CLICK HERE FOR UP TO DATE NEWS
|
Snow?
Yea.. it was actually snowing here in Dallas last night.. freaked me out.. why am I telling you guys? Because the way I found out about it was the saddest example of a computer geek I have ever seen. I got an email notification that Disruptor had updated his .plan file.. the content?
> --- Nov.15.1997 (1:34am) ---
>
> Oh my god! It's snowing in Texas!
This my friends.. is how I found out. Christian suggested I take up smoking to get outside more.. hmmmm
Quake2 Mission Packs
I'm sure a lot of people have been curious what the plans were for Quake2 mission packs after the highly successful packs released for Quake by Ritual and Rogue. Here is an email that was forwarded to me quoting John Carmack on the subject: (thanks moth)
>From my understanding, id software themselves will be working on the
>quake2 mission pack. Is this true? Why not let another company develop the
>mission pack like id did with Rogue and Hypnotic? Then there would be more
>time for id to develop Trinity which would make it an even better game and
>you wouldn't have to worry about release dates... hopefully. But back to
>my question, is id going to do the mission pack themselves or hire
>someone else to do it?
We are doing one, and another company is doing another one.
The idea is that Brian and I will not be doing any work on the mission pack, so we can be doing the tools
for trinity.
John Carmack
For the curious, I can tell you right now that Ritual is not doing a Quake2 mission pack. Sorry :) You'll just have to be happy with our Quake1 Mission Pack, Scourge of Armagon.
Jedi Knight
Author James Hollenbeck chaospilot@geocities.com has sent www.JediKnight.Net the first Grappling Hook for JK. http://www.jediknight.net/files/graphook.zip (2k) (Readme Included) He stresses this is the first version and he's continuing work on improvement of the look and action. -Aristotle
Omicron Bot
I watched the demos that were posted of this bot last night right before leaving for home and was fairly impressed. Although the roaming AI seems a bit weak still, the way this bot handles terrain is superb. I actually saw it jump across a gap, firing a rocket down a hallway midway through the jump. Pretty impressive. Hell, it even jumped the corner to the yellow armor on DM4.. The actual skill level of the bot still needs to be improved though.
Future vs. Fantasy v3.91
Freeform Interactive has released the latest version of their very cool patch. Most of the changes in this version are apparently in response to all the email that people have been sending in with requests. See? developers do listen...
PGL
Got email from the PGL boys again, looks like they have hit nearly 1,000 signups for the PGL tourney. Of those 1,000 people, 128 will make it into the actual "league play" as they call it on the net. I also read on Blue's page btw that they have already kicked out someone from the league for "undisclosed reasons" I guess I'll fire up the ol' pak2 and just find out. :)
Daikatana
Couple bits of news on Ion Storm's big project, Daikatana:
.plan Wagon
What all the homeys are saying:
Okay, some folks apparently think that by reprinting the definition of the word "athlete" according to Merriam-Webster was a shot at the CyberAthletes.
Um, no.
It was as reprint of the definition, with no other conjecture on my part. I think the definition speaks for itself, and I think you can look at that definition and decide for yourself whether playing a computer game counts as "requiring physical strength, agility, or stamina". One could argue that agility could be roughly synonymous with "coordination", and that you need tons of hand-eye coordination to be good at Quake. One could also argue that "agility" involves whole body coordination, which Quake does NOT require (aside from me ducking left and right in my chair while trying to dodge rockets :-) ).
Maybe another take on it could be this: what about other, arguably slightly more physical, activities such as golf and bowling and fishing? If you play golf, are you an "athlete"?
The above is a rhetorical question, and I think the answer depends to a great extent on who you are and what you believe.
I won't bother stating a full opinion on the subject, other than to say that I won't consider bowling a sport until it has goalies. :-)
|
New GLQuake Releases
Just got this email from Zoid, new versions, w00
GLQuake 0.97. Fixes the sprite bug from the previous version, adds the ability to have an independant console size (such as a 320x200 scaled console when running at 640x480) and support for SGI Multitexture extensions for highend VooDoo and other 3D cards.
- da' Shack www.ritual.com/shack_files/id/glq1114.exe
- ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/unsup/glq1114.exe
GLQuake for Linux. Requires a 3DFX based 3D card (NOT VooDoo RUSH) and Linux 2.0.
glquake-0.97-i386-unknown-linux2.0.tar.gzGLQuakeWorld for Linux. Requires a 3DFX based 3D card (NOT VooDoo RUSH) and Linux 2.0.
glqwcl-2.10-i386-unknown-linux2.0.tar.gz
Turok Demo
A new version of the Turok Demo (You can snag the older one from my files section) has been released on the Akklaim page. The new version has support for all the other 3d chipsets out there including PowerVR, Verite 1&2, and ATI Rage.
While you are downloading the new demo, check out the Quake Free Zone. (Thanks Devs)
Charlie's Maps
As some of you may remember Charlie Weiderhold has been asked to join the Ritual Entertainment team. (Seems I am the official new guy host btw, as Charlie will be staying at my place when he finally arrives on Monday) Well, uh.. anyways, Here is an email I got from Lithium of SinCity:
Sin City has gotten the exclusive rights to post the maps of Charlie Wiederhold (the new hire by Ritual)...here is your chance to check out the new talent!
http://sincity.stomped.com
The FRAG Demos
Well, I was working on the other night making some pretty tables for you guys to look at to see the exact results of the FRAG, but Cyberathlete.com beat me to it. (bah!) The winners bracket (last 16 people in the tournement with no losses) has been posted and I have been told that the 2nd bracket which was the fight for 3rd place will be posted tonight. Demos! go grab em.
Also, the Clanring pages have posted just about all of the results as well. Some good writing there too.
The demo of the final match between Gollum and Lord Vader on DM4 isnt as tense as we had hoped, but Vader still makes it entertaining. :)
Rogue Cam
Uhoh.. take a look at the Rogue Cam and get an idea of just what those guys at Rogue Entertainment are up to.. We know they have been working on a secret project for a while, maybe if we look real hard we can see just what the hell they are doin. :)
Malice on Shelves
Just got word from Embrionic that you can now find QA's Malice TC for Quake on shelves at these fine stores:
Requiem for QW
The first beta of Requeim v2.0 for QuakeWorld has been released on the homepage. Grab a copy and fire up a server.
Liz Hurley = Lara Croft
Joy to the world.. Liz Hurley, hot mama from the greatest American movie of all time, Austion Powers has been signed to play Lara Croft in the upcoming Tomb Raider movie. Check out the Cybersleaze article. Thanks Liger.
I'm gonna go sit down and think about this for a bit now. YUMMY
Trinity
In case there was some doubt as to the target system of John Carmack's next 3d engine. (It has been already stated in a couple of articles I can recall several months ago) Dan "Jago" Naoumov got an email from Mr. Carmack himself confirming the fact that Trinity will be targeted for Pentium2 processors. Check out Trinity page for the full email. -VooDoo
Quake 2 requires about 50% more CPU than quake 1 due to increased complexity.
Id is going to do a Q2 mission pack after quake 2 ships, so Trinity is at least eighteen months away. Thats a long time. The game engine will be in use for at least two more years after the first title with it ships, so not targeting the design decisions for PII would be a bad move.
.plan Wagon
What they be sayin:
Interviews
|
Levelord does QuakeCast
Ritual's own, Richard "Levelord" Gray will be the in-house guest on tonight's QuakeCast so be sure to tune in. Head on over to www.pseudo.com and make sure to bring your Real Audio player. Make Ritual proud Richard, or we wont let you come home.
Also, Phoebus forwarded this email from Steve String of aCtivision talking about the EULA. He will be on QuakeCast tonight as well talking about what prompted aCtivision to claim rights to any level created using their tools. (Sounds fairly reasonable to me, except I'm curious what happens to some dude who makes a kickass level, then wants to sell it to some other game company who is making a Hexen product. All kinds of interesting scenarios.. hm...
Interviews -Updated
Couple more interviews
We Love Jack
The always elusive Jack Mathews of 3dfx (and 1/3rd of the GameSpy team) revealed! We went through hell to dig this picture up of Jackie, I hope you appreciate it.
.plan Wagon2
Kevin Cloud as well as Christian Antkow both of id Software felt we didnt have enough .plan updates for the day, so here are 2 more:
Other issues:
As far as I know, Id will not be interested in trying to establish ownership of other people's maps.
Tim Willits and Paul Steed will be going to Australia for a Quake 2 release party.
Manual for Quake 2 is just about finished.
Multiplayer Quake 2 looks extremely cool. I need to make better looking DM teleport pads. I tried to get them done during Paul's birthday party, but something kept distracting me:)
Tim is finishing up the final boss level and Paul is animating the final boss. Those guys are amazing.
There is still a lot of work to do, but the end is near.
On a personal note:
Having your beautiful baby girl cry for daddy until you rock her to sleep is actually incredibly terrific--even at 4:00 am. Kevin loves being a daddy.
NOTICE:
Rebroadcast of this message is okay as long you don't take the word fuck out of it.
Heh, all this talk of Quake II release dates on the various web pages brings to mind an outing Brian and I had last week.
We went to Electronics Boutique to look around for new stuff and I asked the sales clerk for a release date for G-Police. He rambled off a date after consulting his "Book of Dates".
Feeling cocky, I asked him for a release date for Quake II. After consulting his sacred "Book of Dates", he proudly proclaimed "November 24th!". Brian and I looked at each other and chuckled.After identifying ourselves, we shot the shit for a while and explained to him that any dates that have been provided are pure speculation. We're shooting for Christmas, and will go to a gold master "soon", in "two weeks", and "when it's done" =)
Release Dates
Seems to be today's topic, so we get an entire headline dedicated to release date's today, w00.
I've seen a few posts (e.g., Blue's) containing discussion of Quake II "gold master" and release dates. Before we
get tons of email about this:
(1) Quake II will be out in time for Christmas;
(2) There is no set "master" or "shelf" date;
(3) ANYONE who says anything different doesn't know what they are talking about.
Maybe these statements look familiar. They should, since that is what we have said for almost a year now. We'll let you know as soon as we're done :) Don't worry - id will make sure all the boys and girls out there in gamer land have a very merry Christmas indeed!
Quake2 10-15% Faster.
I saw this over on Redwood's page, a quote of John Carmack talking about the sound code for Quake2:
>Can I expext that the final release of Q2 is gonna get a overall faster
>framerate (including high qual. sounds, CD Audio, poly Xplosions ect.)
>than the Q2demo1?
Yes, several things have been improved. Probably 10% to 15% faster overall.
High quality sound will cut performance by 5% to 10%, and require about three megs more ram.
John Carmack
Worldcraft + Hexen2
The Worldcraft homepage has news that a soon to be released version of Worldcraft will have support for Hexen2.
Speaking of Hexen2, there are all kinds of letters and arguments etc by members of Activision etc on www.hexenworld.com talking about end user license agreements etc. Thing is Activision has decided that any level created using the Hexen utilities are the property of Activision, end of story. Ouch.
Drivers
Few new drivers for you guys to download to make Quake fast. (Or slow.. heh)
.plan Wagon
Who's sayin what..
Wack Wisdom
Forgot to post yesterdays column, and just posted the wackness for today for ya as well. Check out Wisdom and Links.
|
.plan Wagon2
Well I'll be.. John Carmack is beginning to share his work log, following John Cash's lead, with the public as well. Check out his work for the day:
> nov 11
---
> * cinematic playback at variable sound rates
> * qdata multiple video in single file fix
> * only one token huffman bug
> * demowaiting
> * allowed individual reliable overflows
> * make all clients invisible at intermission point
> * mask high bits in client_t->name
> * full delta compression
>
> don't show paused plaque in dm
> check all serverinfo flags (skill, nomonsters)
> crunch the scoreboard data a lot
> dedicated net thread
> random-not-nearest option
> "public" variable
> check the "using previous_origin" notes
> echo chats to console?
> weapon icon when hand is centered
> game skills
> better console keyboard editing
> are demos broken with current delta compression?
> should client string commands be ties to usercmd_t, to fix drops?
> why is ref_gl.dll as large as it is?
> allow round up and >256 textures on gl
> mouse during cin
> echo chats to console
> is the dedicated server sleeping?
> get mins/maxs from pmove
>
> warn at startup if any spawn point is in a wall
> make teleport pads glow?
> never make water solid for entity cull purposes?
> get sound position needs to check the valid count on entities
> make secondary sound buffers the default?
> pak file sorting by traces?
> no colored lighting with mono lightmaps!!!
> option to make picking up items not select
> change stretch-raw to a dedicated full screen blit for better performance?
PreyStation Shot
Lithium over at www.preystation.com scored himself a screenshot of Prey that shows of some of John Anderson's latest work.
Interviews -Updated
Netscape v4.04
Not exactly 3d gaming news, but you need a browser to get news, so there you go. New version of Netscape Communicator has been released, this new one includes software by AOL of all people which is their answer to ICQ. You are lucky enough to be able to interact with the AOL community through this thing! w00.
Virtus + Hexen
You probably have checked out Deathmatch Maker by Virtus Corp at one time or another for Quake, probably the absolute easiest editor to use for Quake editing. Well the guys have made their way into the world of Hexen2 now as well:
Macmillan Digital Publishing and Virtus Corporation today announced their second co-publishing agreement, that will bring id-authorized level editors for Hexen II and Quake II to the retail market. Hexmaker for Hexen II is targeted for released in late November. Deathmatch Maker II, the first authorized level editor for Quake II, will follow the release of the eagerly awaited first-person shooter, Quake II.
.plan Wagon
Life in the Quake 2 Lane:
Playtest. Tweak, adjust, modify, polish. Wait for the next feature to be implemented. Playtest. Tweak, adjust, modify, polish. Repeat until Kevin Cloud says "Stick a fork in that sucker."
Pontificating about other people's games: I've been studying animation movies on the various commercial 3D web sites. A lot of what I've seen is pretty nice, but often falls short of the mark. Want to make your games more real? Make the creatures more real. Its not the tools you have to work with, but what you do with the tools. Study moving creatures in the real world and make your creatures move like them. Living creatures aren't marionettes on strings. Remember that they have mass that shifts, contracts or expands when weight is placed on one limb and then the other. Remember that bodies are integrated machines. Movement of a single part affects the whole.
Clan Database
Email I got from the QMountain dudes:
Quake Mountain -- Source for the latest clan and tournament news now has its clans database up and running, we need for all clans to come and sign their clans up. we want to be the biggest bad ass database in the clan scene!
As of now we cover deathmatch, capture the flag, and team fortress clans with more types coming soon! http://www.brutality.com/qm/
Omen II
The sequel to the Omen TC of course, Omen2 has been released and ready for download at your convenience. Check out the PlanetQuake homepage and grab it.
QStats
If you are looking to run a cool webstats page to keep track of your Quake / QuakeWorld etc server, check out the QStatList Page. The one we use here at Ritual which is pretty cool is www.fastlane.net/~heresy
PGL Orientation
The push for professional gaming is still going strong between PGL and the online methods, and Cyberathletics using the regional LAN tournaments. Here is the latest announcement from PGL.
The Professional Gamers' League will hold the first of a series of online orientations tomorrow, Weds. 11/12 from 6 - 8 p.m. (Pacific Time) in the PGL arenas (Quake-PGL and Red Alert-PGL) on the TEN service.
Many of the top players, including Thresh and CnC_God, will be in attendance, to chat and qualify for the official league play which begins Dec. 9. (If you've ever wondered how good Thresh really is, here's your chance to take him on!...or simply watch him play, via the new "ChaseCam" observe-only mode designed specifically for the PGL)
PGL officials will also be on hand to issue late-breaking news announcements, provide info on the the league qualification process, and answer commonly-asked questions such as "will there be separate divisions in Quake for low- and high-latency players?" (yes). In addition, trivia contests and random pick-up games will result in the giveaway of TEN, PGL, and other league sponsor merchandise at the orientation.
FAQ U
Two different FAQ's have been updated, as well as a new version of the GLQuake Help Guide, dig em:
Jobs!
Always love announcing these, Rebel Boat Rocker, the hottest new 3d gaming company on the scene freshly signed under EA is looking for one more member of the team, here is the email I got from Randy:
Rebel Boat Rocker's team is almost full. We're looking for one additional programmer to earn a nice salary and equity in the company if they've got the right stuff.
More information can be found at www.rebelboatrocker.com/news.htm and www.rebelboatrocker.com/jobs.htm
VooDoo2 Poop
Couple more mentions of the VooDoo2 chipset that may be worth a read:
Preview / Review Land
Everyone elses opinion on the games you play:
Daikatana Video
Ion Storm has released the music video that they showed at The FRAG on the net for all the good boys and girls to check out. Also JUDGECAL over at Pseudo did his thing with converting the video to Real format (Get a Real player at www.real.com )
3D Drivers
Saw both of these drivers mentioned on that oddly colored dudes page last night
|
The FRAG Demos
Just downloaded over 120 megs of demos from the guys at VR Games who provided us with Quake servers for The FRAG. I'll be spending this evening sorting through them for posting for you guys at www.cyberathlete.com . There are a lot of demos here, so uh.. it's gonna take a while. Just figured you guys would wanna know that the demos do exist, and will (hopefully) be ready for posting late tonight or tomorrow.
Brian Hook Day
To celebrate the official opening of www.gamegirlz.com Brian Hook was on IRC answering questions for all the good boys an girls talking about Quake2, and all the other questions you could think of. There is an edited log for you to look at. He says we can hopefully expect some sorta statement from John Carmack within a week or two to tell us what the deal is with the "200 player DM" stuff and just what they are up to over there. Then of course we have the accompanying .plan update by Mr. Hook talking about what he talked about on IRC, as well as some scheduled Quake2 work:
- finish up menu stuff as problems/comments arise
- fix the player setup menu so that the FOV isn't all messed up
- see why weapon models are being rendered slightly different in ref_gl and ref_soft
- see how easy it is to sort transparent entities, and if it's trivial go ahead and implement it so that obvious sorting errors are resolved
- mess around with HiProf and Visual Quantify a little bit more and see if
I can get any real data from them
- experiment with stereo support under OpenGL
All Star CTF
The big time All Star CTF project has been completed / finished etc and ready for mass consumption. This is the ultimate combined CTF project that hopefully will let you never need another CTF mod again.
Hexen2 Demo Update
A new version of the Hexen2 demo has been released as well as the Hexen Utilities pack (3.8megs) which includes the Raven moded versions of QBSP, LIGHT, and VIS that you may wish to use on your Hexen2 maps. The new demo will let you play as any of the 4 character classes now instead of the limit of 2 in the old demo. If you run in to any problems with the utils (Bugs, not "I can't get past level 2!?!?") email them at h2bugs@activision.com with H2_Utils in the subject.
Kali Dead?
Saw this link on Blue's page.. There is an article on Computer Games Online talking about what could be the beginning of the end for Kali.. I imagine without reading the article that they talk about how most all games include internet play and will possibly no longer need thes services of Kali in the future
Jedi Knight Stuff
Interviews
Just one interview so far today, Sandy Peterson, formerly of id Software, and now proud member of Ensemble Studios answers some questions with the guys at VideoGameDesign.com
VooDoo2 Boards
Fresh after Diamond announcing that they will be making a video card based off of the VooDoo2 tech, Creative Labs has also announced that they also will be using the VooDoo2 technology from 3dfx for one of their new cards. Check out the short Next-Gen article.
Preview / Review Land
Everyone elses opinion on the games you play:
Mac Stuff
Couple new happenings for the Mac users out there in our land of Quake:
.plan Wagon
Happy happy .plan .plan:
> 11/10
> *stopped trigger spawned monster from telefragging themselves
> *fixed crash when firing railgun
> *fixed trigger_gravity (still non-functional pending a change in player movement)
> *added Strogg ship model
> *changed power armor code to allow monsters to have it also
> *fixed a crash in ref_gl caused by bad frame numbers; made it a warning
> *gave the brain a power screen
> *made the clock function portable; also fixed a possible buffer allocation problem
> *reworked the fly code and made it cleaner
> *put in the new power screen model and effects
> *reworked the RF side of the shell effect
> *fixed good_guys going to a bad frame upon death
---
> Stuff That Sucks (tm sCary) - Going to the dentist "slight discomfort"... yeah, right
|
GLQuake and GLQW Ultimate Setup Guide
Brett Jacobs has written up this *36* page document explaining everything you could possibly want to know about setting up GLQuake and GLQW to run as smooth and efficiently as possible.
PGL Launch Event
Just got this email from Kenn at gamers.com about the PGL Launch event.
On Monday, November 3, 1997, the AMD Professional Gamers League kicked off its inaugural season with a huge press conference at 3Com Park in San Francisco. Over 50 members of the press including the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, CNN Headline News and C|net, attended to learn more about the fledgling world of professional online gaming. In addition, representatives from PGL sponsors AMD, Creative Labs, GTE, Logitech, Rendition, and US Robotics/3Com were present. Speakers included representatives from TEN, Advanced Micro Devices, and the newly appointed PGL Commissioner, Nolan Bushnell, the inventor of Pong and the founder of Atari. The speakers elaborated upon the future of the PGL as well as revealing the members of the PGL Board of Governors: Jack Heistand President and CEO, TEN
S. Atiq Raza Executive Vice President and CTO, Advanced Micro Devices
Scott Miller Co-Founder and CEO, 3D Realms/Apogee
Brett Sperry President and CEO, Westwood Studios and VP, Worldwide Operations, Virgin Interactive Entertainment
Peter Molyneux Managing Dir./Founder, LionHead Studios (and founder of Bullfrog Productions)
Erik van Dillen Senior Corporate Vice President, IMGOther announcements included the addition of Creative Labs as the official sound technology of the PGL, and Dockers, a division of Levi Strauss & Co., as the official apparel of the PGL. The commitments of these two companies bring the sponsorship totals to over 2 million dollars, the largest sum in gaming history. In addition to informing the press about the PGL, the event allowed sponsors to meet face to face with the players to discuss potential endorsement opportunities as well as valuable product feedback from some of the best gamers in the world. The event culminated with an exhibition team Quake match featuring Quake legends Thresh, Reptile, Unholy, B2, Pookie, and Tonka. Signups for the PGL are still available at http://www.pgl.net
QPed II Released
My personal favorite Quake .pak file editor has migrated to version 2.0, w00. New features include:
Direct3D Wrapper for Quake v1.2
A new version of the Direct3D wrapper for Quake has been released by David Springer. As mentioned on the Blue dude's page, there is an ongoing dispute / flame war going on in the news groups arguing on the origination of this program. Some people may remember that Microsoft themselves released a Direct3D app that would let you run around in Quake a while back.
Pure3D
Canopus (I'm wearing one of their t-shirts today, w00) has updated the Pure3D FAQ. The pure3d card is a 3dfx voodoo based card which has 6 megs of ram onboard instead of the standard 4. Really is a great boost for avoiding texture thrashing.
Speaking of 3D Cards..
Tom's infamous Hardware page has a really lengthy review of 3D Accelerator cards. The number of 3D cards that he covers is quite impressive, so if you are considering buying a 3d card, make sure and read this first.
Quake Literature
Just got this email from Joltox of the Quake Literary Pages that uh.. I guess is cool:
3 new stories up at the Recently Redesigned Quake Literary Guild!! Plus a humor entry!!! Lots of Exclamation Points!!!! http://www.planetquake.com/guild/
Jedi Stuff
All the news that is Jedi Knight:
Preview / Review Land
Everyone elses opinion on the games you play:
.plan Wagon
Not many .plan updates yet today, but here is what Brian Hook, programmer at id Software, had to say about progress on Quake2 :
- found a pointer bug in ref_soft.dll relating to image loading. Have I
mentioned that BoundsChecker rules?
- cleaned up the "player setup" menu somewhat. Put a border around the model viewport, moved the model back a bit so it doesn't "fisheye" too much, and removed the "team" field (since choice of team will be implicity by choice of skin or model).
- rewrote some really gruesome menu code that I had done pretty sloppily a while ago. Good thing too.
- made character lines 9 pixels tall instead of 10 pixels in the "customize keys" menu so that all the keys would fit on the screen without overwriting the status bar
- I'm caching cursor images now before loading the main menu so that there isn't a noticeable stuttering effect when the main menu is first brought up
- renamed "Communications Center" to "Comm Satellite" in the "Start Map" selection screen, since "Communications Center" was too wide to fit at 320x240.
- during the last merge I inadvertently broke cinematics on the Intergraphs since I was calling glColorTableEXT even if it didn't exist. Whoops.
- added banners to the "save game" and "address book" menus
- reformatted more menu stuff
- narrowed down a bug where player setup wasn't showing up on 3Dfx. Looks like it is probably a 3Dfx minidriver bug, so we'll wait to see if that fixes it.
- fixed bug in the video apply stuff where brightness was not being set correctly on 3Dfx
- made the "deathmatch options" menu properly read the "dmflags" cvar and set things accordingly
- removed "double negatives" from the "start server" deathmatch options, e.g. we used to have an option called "no powerups", which could be "yes" or "no", and now it's just called "allow powerups".
- made the key labels in "customize keys" green instead of white
- went to dinner at Chili's. Man, how I long for a good restaurant in
Mesquite.
I had hoped to get around to messing with HiProf and Visual Quantify today, but it's already 2AM and I need to get home to watch today's NFL highlights on ESPN SportsCenter. :-)
Tomorrow I'm going to mess with profilers after I get 8-bit skies working a little better. Get this -- right now skies are loaded as 16-bit TGA files, up converted to 32-bit ARGB textures, then quantized back to 16-bit RGB values, which are then indexed into a 16-to-8 inverse palette.
How's THAT for ugly? I'm fixing this on general principle. If an 8-bit PCX version of a file is available I will load that and use its palette directly instead of dealing with the up/down/quantize/palette headache we're going through right now.
I'm also trying desperately to finish up the menu tweaks -- need to add a credits screen with scrolling text.
Uh..
Ok.. lemme run down my morning events for you guys.. it ruled.
Patrick (new guy here, staying at my place till we get the new crib) wakes me up at about 9.45am.. "Yo, time to go to work or something" I of course go "yea whatever, and hit the snooze bar deciding I need another 10mins of sleep.. I finally do get up a bit later, grab my stuff and head to the door. Guess who I see, some dude with a clip board writing something up ready to take my furniture!?
I take a spazz and end up spending the next hour haggling this guy for 5minutes (useless) and heading downstairs to talk to the management. Waiting for the woman who handles my rent to show back up from giving a tour. This was not fun. In fact, it sucked. Just so you guys know, I got a call that Friday telling me that they never got my rent check, and it was no big deal so I dropped off a check Saturday afternoon. (I had dropped off a check on the 1st of the month, they lost it apparently, didnt bother me though) Monday morning homeboy is ready to evict me.. He's lucky I was in a good mood or I was gonna represent.
|
Miss me?
Wow... actually did stuff that wasnt work related for once in my life. Lets catch up on what I missed yesterday eh?
Quake2 FAQ
The boys at www.quake2.com have been hard at work updating the FAQ for all of you who have questions that seem to be frequently asked. There is also a mirror site for the FAQ that can be found at Quake2 Nutshell.
Quake Done Quick 100%
"The Quake done Quick team are currently completing the filming for a new movie, "Quake done 100% Quick", a run through the game getting all the kills and secrets. Since it is over an hour long, the camerawork will take a while. The normal demo version is available now, so if you don't want to wait until the full movie, you can download seventy minutes of single-player carnage now - this time, speed kills."
Level Designer?
Part 2 of the AVault series on level designing has been posted. As always it is a damn fine article including comments from Our own levelord of Ritual, as well as Dr. Sleep from Ion Storm among others.
New Thunder
A new version of the Thunder Quake level editor has been released. There is now a 3d preview (pretty necessary eh?) as well as a bunch of minor bug fixes from the previous version of course.
The reason you need us "smaller" pages..
Well, we can always count on those large "corporate" pages to goof things up once in a while, so we have pages like Zanshin's Dojo to clean up the mess of confusion that they leave us once in a while. Check out this article, GameSpot on Crack, as usual. -Wicked.
AirQuake Test25
All kinds of new features in this continually progressing Quake mod that is well worth checking out. Dig on the homepage to grab a copy.
"This update adds a new defense turret, new models for Dogfighter and AMRAAM, and a lot of little code fixes that should make it work more reliably than test 24. Also the Air2 now has more to do in single player, although it still lacks an exit..."
.plan Wagon
Everyone has at least something to say...
Interviews
A couple of interviews have popped up:
Hexen2 Stuff
Couple new bits of news for the Hexen2 freaks:
Holy Wars
Be good, become a Saint, and kill everybody! The new Holy Wars 1.41 is out on the Holy Wars page:
http://www.quake.shiny.it/holywars/
Holy Wars is a Quake mod that makes normal deathmatch feel like being caught in a traffic jam while driving a car equipped with a radio that can only receive weather reports. Incredibly simple rules and heavenly gameplay will drive you into an unprecedented fragging frenzy. Try it now and you'll see the light! Wait, I want to put yet another exclamation mark into this paragraph!
Preview / Review Land
Everyone elses opinion on the games you play:
New Pages
A few new web pages of note have opened up:
Mod Damage is home to two new quake mods: Get Rich Quake and Monster Match.
- In Get Rich Quake, you collect money to increase your score. When you frag someone, their money comes flying out so you can pick it up. You can protect your own money by hiding it in your cashbox, but if anyone finds the box, they can steal it. The leader's money is out there somewhere, so it's never too late to snag first place!
- In Monster Match, you pick up masks to transform into different Quake monsters. Each monster has its own unique characteristics. For example, zombies can stay under water indefinitely, and the players they "kill" are transformed into fellow zombies. Monster Match also works in single-player Quake.
|
Copyright Steven M. Gibson |
