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Saturday, June 6 5:04pm

Um, at any rate. Here's the stinking news:

Marketing Genius
In my search for a new home, it's amazing what some guys say to me. I figured I'll share with you the most entertaining stuff though. I apologize for the lack of updates but I've been spending my time trying to find the page a home.

"dude what if I could guarantee u a daily blow job?!?@"
"I have much more power than that guy"
"I won't even charge you for hosting!"

Trinity
John Carmack went pretty in depth into answering a couple of questions sent to him by Hin, who coincidentally runs a Trinity website. Here's a snippit of Carmack in action:

2) long ago, and correct me if i'm wrong, there was mention that game engines by id software displayed static world geometry followed by dynamic entities, which, in effect, was like having two separate rendering pipelines. are there any plans to unify the display of all things into a global rendering pipeline for future game engines? if so, are the benefits solely from a design perspective?
------
Yes, Quake 3 finally unifies all rendering into a singletesselator/shader paradigm.With CPU based rendering, there were always too many optimizationsavailable for specific rendering tasks (less coordinate precision,less perspective precision, table based color transformations,etc ) that made unification not worth it. I tried it duringQuake 1's development, and the performance loss was unacceptable.With rasterization hardware providing high quality renderingas a baseline, there is no longer any benefit to having seperatepaths.

Half-Life TeamFortress
The boys over at http://www.halflife.net/ have scored some videos for you to check out with footage of the TeamFortress conversion that will work with Half-Life once it is released. There is also an IRC log on the website as well for the truely bored which was a chat with some of the Valve Software guys who are of course working on Half-Life.

Speaking of the guys, a new website dedicated to Valve has opened up at http://www.valveworld.com

GLDoom
Bruce Lewis's GLDoom port is finally nearing completion. We've all seen the screenshots and his WinDoom port and all the cool stuff it can do. (He added a console to Doom!) Here's part of the update he made to the GLDoom page: -VE

To those of you waiting to play glDoom, this will only add little to the time required to finish the conversion. It may even (by solving a number of problems) make it quicker to complete. You won't have to wait that much longer. I know you're tired of waiting. But bear with me. It's my firm hope to have this thing finished by the end of June. Note that is NOT a promise. Any number of things can go wrong and usually do. But I don't know if I can maintain
the work schedule I have been for longer than 6 months (WinDoom AND glDoom) without a real vacation.

Hardware

PowerVR
Owie, check out this little slam bam on the PowerVR guys that isnt exactly nice. Here is a snippit of the rant:

--- PVRSG performs full-scene anti-aliasing in real-time.

Again baloney. PVRSG claims 120 MPixels/sec fill-rate (and again this is a marketing number and one which certainly doesn't hold once translucent polys are added to the scene as explained above, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for the sake of this argument...). PVRSG performs a very brute-force approach to anti-aliasing, where they render a scene into a 1600x1200 resolution, then "down filter" to the desired display resolution. The problem with their approach with PVRSG is that they have nowhere near the fill-rate to be able to sustain this in real-time. A depth-complexity 4.0 app rendering at 1600x1200 resolution with a 120 MPixels/sec fill-rate only sustains 15 fps! This is certainly not real-time, and as I mentioned above, they're not going to be getting anywhere near 120 MPixels/sec once they start rendering current generation algorithms which rely heavily on multi-pass techniques. Another problem they have rendering into a 1600x1200 frame buffer is that the number of tiles they have to process increases by a factor of 4-8x, which only further increases the CPU requirements for rendering. I'm sure they'll concoct some demos to show AA at decent frame rates, but try it in a real-world game and I just don't see it happening.

I'm not gonna post the entire thing but check out VooDoo Extreme if you are really antsy to see the PVRSG torn up.

werd
Yea, bummer. need a new home. If I actually start getting payed again I bet the page will pick back up a bit. Hell, I may even have to sign a contract saying that I'll update the weekly sections regularly. (heh)

Oh man, check out the Booth Babes from 3DR btw. Yummy! (personal favorite linked here sorry mom!)

 

Thursday, June 4 7:54pm

Ritual Hirings
Ritual Entertainment has scored *huge* with these 2 new artists recently hired. The talent that these 2 guys alone should add another 100,000 sales to any Ritual title. Check out part of the press release sent out:

Computer graphic artists Murphy Michaels and Mike “Chaos” Werckle. Both artists will add their considerable talents to some of Ritual’s hottest new projects, including Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2.

Unreal GL & D3D
Tim Sweeney (who I finally met at E3 this year, cool guys) made a post to the megaboard concerning his work on the OpenGL and Direct3D ports of Unreal:

Two separate teams are working hard on the OpenGL and Direct3D drivers for Unreal. OpenGL is up and running now on several cards(though still very rough, and not releasable yet). Direct3D is rougher, and will probably have to target DirectX6 which isn't available yet, because Unreal uses a very large amount of textures, and DX5's texture handling is a very big performance bottleneck.

We would have loved to have these in time for shipping, but they are taking a far larger development effort than other 3D support (like 3dfx and PowerVR) because they target a much wider range of hardware, which requires more development and testing time.

The 3dfx driver is my code, and I'm the one working on the Voodoo Rush fix (with 3dfx's help). So, fortunately, the time I'm spending on Voodoo Rush, network code, and other fixes isn't impacting Direct3D/OpenGL support.

My Heretic2 Preview -E3
A game that I admit I was really less than excited to see at E3 was Heretic2. Honestly if it hadn't been at the aCtivision booth I'm not sure I would have even seen it. The original Heretic never really did anything for me. But man am I glad I happened to run into Heretic2. It's awesome!

The screenshots that were released on the net in the months prior to E3 were kinda cool but I never really thought much of it. Thing is, those impressive looking scenes were not only restricted to the occasional screenshot. I found myself watching a Raven dude running around the game just googly eyed at all the cool stuff you could do.

All the spells and their effects were just incredible looking! The game is obviously 3D hardware required looking at all the alpha effects that the artists were using but who cares? By the time this baby comes out a large percentage of gameplayers will have a 3dfx or Riva or something.

Something I didnt really like about Raven't previous 3D title, Hexen2 was the incredibly simple level architecture. It looked like the guys were shooting for some seriously low system requirements. This time around the levels look great though. Either the level designers were held back by r_speeds last project or they just got a new level design team all together. The difference in architecture is like night and day.

The character animations were equally as cool. Watching your hero pull out different staffs and casting spells, jumping around and pulling the old Ninja Gaiden wall bounce technique among other things was just a joy to watch.

I looked really hard at any problems with the game and the only thing that worries me is of course the melee fighting. Much like Drakan Heretic2 is suffering from the same boring "click attack when next to the monster" problem. You just cant let a game as beautiful as this get out there without addressing this.

Strangely enough, Heretic2 was probably the biggest surprise and game that has me most excited leaving E3. (Along with Drakan) Both games being 3rd person pov. Wacky.

Sinterview
Charlie Wiederhold, level designer at Ritual, has done an interview with the Ritualistic guys. There is quite a bit of talk about the game itself and what we can expect. Of course the stuff that was shown at E3 is a major topic covered in the interview.

Paul Steed on Quake3
Hin's Trinity page has gotten permission to post a bit of an email exchange with Paul Steed talking about the next-generation technology and game we can expect to see from id Software. Here's a bit of it:

My use of polygons has always been based on the requirementsof the game-rendering engine. Given the low-face count limitationsof our models I prefer to model vertex by vertex, face by face.In the future we will no doubt be moving towards adaptive sub-divisionssince it provides for a dynamic level of detail. Level of detailcan be accomplished with Nurbs, but spline-based models are veryexpensive in terms of memory and manipulation in the gameenvironment. Tesselation and deformation based on displacementmap technology is valid and some developers are pursuing thatpath as well.

Cyberathletes
The CPL is making a lot of noise recently with announcements of several sponsorships being landed with some pretty good size cash prizes for the tournament to be held at the QuakeCon CPL tourney. First prize is up to $3,000 cash now and $2,000 for second prize, and $1,000 for third. This is of course just the cash, all kinds of hardware etc is up for grabs at the tournament as well.

The tournament / LAN party will be held in Dallas, TX July 23-26.

PGL Wrapup
After concluding the Quake2 and Total Annihilation seasons for PGL at E3, there is a wrap-up of all the events posted on the PGL page. The scores, demos, and commentaries on some of the key matches are also now finally online as well.

3dfx OpenGL Beta
The guys at 3dfx have released yet another new version of their full OpenGL driver for Voodoo1 / 2 as well as Rush cards on their website. Keep in mind that if you use OpenGL screensavers in Win98 you are askin for trouble. -VE

Ask Brian
If you just cant get enough of Alex St. John and Brian Hook going at it, check out the "GrandMaster B's Q&A Column" hosted over at VE

The Views -part2

Unreal Net Code
Uhoh, may have to give Unreal another shot on the net according to Bastard over at PlanetQuake. Check out his .plan update with some promising news:

Unreal Multiplayer fixes are on the way!

We've been working on both the Unreal and the GameSpy side of things to get Internet Multiplayer *really happening* the way it should. A couple of notes for you:

1. We found that setting Unreal Servers to uplink to a master server takes the CPU on a p2-300 from 2% to 80% and pegs it there. Kind of cuts down on what the server can do. ;) crt wrote a replacement for "master tick code" and sent it to Tim Sweeney.

2. crt also wrote a UDP server query class to replace the TCP class that is *so* tremendously slow. They are testing this at Epic now.

We're going to release the full version of GameSpy just as soon as the Unreal fixes come out and we can test our performance against 100+ servers. We just aren't comfortable with a full release until users can get a decent experience with unreal.

Unreal Multiplayer is extremely fun! If you can get to Southern California on June 13th, try to get into the Beatdown www.planetquake.com/beatdown/ . Cliff B from Epic is attending and promises to show us why unreal deathmatch is soooooo kickass!

The Views

werd
Apologies for being late, Yeesh, um.. took a bit longer than I expected to run errands today. I got a house key now again though :)

 

 

Wednesday, June 3 12:55pm

Prax War Shot
The Rebel Boat Rocker boys having just returned from E3 have posted a new screenshot of Prax War for you to check out. I got to check out the private demo for Prax while I was at E3 and it was awesome. Although Billy is a punk.

Messiah Site
The Messiah by Team Ego website has opened its doors and has quite a bit of info about the much hyped and deservedly so Messiah project by Shiny. There are a couple of new screenshots on the site as well as a bit of talk on the technology they are using etc. A certain former 3dfx employee was quoted as saying the programmers on this project deserve "badmotherfucker wallets" for the character work they are doing. -VE

Duke4 Video
The AVault E3 page has posted the Duke4 Video that everyone was checking out while at um.. E3. -Reds

PingTool v2.1b4
A new version of Ping Tool with support for just about every multiplayer internet game under the sun has been released for your fragging pleasure. There are upgrade patches, full installs, and all kinds of other things for you to download on the homepage.

GameSpy & Unreal
As many people have noticed, a couple of the Unreal servers lists are not agreeing with GameSpy. The website has been updated with information on just how the server list admins can get their lists to work. For now just use the unreal.gamespy.com list though.

ClanRing v4.01`
A new version of the ever popular ClanRing mod for netquake has been released by Paul Baker. Here are a few of the new features:
+ Ultra Smooth ChaseCam observer modes.
+ Automatic Overtime in match mode.
+ Practice Mode with unlimited ammo and weapons.
+ Accurate per-weapon efficiency statistics.
+ On-Screen options menu for admins
+ '+teamscores' command show's team scores instead of player scores (+showscores)

My Drakan Preview -E3
One of the top games on my list to see at E3 was Drakan from Surreal. I've always been a bit of a fan of the fantasy world D&D style universe but never really found a game that floated my boat. I think Drakan may change that though.

I traded a few emails with a member of the Drakan team before E3 and he asked my opinion on a number of things so thats already a few bonus points in their favor but of course the Forsaken guys did that too and uh.. that game *cough*sucks*cough*

Well, before E3 Surreal had released a single screenshot on their website showing off some great landscape possibilities in their engine and then a week or so before E3 a few more shots came out that really were impressive. Once again though, sweet talk and nice screenshots dont always add up to a good game. I walked to to the booth at E3 with high hopes but not expectations.

Well, there it was, a big monitor showing a character riding a dragons back through a canyon swooping under passes and showing off some of the most incredible animations I've ever seen. A couple of people next to me could vouch for myself gasping "holy shit" when I first saw it. It was awesome looking! I watched as the player (a female) and her dragon landed in front of a cave entrance and begun to explore the caves on foot. The architecture and atmosphere of the caves were spectacular! I am dying for these guys to finish!

Ok, of course all was not perfect. Watching the character push a boulder was quite ridiculous looking, and the actual sword fighting interface when confronted with monsters seemed pretty weak too. The game looks spectacular, and creates a great atmosphere, now all they need is the interface for the player. Just walking up to a monster and hitting the attack key will not do it. I can imagine this game being quite a huge success based on whether or not the Surreal guys can fully realize the hit game they have on their hands. As a startup company this is their first title. They do have members on the team from other game companies though with previous experience.

So.. well great level design, some great animations on the dragon, the character still needs a number of animations though. They should take a look at Heretic2 or Tomb Raider for some good 3rd person pov animation stuff. Keep a keen eye on Drakan though, chances are its gonna rock.

E3 Stuff
A few more followups by the sites

The Views

Hardware
Havent had this section open in a while eh?

werd
Yea, I didnt take any pictures at E3 guys, sorry about that. Carrying a damn camera just irritates the hell out of me. Wendigo did get a pic of me in my natural habitat though.

 

 

Tuesday, June 2 5:25pm

PGL Haxors
The Focus on Quake page has an article discussing Kuin deleting his player skins to make an opponent appear bright colors during a PGL finals match. Also Blue sent some email to Joe Perez asking about the incedent, here is his official response:

1) Andy Vajda "unowned" was completely correct in that he was seen as a red and white player model on Kuin's screen.

2) I was one of the PGL officials on the stage floating between the two currently running matches and considered the main ref. The other PGL refs were in the back in observer mode so they were not able to see the same screen I was seeing and notice the hacked player model. The only other member of the PGL staff that was with me on stage was a network technician who players may have mistaken for a PGL Official.

3) I was under the impression that Kuin was using the player model on his screen for his character not unowned's character. I had no idea that unowned was showing up as the red and white player model on Kuin's screen. There seemed to be a major miscommunication here in the heat of running two matches almost simultaneously. I did not stop the match or replay the match because I thought that it was no big deal for a player to be using a custom skin for themselves. I did however tell Kuin to not use any custom skins in any future matches and he obliged.

<snip>

Of course, considering the qualifying rounds for PGL were held online, you think these kind of tactics were limited to the finals held on a lan? Until they have some solid cheat / modification detection in place they may wish to consideri pulling that word "Professional" out of PGL. Also, keep in mind Kuin is not the only one at fault and played exceptional during the PGL matches. The impact of a skin change is minor but still significant enough to be noted. I only make my statement because if a player can do something like that on an officiated lan match, what do you think players had available to them when qualifying from home?

PowerVR Stuff
The GameStats page has posted a huge amount of info concerning the next-generation chipset coming from the PowerVR guys. There was a huge booth running PowerVR at E3 and the image quality and performance level was on par or slightly slower than Voodoo2 cards. Also of note is if you happen to be using a PCX2 from PowerVR and installed the latest v3.15 Quake2, I hope you didnt overwrite those PowerVR drivers because the ones included with the v3.15 update are a bit old. -VE / Blues

Unreal

A 3dfx engineer I'm working with has found the source of the problem (it's a weird three-way conflict between Glide, DirectDraw, and my window-management code). I'm working with him to find a fix that eliminates the problem. Then we need to do some testing on it. Unless there are new, unexpected problems with the code, we should have a fix available in 3-6 days.

I'm sorry for the time it's taking to nail this problem...it has been a difficult conflict to track down.
We have received final code for Unreal, and are working hard to merge it with the curent Mac version. There were quite a few changes in the final code, so there is lots of work to do. Currently we're tentatively hoping to have the Mac version ready for ship by mid or late July.

We're still trying to add whatever cool Mac-specific features we can to Unreal, and it looks like we will have optional Text-To-Speech support, so you can have the game read chat messages, game messages, and possibly even ship logs/translator messages to you!

The Views

My Duke4 Preview -E3
Well then, one of the first games I headed over to see while at E3 was the Duke4 preview playing in a loop over at the GTI booth. I wasnt smart enough to set up an appointment with the 3DR guys and missed them all show so I can only tell you what I saw from the rolling demo which was showing in the public.

Wow, it's like an action movie. Duke4 looks like it is getting a bit away from the first person only style of gameplay for sure. There are scenes where you are operating a turret ala Incoming shooting down planes, and stuff like being in a 3rd person view in the back of a truck on a highway shooting at the bad guys who are also in vehicles.

The "realism" level in Duke4 looks to be about the same as it was in Duke3D. A bit more realistic than Ritual's Sin, but not quite up there with Valve's Half-Life project. Honestly I think it fits perfectly with the Duke3D character and 3DR is smart to stick with it.

The level design really surprised me. It was awesome. Considering the level designers for 3DR are either converts from working on the Build engine or all hired off the net meaning they had not worked on a Quake engine project before this my expectations were just to see some "average" levels. Boy was I wrong, those guys have really stepped it up. The environments are looking absolutely great. Kudos to the guys.

But, of course the game isnt perfect. I saw a few things in the game that really need to be addressed. Your female sidekick with the big knockers looks to be animated extremely roughly. I wouldnt have even shown her in the video with those animations. I watched her run around a corner and into the back of a cargo plane with a gun pointing out rigidly that made me want to hide my head in the sand.

I did in fact run into George and Scott on the way out of E3 for the final time and hit them up for a visit to 3DR since I happen to live in the neighborhood. George did a superb job interviewing before E3 talking about Duke4, and now that a lot of people have really seen the game We'll see if the guys are nice enough to let me stop by and get a good look myself.

The E3 Pics!
Wendigo, the man with the camera has posted his 100+ E3 pictures for the world to see. As always there are some very non-flattering pictures of several people you may know from our little community.

OpenGL
Saw on VE this article from OpenGL.org which may interest quite a few people who just hate Microsoft. (There are people like that?)

OpenGL-based hardware in the PC market is expected to grow over 660% in 1998 . The number of applications that utilize OpenGL is also expected to grow dramatically as the hardware to accelerate those applications becomes more widely available. According to the study by JPA, already OpenGL dominates the professional content (animation and visual simulation creation marketplace and is making considerable headway into the prosumer (professional-consumer) animation market.

Check out this link for the full deal.

Mad3D Demo
MadCow's 3D engine demo has been updated again. Here is the email he sent out:

I just put up the new demo of the mad3d graphics engine up on http://madcow.telefragged.com
It features:
Dynamic lighting
Dynamic Shadowing
Soft Shadowing
Portal Technology
Transparency Effects
Not to mention an all new SFX engine. Check it out!

The Dementia
The Daily Dementia has been going strong for a while now landing some really interesting guests. They scored Steven Woo, a member of the Diablo2 development team, Jay Wilson from the Blood2 team, and a double dose of the Unreal team with Mark Rein and Tim Sweeney.

WinGlide
The ever updating WinGlide util has been updated yet again. I've skipped a few versions so I figure its about time for another blurb since the util is actually quite cool. There are now 3 different versions of WinGlide for you to play with. WinGlide, Overlay WinGlide, and Multi-Threaded WinGlide.

werd
Bleh, changed credit card + isp + not being around at end of month = isp shuts down account = late update.

I need to give a big thanks to the guys at 3dfx for hooking me up with another Voodoo2 card for me to play with. Thanks Brian!

I'll have a preview for Drakan posted tomorrow.

 

Monday, June 1 2:05pm

E3 Coverage
Well, back from E3 myself now and was working on my reviews when um, I figured it would be a good idea to update the news in the mean time? Of course there was a buttload of coverage offered by several other publications. Some of it good, some of it pure "I believe the hype" stuff. Here is a list of links ganked from VE / Red / Blue, etc:

Writeup's:
 		Large Coverage:
 		Single Game Coverage:

Screenshots
What a lot of developers like to do during E3 is release some new screenshots for the kids to play with. Here are links to a few of the shots I have run across so far:

Quake2 v3.15
The new version of Quake2 has been released by Zoid. Here are some .plan updates talking about it. First is of course Xian's with the file locations:

--- May.29.98 @ 11:46am ---

A few new releases this morning;

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/q2-315-x86-full-ctf.exe
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/q2-315-x86-full.exe
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/q2-315-x86.exe
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/quake2-3.15a-i386-unknown-linux2.0.tar.gz

If you are upgrading from 3.14, all you need is q2-315-x86.exe.

Also Check out Zoid's .plan update:

I hope everyone is enjoying Q2 3.15. Some of the new features of the release should make Quake2 a lot more fun.

Of course, with any release, there's bound to be a little problem show up. In this case, the Linux version in server mode fails packet checksums in some cases. (This results in your joining a linux server and you can't move, you just jerk back to where you spawned). I have a new Linux version out that addresses this at:

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/quake2-3.15a-i386-unknown-linux2.0.tar.gz

I'll be keeping a close eye on all the Quake2 servers over the next few days to see what's up. I'll also be working over the next day or two to get the other platforms done for servers: Linux Alpha, Solaris Sparc and Solaris x86.

I'll have new the CTF with 3.15 changes (Vwep support, banning, etc) and the CTF tournament mode done soon as well. Also, I'll be posting the changes to the game DLL later (including the banning, etc). 3.15 does run all 3.14 Game DLLs, but don't have the new features.

I'll look at adding the ability for clients to control whether or not they download all the skins, maps, etc. Right now it always downloads (if possible). If you set cl_noskins 1, it won't download it, but that's not very useful in CTF or other team based mods.

I invite feedback on this version. If you have a comment, drop me a line at zoid@idsoftware.com . I can't reply to all the mail I get, but I do read it all. :)

Half-Life & TeamFortress
Probably one of the smartest moves to be made by a game company, Valve Software has snatched up TeamFotress to be included with Half-Life. Check out the press release. Considering the huge number of TeamFotress players out there and assuming Valve and TF Software does things right, this is gonna be coolbeans.

Nihilistic Plans
Just what the Nihilistic guys are up to has been revealed in this press release. They have secured rights to Vampire: Masquerade (Very popular RPG) and will be covering from the dark ages up to present time in the game.

werd
Man, the amount of stuff that happened over the past few days is just ridiculous. I'm about halfway done with email now. I'll be running down my reviews of all the games I saw at E3 posting one game a day (I've gotten 3 wrote up so far) for as long as I can go. Duke4 will be tomorrow's review.

Also, minor correction. Although Brandon Riza did leave Ritual, he is now contracted by Ritual to help with some work on the cinematics so he is still officially working for them. My mistake.

 

Sunday, May 31 ?:??pm

Hi
Um, tired and stuff. Just wanted to say hi and uh I'll spend most of tomorrow catching up on large portions of email. Wanted to mention this at least tonight though, among the many people I talked to at E3 was Tim Sweeney. He informed me that he agreed with my Unreal review, and homeboy wrote the game. Whats that mean? You puds who did email me finally saying I had no clue, kiss my white ass :)

Oh, and yea I missed you guys too.

 

 

Older News Copyright Steven M. Gibson - VRGN