some sample code on SGI's web site.  For these reasons, we expect bump map embossing to be very popular   with developers.

PERMEDIA 3 includes dedicated hardware to perform bump map embossing.  This allows it to perform bump map embossing AND texturing in a single  pass. In other words, in Direct3D 6, PERMEDIA 3 will be able to render a scene with a bump map and a separate surface texture in a single  pass.

Even though we expect embossing to be the most popular bump mapping  method with developers, PERMEDIA 3 has also been designed to support  the two other Direct3D 6 bump mapping modes: "dot product" bump  mapping, and bump environment mapping. In particular, the "dot  product" mode can also be used to perform bump mapping and texturing  in a single pass with PERMEDIA 3.

Weekly Demos [11:44pm]
They are up, check out the Dark Req LAN game, and a pair of matches of R3v against the newly reformed DG.

QuakeArena FAQ [10:54am]
A pretty good resource for those of you who still dont quite understand what id Software is up to, check out the new FAQ that is hosted over at Telefragged.

CPL Announcements [10:54am]
It's almost here! The big CPL event. (I just picked up a pair of chumps this morning) A few new announcements just for the hell of it:

The Adrenaline Vault has launched a new section dedicated to live coverage
from the CPL Event. The URL is www.avault.com/cpl_event/

GamesNet will provide all tournament servers for the event. The servers include Sun Ultra-1, as well as high-end Intel Pentium-II systems dedicated exclusively to the tournament matches. More details are in this press release: http://cpl.cyberathlete.com/pr19.shtml

ThrustMaster, a leading manufacturer of game controllers for PC-based entertainment, announced today the special preview of their new first person shooter control - the Frag Master™ - at the CPL Event. Press Release: http://cpl.cyberathlete.com/pr19.shtml

Messiah AVI's [2:39am]
The boys at Shiny have released a TON of new AVI's showing off several of the characters to be included in Messiah. If you arent excited about Messiah your ass should be. Sax has put together the most incredible looking model system in an engine that anyone has ever seen. I'm gonna need some time alone with these videos.

Bob, BeastA, BeastB, Barman, CopFemal, CopRiot, Chot1, SubGirl2, Dwelfelm1, Pros2, Hung, Pros3

Four Portals Source [10:54am]
If you remember that Quake2 movie that was released a couple of weeks ago and were curious how they did it, the source code has been released now on their homepage.

S3 & Tom's Hardware [10:54am]
Blue's page posted this from Paul Crosly of S3: (I just copied it since it's a day old anyways)

Saw your link to the 3D accelerator review on tomshardware.com and just wanted to send part of a response I posted on Dimension3D:

".....Bottom line, as evidenced by reviews on bootnet, c/net GameCenter, Cyrellis3D, GameSpot, Next-Generation Online and OGR, the numbers posted on tomshardware.com are incorrect. While I don't know the origins of the board that Tom has (it looks to be an early "first silicon" rev.being tested with Vsynch on.), the results it generated are clearly not representative of the performance levels Savage3D is capable of.   Tom rarely makes mistakes and we like to think we're perfect, but in this case something is out of whack. Suffice to say that we're working with Tom to get back on track."

Errands [10:54am]
I'm gonna be running around for a few hours today, I'm gonna try and get something setup to update remotely, but if not its only about 10-15 minute drive home.

Views [10:54am]

Tech [10:54am]

werd
Are they ill tempered?

 

Tuesday, July 21

More Tech [9:54pm]

Q_Check [8:14pm]
Scott "monkey boy" Smith updated his mIRC script for Quake that detects when you use GameSpy and automatcally sets you to AWAY mode and has the server that you are playing at listed in the msg.

More Views [7:49pm]

New GameSpy [5:41pm]
A new version of GameSpy, 2.02 to be exact has been released over at the www.gamespy.com website. Thanks to Redwood for the word. Here is a local copy.

- Improved Quake 2 Master support -- be sure to update your master list to get the latest & greatest id Master.
- GameSpy SOCKS5 and HTTP support is now implemented for all you poor souls stuck behind a proxy server. (w00p!)
- More Server List Info: Added two more much requested columns to the server list:
"Average Ping" and "No. of Pings to Date".
Unreal UDP support and player profile support including skins.
Creates a Launchinfo.txt file containing the server details when you launch a game.
Improved Master list update routine now verifies changes to your sources before updating them.
Added an import/export server list routine - now you can backup those favorites or share them with your friends - or better still your enemies!
Faster Shared Server Lists - Less time hangin' and more time gang bangin'.
More Tweaks - A whole bundle of new options to tweak your setup and in-game performance.

Wow [3:10pm]
Hum, not much I can really say about this .plan update by Mike CHAOS Werckle over at Ritual. Just check it out and see what you think

This one's for all the producers at ACTIVISION who suffer under RITUAL  and RAVEN:

The only thing in this business that I hate more than a "producer from  the coast" is a "slow-ass redneck developer."   Artists: These guys have no clue. They're not really artists anyway.  At best they are excellent craftsmen, but not artists. True artists  create interesting works of originality. Game artists copy the  innovations of others. Every game artist that I have met has been  difficult to work with. They don't know how to take criticism. They  sit and work on something for a week and won't let anybody look at it   until it's done-- and then it isn't done right. And they get irate and  pout when you ask them to change it
<snip>

In case you guys can't figure it out. Mike is kidding. It's a joke, chaos style. :)

More CPL & Levelord @ DMN [1:15pm]
After you take a gander at the CPL Preview posted on CSN, you should also have a look at the Dallas Morning News articles posted. Here are the links provided by HERESY:
Levelord article:techbiz710.htm
Quake Community Stuff: techbiz8.htm
Quake Lexicon:  techbiz99.htm

Wanna See My Bump? [1:15pm]
Gary McTaggart updated the ol .plan file talking about bump mapping and some of the downsides of the methods that PowerVR has chosen.

Weekly [1:15pm]
Had some guests hangin around that kind of delayed the creative process you could call it. If I were King has been updated now.

3DR Nostalgia [11:55am]
Joe Siegler over there at 3DR has posted something pretty interesting on the 3DR website.

The other day I was going through some videotapes of mine, and found this little tidbit of Apogee history.   It's a 2.5 minute long interview with Scott Miller & George Broussard done in the summer of 1992.  It aired back home in Philadelphia in November of 1992 on the NBR show that is on PBS.  It was a report on Apogee (and id Software) and how we were changing the face of computer gaming.

This interview was done in the post Wolfenstein 3D hysteria (as Wolfenstein is all over this video), and also has an interview with John Romero (now of Ion Storm). In addition to Scott, George, & John, you can also see some others in the background (but don't talk) - our own Steve Blackburn, as well as Jay Wilbur, John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, and I believe Kevin Cloud of id Software.

OGR Guest Column [11:15am]
Saw on Redwood's Witchboy from Ion Storm has made an appearance on OGR's guest column discussing enemy AI and weapons.

As with weapon differentiation, if each enemy has a particular function in the game world (and it is obvious and/or something the player can learn over time) then the player can make informed decisions about how to deal with each enemy (which becomes a game dynamic). The alternative (in which all enemies do basic variations of the same thing - race forward and inflict damage) is boring.

Drakan Shots [10:21am]
Duncan of Surreal was kind enough to send word that some new screenshots of Drakan from Surreal software have been posted on their homepage. Drakan was one of the top 5 games I saw at E3 this year so you better get all excited and check out the screenshots. They are also indexed over at www.screenshots.net

screen6s.jpg (5480 bytes)

CPL Predictions [10:41am]
CSN has put together an in depth preview of the upcoming CPL Tournament, the end all be all of Quake1 tournements starting in just a couple of days down here in Dallas. Aside from the dork picked to finish in 10th place, it looks pretty good.

More Views [10:41am]

Sweeney on Particles [10:21am]
Tim Sweeney made yet another update to the Unreal technology page talking about the particle system in Unreal and a bit of a comment on the closing down of www.unreal.org

Yet, the mainstreaming of Unreal does not discourage me, because I know the best is yet to come: there is a tremendous amount of new progress being made in the Unreal community toward new mods, new levels, and new tools. We have a lot enhancements in the queue, and our partners such as Legend Entertainment, Ion Storm, and 3D Realms are coaxing the engine into doing things we didn't dream possible. And, the team is beginning to see a rough outline of the things to come for our next project, and some of the possibilities are immensely exciting.

VE Article [10:21am]
Billy over at Voodoo Extreme is doing a bit of a "multitexture extravaganza"

In this article I plan to go into some specifics on how mulitexturing is supported in various 3D hardware - both current and near future. Almost every 3D card in the market supports multitexturing in some form. This article will describe how this hardware performs these operations, and the strengths and weaknesses of each method. I wanted to do this to clear up some common misconceptions that people have about the TNT, Voodoo2 and PVRSG when compared as multitexturing platforms.

It will help in this article if you understand a few things first. You should have an idea about what dithering is, what tiled rendering is and what multitexturing is. If you don't understand any of these things, then here are some links to try reading:

An Introduction to Multitexturing by Jeremy Krieg
Dithering or full 24 bit ? by Kristof Beets of PowerVR Power
How the PowerVR Works by Sam Hatoum (explains tile-based rendering)
Tile Based Rendering by Kristof Beets

<snip>

CPL Coverage [10:21am]
The CU-See Me guys have announced that they have been added to the ever expanding list of media that will be covering the event formerly known as QuakeCon. The volunteers start pooring in tomorrow at the Dallas informart. (I'm heading over there myself, I somehow got suckered into announcing the entire event) Check out the http://cpl.cyberathlete.com website.

GX Q2 Mod [10:21am]
Gamers Extreme has released their attempt at a ClanRing style mod for Quake2 to encourage the competetive play style for Q2 that seems to be lacking right now.

I just wanted to let you know that we've just wrapped up the first beta version of the GX Mod, a Quake II Tournament mod which manages team and 1 on 1 games.  The mod contains a host of features such as a comprehensive voting system, 3 chasecam modes, advanced admin and configuration settings for different types of matches, support for ffa/practice modes, and much more.  You can find more info at http://www.gamers.com/gxmod, and server administrators can download the beta version from there

Views [10:21am]

Tech [10:21]

SHOGO Pack [9:35am]
Instant Access has announced a deal with Monolith to produce a SHOGO: Mobile Armor mission pack.

Monolith Production's "Shogo", currently scheduled to ship in October and tipped to be one of the hottest games of the year, will be followed by an extension pack currently being developed by Instant Access. Greg Rice, Managing Director of Instant Access said, "We are extremely pleased to be working with Monolith. Shogo is going to be one of the most spectacular games of the year, it will develop a following amongst game fans who will crave more once they have conquered the original, and this extension pack will keep that momentum alive"

<snip>

Erotic Webmaster Theatre 3 [12:35am]
As you all know, the life of a webmaster is an exciting one. This time coming home from a trip to Arby's I happened upon a "lady of the night" who seemed to know my name.
Her: "Oh sTeve! show me your input device! Show me a mean POPUP!"
Me: "What kind of resolution is your deskTOP? it seems kind of small for my liking"
Her: "Oh yeah? well that puny DRIVE of yours has probably never even been partitioned by a lady before!"
Me: "I FDISK all the time at home by myself lady, I dont need you to meet my needs. That going blind stuff is a lie!"
Her: "Ok, tell you what, I'll let you check out my .plan file in the back seat of that station wagon for $5 instead" (Think a little)
Me: "Deal"

werd
Psychopaths kill for no reason, I kill for money

Monday, July 20

Prax War Release Date [8:55]
Randy Pritchford, lead level designer over at RB updated his .plan file to clear up some of the rumors circulating concerning RBR's release date for the Prax Wars project:

I've noticed some confusion lately about our 'release date'.

Let me clear it up:

Right now, we have no official 'release date'. We hoping for Q1 '99. We used to be hoping for the end of this year, but there's just too much cool stuff we wanted in the game we're not going to cut just to make some date. EA's got a nice plan for us...If you haven't heard an official 'release date' directly from them, than any release date you've heard is conjecture.
<snip>

Scott Miller [6:15]
First off Scott Miller is interviewed over at UGO. (Saw that on AGN3D) then secondly Scott made another .plan update talking about Lucas and their goofy trademark infringement stuff.

Free QW Proxy [5:45]
Although not featuring as many cool gadgets as QIZMO, this new freeware QW proxy program works like a champ and is completely free. Check out Cheapo.

New V2 Drivers [5:15]
Yea, just cant get enough of these new Voodoo2 drivers from 3dfx. Thanks to Cyrellis for the word

3Dfx Voodoo2 Reference Drivers for Windows 95/98
Release: 2.1
Version: 1.03.01
Date Posted: 07/20/98

NOTE: These drivers will NOT work on Voodoo Graphics or Voodoo Rush based cards.

Suck [5:15]
Ok leave me alone already, the weekly Stuff that Sucks has been posted.

More Views [4:41]

Cracked [2:41]
Dave Taylor has made a .plan update with some distressing news. Here's a clip:

Conventional biz wisdom says you shouldn't announce this sorta thing, but I do so because of an annoying decency streak. So before the rumors start to fly, I should announce that Crack is in deep financial shit. We're not in debt and refuse to enter debt, but we just ran out of cash and are not making payroll.

Dave Taylor was formerly employed at id Software, and is currently working on the 3D Golgotha title.

Tom's Big Preview [1:22]
Tom's Hardware page has gotten a big update with a preview of the cards that he mentioned having gotten a hold of last week. The 3dfx Bansheed 2D/3D card, the Matrox G200 2D/3D card, the nVidia RIVA TNT 2D/3D card, the next-gen PowerVR stuff, and finally the S3 Savage3D 2D/3D Card. Here is a quote from the article:

Finally it's done, the Preview of 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee, NVIDIA RIVA TNT and S3 Savage3D is online, of course in the new beautiful layout, courtesy of Design Reactors and Tom's webmaster Fredi Gross himself. Will Banshee change the world of the integrated 2D/3D cards? Is Savage3D a real Voodoo2 competitor? How does TNT really stick up? Read it on the above mentioned page(s)!!

SouthPark Q2 [8:55]
Just got word via that Blue guy that the SouthPark TC that oh so many of us thought was Fox'ed apparently has just come out with an alpha version of their patch for Q2 to download and enjoy.

Q1 vs Q2? [8:55]
Ok, this article um.. is interesting? guess I know what I'm obligated to write an editorial about next though. Check out OGR's Meanderings of Medusa or something.

BlackOps Diary [8:05]
The Shadows of Reality web page has posted the first of many planned updates giving a designers diary style look at the development of Shadows of Reality, which is based on the LithTech (engine formerly known as the DirectEngine) technology. Yea, BlackOps.

DirectX 6 RC [8:05]
According to PlanetHardware, the release candidate for DirectX 6 from what is says in this infoworld article. A 60% increase in 3D performance? What?

Compared with Version 5.0, DirectX 6.0 boosts performance in 3-D applications by 60 percent, Kenworthy said. It supports Advanced Micro Devices' 3DNow instruction-set extensions further to boost performance of the non-Intel systems that implement the standard. 

Suckage [8:05]
The suckage won't be posted till this afternoon because I'm tired as hell. So there :)

Views [7:39]

Tech [7:39]

When you are constructing a 3D image, part of the process that goes toward forming the completed image is called texturing.

I did managed to get some testing on the S3 Savage3D board I received, so far things are looking good for a review early next week. I just thought I would keep you up to date on what's going on down here, from the looks of things the Savage3D will be the closest thing to a head-to-head Voodoo2 competitor until theRiva TNT comes out as well as a few of the other competitors.

werd
Yikes, stayed up late last night gettin some practice in for the big CPL (The LAN party formerly known as QuakeCon) event coming up in a week. Got my panties in a wad looking forward to the SIN demo in 6 days too.

 

Sunday, July 19

Levelord Interview [9:31]
Got word from LAReviews that they have posted another interview, this time with Richard "Levelord" Gray over at Ritual who is working on SIN. (To be released in 7 days, w00!) A quote that Blue picked out was especially interesting:

Question: From what we gather you're currently working on Sin. So where might we have sampled your work in days gone by?

Levelord: Well, I have done a few levels before, but nothing significant until SiN. It's all been 'warm up' until now ;)

QuArK Map Ring [9:31]
Got this email from Goo which just warmed my heart enough to post. :)

The QuArK Ring-Map site currently located at: http://members.tripod.com/~qrm/ It is a chain map style site for the users of the QuArK editor only. We are in need of mappers to join the rings, and partial map submissions

Unreal & RIVA [4:51]
Mark Rein made another update to the Unreal web page talking about support for the RIVA not being dropped

I hope people don't misinterpret Tim's statement to mean that we're not supporting the RIVA. That is not true. We're working on OpenGL support for it and we WILL release and OpenGL driver for it. We're also working on D3D support for RIVA.The RIVA is one of the most important cards to us.We've asked the D3D contractor to make it their priority. As for not making OpenGL work, that is not true either. We are making it work and we're working with nVidia to try and make it work faster. But we don't want people to expect Voodoo2 performance out of the RIVA when running a texture rich game like Unreal.
<snip>

Views [3:21]

QW Stuff [2:31]

- works with QW 2.29
- config saving (client configs saved in cfg/player_name.cfg)
- added %x %y %g %i %j and %k team report options
- TF and CTF compatible (%-reporting recognizes runes/flags/sentries/flag
carriers, %e/%x checks team from pant color in TF)
- new filters to increase fps/save bandwidth

Statz on Heretic2 [1:06]
Jeremy Statz updated his .plan file with a bit of a progress report on Heretic2.

Heretic 2's moving along really well... a lot of minor control issues are going away and the cool little details are starting to emerge. I'm starting to feel really good about it and how everything's going with my maps. The fire kicks ass, the gore and severed limbs fly freely (well, when you use your halberd... tough to sever limbs with a fireball), and the AI stuff is getting really neat. The buoys give enough control that monsters can be made to do some really interesting, complicated stuff if the situation calls for it.

GLDoom [1:06]
Bruce Lewis has made another update to his GLDoom project page talking about what he's up to.

Spent a couple of hours working on the newest floor/ceiling generator for glDoom this morning. I'm really glad to get back to doing that. This part of the program has got to be rock solid for it not to be a pain in the butt to play. Can't have it blowing up on every other level. ;o)

Unreal.org Gone [1:06]
The long standing www.unreal.org has shut down with a lengthy explanation behind why and of course what a few of the members will do next. Check out the history too.

Views [1:06]

werd
Weekends generally suck for news.

I made the switch from Frontpage Express to FP98 yesterday, and um.. It's seriously buggin me out. Anyone at Microsoft who could actually get a few of my suggestions heard I'd love to get some email from ya. smiles@3dnews.net

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