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Impel Rebel (Quake1 Pack)
Due to moronic publishers who dont know how to
give credit to the guys who work so hard on a project, Impel Productions has decided to release
their entire Quake1 mission pack on the net for free download. If you enjoy the game
please send the guys at Impel some cash as they worked very hard on this and were screwed
over by the man.
Hook on Unreal
We all love to see the interesting things that
Brian Hook, programmer over at id Software has to say yes? Well check out this .plan update
concerning Unreal:
... I also got to see an Unreal demo at the Quantum3D booth running on a Voodoo2 SLI in a P2/400, and I have to admit that Unreal is really beginning to look good. The water and lava effects are extremely nice, I dig the light halos, and all in all it looks like the game is becoming a game instead of a disjoint set of special effects. I didn't get to see the software renderer, but word is that it looks really nice also. I saw some empty display boxes at EB, and the minimum system requirements looked pretty low (P5/133 w/ 16MB I think).
sIn Delay?
GameSlice, who occasionally enjoys displaying
the lack of a clue, is stating that sIn is delayed. They also made this claim a couple of
months ago and had to retract it when handed a cluepon. Perhaps its that time again.
Especially with Sin being delayed until Summer -- a fact which was confirmed by about three people at CGDC
ot posted in his .plan a response.
Unreal Shots
Although I can't get to the page right now,
apparently there are 4 more great looking shots of Unreal for you guys to check out over
at www.unreal.com Here be a link to the screenshots page. Oh, and descriptions
mooched from VE:
Castle: A Skaarj and a Krall outside the Nali castle, with an amazing sky
Pool: A Skaarj with a different skin taking a flying kick at us, near a pool of water in an underground cavern.
Leaping Skaarj: A Skaarj leaping at the unsuspecting Unreal chick's back as she runs towards us. Look at that sky!!! Look at that moon!
Amphitheatre: A Titan eyeing us off inside some kind of outdoor amphitheatre (and I guess we're the show!)
Also, check out yet another Unreal article posted on Next-Gen. More Unreal Than Ever.
Daikatana
The Ion
Storm website has been updated again with more info on Daikatana. They show off 3
weapons that will be previewed at the E3 show, as well as the Greek episode. The weapons
are:
The Discus of Daedalus, Venomous, Poseidon's Trident, and the Hand of Zeus
Messiah not all hype
Wow, after all that hype you'd think Messiah
would turn out to be like another *cough* game that was overhyped. Gary McTaggart from
Ritual, working on the UberEngine along with Charlie Brown has a different story
though. It's really good!:
Just got back from CGDC. . . had a GREAT time out there! Was good to see all of my old friends out there.
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By far the most impressive thing at the show to me was Shiny's Messiah. Sax definitely deserves a bad motherfucker wallet for this one! Besides technology, looks like it's going to be a really good game.
CGDC
With the show finally over, here are some of
the final articles coming our way:
The Views
Hardware etc
werd
Deep Impact was pretty cool. As far as natural
disaster movies go... Predicted best movie of the summer: "Can't Hardly Wait" :)
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Quake3
Yummy! OGR has posted an article which I'm sure
you all want to read. A Q&A session discussing the new Quake3 tech:
In the Q&A session he didn't cover too much that he hasn't said before, but did go into a bit more detail about the whole rendering engine. First, world geometry will be static. This world geometry will be dynamically constructed by tesselating out some kind of curved surface description of objects, though exactly what kind of parametric descriptor they'll be using is currently unknown. He did say that they specifically won't be using NURBs though, or at least John Carmack considers them problematic and thus not desirable.
The rendering pipeline for Quake3 will be a uniform one, with character models and world geometry all being rendered together instead of each seperately as in Quake/Quake2. This will allow them some more freedom in the rendering pipeline.
Anachronox
Another great article over at OGR
discusses the mysterious Anachronox project from Ion Storm. Everyone who has been lucky
enough to get a glimpse of this game has been blown away.
HexenWorld?
Well, it didnt come out yesterday as hoped due
to an aCtivision rep not being around the offices.. Check out the .plan update by
Mike Gummelt giving the low-down:
Thursday, May 7, 12:03 PM
Just got e-mail from Steve Stringer at Activision, he will be out today and won't be able to put the game out until tomorrow. That's cool since that gives me an extra day play with Siege before this beta I wasn't anticipating and it still gets the beta out there for the weekend... it's coming along very well- I hope you all enjoy it!
Unreal
A bit better than the Riot:Mobile Armor posted
the other day by the guys at MeccaWorld, this is an informed and intuitive look at Unreal,
which we all hope to be seeing very soon. Think it's gonna be "gold" by the
28th? Looks that way from everything I've heard.
Much of the hype over Unreal is based on the game engine, where so much more has been implemented than was first envisioned when Unreal development was born. Every texture in Unreal is depicted under a separate 16-bit color palette (roughly 65 thousand colors), while Quake 2 uses one color palette for the whole game. Take a look at the difference between Quake with an 8-bit color palette and Quake 2 with a 16-bit color palette. Imagine the same jump between Quake 2 and Unreal. On top of that, the textures can be animated. Combined with the fractal engine, textures can be animated at random locations on one surface (i.e. ripples on a lake). The developers have taken full advantage of this; the levels are rich, deep, detailed and highly varied.
Ion Storm
The May edition of the Eye On Storm online
newsletter has now been posted at http://www.ionstorm.com.
This month's EOS features interviews with ION Storm Sound Designer Stan Neuvo, as well as
a round-table discussion on level design with Sverre Kvernmo, Steve Rescoe, Tom Hall,
Larry Herring, Rich Carlson and Ludovic Texier. The Biz Bin gives a team by team preview
of ION Storm's E3 plans. Developers from id, ION Storm, and Apogee/3D Realms offer their
visions of the future of computer games in an article entitled 2000 and Beyond: The Future
of Gaming. Tom Hall and Jeff "The Mad Samoan" Wand are also back with their
respective columns.
CGDC
More articles from the show:
The Views
Hardware etc
werd
Anyone wanna send me a new UW SCSI HD? I think
mine is about to die.
Some cool movies coming out this weekend, go watch em.
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Unreal Nekkid
I'm not sure I'm comfortable with a game
getting exposed to me so much when I hardly know it, but GameSpot
UK is sorta into that kinda thing it seems. They have posted yet more shots and info
along with interviews with 4 more members of the development team for you to check out.
The interviews also include AI man Steven Polge.
sIn Stuff
This should be the last bit of sIn art spam from the
aCtivision pages for a bit. Check out this cool new art that will be showing up in
gaming magazines advertising the Ritual project.
HexenWorld Today (maybe)
According to the .plan file of
Mike Gummelt over at Raven Software, we could be seeing a new version of the
HexenWorld patch for Hexen2 as early as this afternoon. The new version will be including
support for the mod that they all seem so excited about, "Siege".
...I will probably finish the beta tonight, but I have to release it through Activision since it's not just a mod, it's a new version of the HW server and client beta...
So, tonight I finish it, tomorrow Steve releases it to the net...
StarSiege
After linking the movie and screenshots etc
last night I didnt even notice that there is actual a technology demo available for StarSiege as
well. Although its a couple of months old its still pretty damn cool. Check it out if you
liked the shots yesterday
Half-Life Shots
The VX
Half-Life page has posted 3 more screenshots of the game that for some reason I didnt
link yeterday. Check them out.
Poly Engine
Word from PsychoNews is yet another 3D engine
has been announced. This engine is creatively named the PolyEngine but features some
interesting stuff such as the ability to impoart Quake architecture.
DIVX
With all the hoopla over DIVX and how much it
sucks etc, I imagine this little blurb from thedigitalbits.com
would be of interest. (thanks Brian Schmitt)
Word from a well-placed industry insider is that Circuit City and Divx will announce tomorrow that they are postponing the test-launch of Divx. I'm told that the launch will now definitely not happen in May, and may be delayed even longer.
Demo Viewer Util
Something that I've been wanting for quite
sometimes and finally someone has made it. Snag this Quake/ QuakeWorld demo viewing util.
Just double click on the .dem or .qwd file in Explorer and it launches the demo for you
and has quick keys setup for fast forward / slomo / showscores etc all setup. -ScrewBALL
CGDC
All kind of excitement going on over at CGDC,
here are a few of the articles coming out of the event:
From the demo Shiny also displayed the engine’s scalability with a main character that was made up of more than 2,000 polygons when viewed at 30 frames per second and 700 polygons when viewed at 60 frames per second. The scalability options also enabled the game to display more than 20 fully modeled characters onscreen all at once without a slow down in the frame rate.
The Views
The Mods
Sites etc
werd
Damn frontpage has a habit of crashing on me.
Lost a good 90-100 mins of work yesterday, but I learned my lesson so when it crashed yet
again today I only lost about 10-15mins worth of Work. Hrm, need to think about Linux..
heh
Here's a QuakeWorld Clan demo that I posted earlier this morning while workin on the update.
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RBR Shots
The Below
Decks website has posted the 5 screenshots you can find in this months Next-Gen
magazine. These are the first ever public screenshots of Rebel Boat Rocker's project so go
visit and be impressed.
StarSiege Tribes
Got email from Mike Valera (SnoopBorgyBorg)
that Dynamix has gone public with their very impressive looking StarSiege Tribes project. There
is an AVI for download as well as several great looking screenshots. Looks like they dont
have curved surfaces in the game yet, but the visual quality is top notch.
Here is the AVI hosted locally.
Kevin on Modeling
Kevin Cloud, artist over at id Software made a .plan update of
some interest to you polygon hax0rs out there, here's a bit of it:
If we move to NURB modeling, Alias will be our first choice. However, until then we'll be strapped with using Max for creating and Alias for animating. And until Alias is solid on NT I wouldn't suggest it to anyone.
Some of you correctly commented that Painter3D is dog slow. There is no doubt that Painter3D could use some help from Carmack on speeding up their model rendering. I chose Painter because it is easy to use, loads and saves 3DS, has a great MAX plugin for transferring model data, allows us to paint directly on the model, and edit and control different mapping layers (such as bump, specular, glow, etc.)
Sin Shots
Check out www.ritualistic.com
to get a better look at the screenshots that were featured in this moths PC Gamer.
Unreal
Check out the GameSpot UK
article talking about Unreal one more time. We may finally get to play the game. Word
has it that Unreal is shipping as you read this and you should be able to find copies
before the month is over. The article is a discussion with Mycha, a level designer for
Unreal.
Also, check out OGR's look at Unreal.
Half-Life at CGDC
Well, not really CGDC anymore after this year,
since they are changing it to just GDC now. But the guys at OGR stopped by the Orchid
booth and checked out Half-Life running on some phat 400mhz system and dual voodoo2 cards.
They thought it was cool, and
decided to share. There are a couple of AI examples mentioned in there.
Ion Storm
Today's Daily Informant http://www.ionstorm.com has now been posted. Here are
the headlines:
CGW Previews Daikatana
Daikatana is one of 14 upcoming shooters previewed in this month's Computer Gaming World.
The Daily Informant tells you what you can find...
PlanetQuake Announces Massive CGDC Coverage
Dave "Fargo" Kosak announces his daredevlish plans to get to CGDC and promises
in-depth coverage
Duke4 Shots
I failed to link the Duke4 shots yesterday
along with the interview, but Operation 3dfx is always on top of screenshots, check out this archive
which includes scans of even the most recent shots for you to check out.
Zoid on QuakeWorld/Quake2
The Zoid man has updated his .plan letting
everyone know that he's very hard at work on getting the new codes out the door so we can
live without those damn rcon hax0rs:
As John mentioned, there is a security backdoor in QW and Quake2. I'm working very hard on getting the new releases of QuakeWorld and Quake2 out ASAP in order to address this (the new releases also have several other features).
In the meantime, I'd like to thank crt for providing an interim solution. He has a web page up that describes the problem and has a simple program that patches the binary to fix it. I recommend that all server operators grab this patch until I get QuakeWorld 2.2 and Quake2 3.15 out the door.
The Views
Hardware etc
The Patches
Sites etc
werd
Wow, thanks for all the positive emails about
that interview I posted yesterday. Since you guys dig it so much I've fired out 3 more
interviews with questions I'm sure you all have.
Weekly section (new demo) updated, and the Interviews section should be fixed today as well.
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Max Payne
In response to a recent hacking of Remedy,
Petri over at Remedy felt it was time to update his .plan and state
the facts. They are on schedule and have made no other statements otherwise. The emails
sent out were fake and not him.
Hardware
George Broussard Interview
After seeing the most recent screenshots of
Duke4 in a couple of magazine publications I figured it was time to ask 3DR some of the
questions I have about Duke Nukem Forever. Here is my interview with 3DR Partner, George Broussard. A snippit to
get your interest:
Q: What is the plot of Duke4? How much will the plot be integrated into game play? Will we really need to know what's going on in the game or can we just hop in and start blasting? A: ...The plot will be integrated into the game in as far as characters will talk and interact with you. They will help you out, guide you, advance the plot, etc etc. You can kill at will, as usual, but you might miss a few things. There will be all the typical in game cut scene and cinematic type stuff that everyone else is so proud of. We see all this stuff as a simple extension of the type of thing they did in Resident Evil 1 and 2, brought up to date and given our usual spin on things.
CGDC
It's going down! and of course the coverage
has begun as well. First off check out what Next-Gen
has to say about it, then head on over to www.ogr.com and
check out their coverage as well.
While you are there, check out the ATI buy into Warp5 -Tony
Unreal Movies
Well, um.. I kinda forgot that it takes a hell
of a long time to download stuff when your connect at home is only 128k ISDN. Sorry these
didnt get posted last night.
9meg
.mov file.
25meg .mov file
Sin Ad
Check out www.ritualistic.com
for a scan of the latest ad to be circulating from aCtivision advertising Ritual
Entertainment's Sin project.
RCON Fix Part 5!
Ok guys, hopefully this is the absolute final last fix for the Quake2 / QuakeWorld
server hack that has been floating around on the net recently. crt says so at least.
:)
Check out crt's web page dedicated to the hax0r matter and instructions on how to use this patch if the readme.txt is just too durn complex for ya.
Wheel of Time
The Wheel
of Time page has been updated again with screenshots and info on the most recent
developments on the project. Speaking of which GT Interactive has been named
the publisher for this game.
MacQuakeWorld
Here we go! a new version of QuakeWorld for
the Mac users out there. Check out the Westlake Interactive page
for instructions and download.
HumanHead Statement
Saw on Redwood's
page that HumanHead Games has a statement posted up on their web page at www.humanhead.com
Human Head Studios is a recently formed computer game company located in Madison, WI, headed by six former employees of Raven Software. We left due to creative differences and a desire to create a solid team of top industry talent.
The art staff of Human Head Studios consists of Shane Gurno, James Sumwalt, and Ted Halsted, who were the senior art staff on nearly every Raven game to date: Hexen II, Hexen, Heretic, Take No Prisoners, Mageslayer, Necrodome, Cyclones,and Shadowcaster.
The programming staff of Human Head Studios consists of Ben Gokey, Paul MacArthur, and Chris Rhinehart, who were the core programming staff of Raven's hit games Heretic and Hexen, as well as working on Hexen II, Take No Prisoners, Mageslayer, Necrodome, Cyclones, Shadowcaster, and Raven's first game, Black Crypt.
QBS
A feature that you would have figured to be
included a long time ago has just been added to QBS.
The ability to choose which news sources you monitor for updates. Check it out and be
informed.
The Views
The Mods
werd
The phone company seems to be jerking me
around today, they pulled my ISDN earlier but now its online again.
Weekly section is of course updated again.
Several people have wrote in my page for the Top100 list and I appreciate it quite a bit. Since several hundred of you have taken the time to write me in on the list I hope to get listed next week. Click here to vote for my page please. I'll name my first kid after you.
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Unreal Movies
The Epic PR dude sent out word that they have
released a pair of new movies for everyone to check out with footage of Unreal of course.
I'm downloading the AVI and QT formats right now to post on the page locally, but here are
a pair of links to the Operation 3DFX urls for now:
- 9meg 1minute AVI
- 25meg 3minute AVI
3dfx GL Driver
Just got this email from Billy which you guys
might find interesting:
Yep, just noticed this over on 3Dfx's download page http://www.3dfx.com/download/sdk/index.html
Coming Soon: 3Dfx OpenGL Beta 2
We are working hard and making lots of improvements in performance and quality for the beta 2 release of our OpenGL Driver. Beta 2 will be available on May 18th. Please come back to the site and get the updated version.
Dallas Scene
The 2nd part of the Techweb article discussing
the Dallas gaming scene has been posted online now for all to read. -Blues
Quake3
John Carmack went buck wild! John made a massive .plan update
discussing all the research he has been doing for Quake3 / Trinity and all other kinds of
good technical stuff that nobody reading this will understand. I'm gonna paste a bit of it
though which I claim to find interesting yet have no real clue what he's talking about.
Perhaps people will be under the impression that I do understand this stuff though since I
post it on my page.
Here are some notes on a few of the technologies that I researched in preparing for the Quake3/trinity engine. I got a couple months of pretty much wide open research done at the start, but it turned out that none of the early research actually had any bearing on the directions I finally decided on. Ah well, I learned a lot, and it will probably pay off at some later time.
I spent a little while doing some basic research with lummigraphs, which are sort of a digital hologram. The space requirements are IMMENSE, on the order of several gigs uncompressed for even a single full sized room. I was considering the possibility of using very small lumigraph fragments (I called them "lumigraphlets") as imposters for large clusters of areas, similar to aproximating an area with a texture map, but it would effectively be a view dependent texture.
The results were interesting, but transitioning seamlessly would be difficult, the memory was still large, and it has all the same caching issues that any impostor scheme has.
Another aproach I worked on was basically extending the sky box code style of rendering from quake 2 into a complete rendering system. Take a large number of environment map snapshots, and render a view by interpolating between up to four maps (if in a tetrahedral arangement) based on the view position.
A simple image based interpolating doesn't convey a sense of motion, because it basically just ghosts between seperate points unless the maps are VERY close together reletive to the nearest point visible in the images.
<snip>
Interesting stuff huh?
Unreal
The debates still continue on whether Unreal
will actually work on a P200 w/3dfx card at a reasonable framerate. Check out this post
from UnrealNation though discussing the point:
The best system I have at home is a P200MMX with a 3DFX card just like this guy's and Unreal plays great on it. I have two of these machines. I've repeated this over an over but people don't seem to be listening. A 200MMX, 64Mb of RAM and a Voodoo (regular model) is a great configuration for Unreal. You'll miss none of the features of Unreal with such a configuration unless you've made an absolute mess of your PC. There is one 200MMX machine at Digital Extremes that performs pitifully (compared to mine at home which are no speed demons either) and it's still plenty enough machine to run the game.
Q2 Master
For all you Aussies, a new Quake2 master
server has popped up to report all your local servers at 203.142.228.131 or
q2master.mondial.net.au
Hexen2
The Chaos
Sphere has posted a walkthrough for all of you out there who are having problems
making it through the Hexen2 mission pack that was recently released.
Gibbed.com Clan Forum
Here it is kids. If you're too busy to read
the whole description, jump directly to http://www.gibbed.com/forum/
The Gibbed.Com Clan Discussion Forum has been released to the public. This forum has been
designed to help clans and gaming organizations maintain discussions. Features include:
* Ability to customize display for every user
* Great interface to maintain clan discussions, challenges, etc.
* Full search capabilities
Hardware
The Patches
Sites etc
werd
Uhoh.. I'm finally back on a normal schedule
again. (or close to it) Woke up at 6am and will be on top of things it looks like again.
Gotta slap some NT4 on my box is about it.
News has been archived and the weekly section has been updated as well.
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QuakeWorld
In case you are one of those oh so many people
who run Solaris Quake/Quake2 servers and you are having a problem with people hacking your
server, crt has released what we hope is the
final server fix.
Speaking of which, I've been lucky enough to be helping Zoid test out his new version of QuakeWorld mentioned in Carmack's .plan. We have invited several players to test the client and give opinions. (Not doing this anymore, dont ask please) Why do I mention this? Aside from fixing the any cheating problems The new QuakeWorld also offers many other features. The physics are now identical to the original Quake, this includes stuff like rocket kick, player movement, the ability to hear people in water, the shaft aiming, all of it. Several NQ players who have tested the client and previously distasted QW for the lack of consistency when switching back and forth to a LAN said they may finally play QW. Yes, even players from DeathRow and U4. I'll be damned. Oh, and you guys are gonna love the new recording. No more disconnecting, just hit record at any time and keep playin.
Release date: When it's done.
Duke4
Duke4.com
has gotten a hold of the 4 new screenshots released in the latest CGW magazine that you
should be able to find on newstands soon if not by now. It's a good article and shows off
the level of realism that the 3DR guys are after. I'll have to say the quality over
quantity approach that 3DR is taking with releasing shots for Duke4 is quite impressive.
You'll see in the screenshots that Duke4's realism factor is about the same as Half-Life.
If you guys havent gotten excited about this game you better start doing so.
Quake3
Brian Hook made a .plan update of
interest talking about stuff thats is going on in Quake3. Here is a bit of it:
Well, so much to talk about. The past week I've been working on a lot of different stuff, including video compression stuff and character modeling stuff.
Since Quake 3 is going to exist in the full 32-bit ARGB color space, compression for cinematics is going to be vital. Right now our general strategy is that cinematic frames are going to be in some RGB file format, most likely TGA, of MxN size. These frames are going to be used as textures and downloaded and rendered in GL. Since the largest texture size we can expect is 256x256 (this is the upper size that Voodoo supports, and Voodoo is a very significant chunk of our target audience), we're going to have to resample our MxN RGB cinematic frames into 256x256 RGB cinematic frames suitable for use as textures.
Blood2
Yet more screenshots and info on the Blood2
project are available over at the Monolith pages. Check out the "Weekly
Visions" section.
Win98
If you are all excited about new and
interesting ways to make your computer crash, then I bet you need to pre-order Win98 huh?
Check out this email I got from Wraith:
Office Depot is offering preorder for Windows '98.. Upgrade CD - $89.99
Full CD - Under $200 (if I remember right)
Plus! 98 CD - Around $50
"Windows 98 will be for sale on June 25" ..."
Warning: any transaction processed as a sale prior to the street release date of June 25, 1998 will put Office Depot in violation of our contractual agreement with Microsoft. Therefore, this program is designed as a promotional Reservation System only. No money, invoicing, or register transactions are to occur." :-)
Unreal Shipping?
Hehe, this oughta get some people with their
panties in a wad, check out this quote from VE:
Unreal ship date (according to Billy)-1:35am MDT-Billy"Wicked"Wilson
I was just informed, by a VERY reliable source (God him/herself) that Unreal will ship sometime after tomorrow. Did I lay on the sarcasm enough? What is this "I have from a reliable source that it is going to be the end of the month" or some other crap. It'll ship when it ships (damn it).
QBS
Another new version of the only util you'll ever need if you are into
keeping track of all the news that is 3D. It queries all the popular web pages out there
for updates and lets you know whats up faster than you can hit the reload button.
Quake2 Mod Tracker
Check out this IE Channel page that keeps tabs on all the
popular Quake2 mods for server admins making sure to have the latest cool version number
stamped on your mod. -Blues
The Views
Hardware
werd
Ahh... weekends.. Gettin a haircut, meeting
about the next CPL/QuakeCon event, doin laundry, and possibly go car-jacking later.
I'm telling you guys, *EVERYONE* needs to check out the new QuakeWorld when it's released. We may finally see the merging of NQ and QW
| Older News | Copyright Steven M. Gibson - VRGN |
