Saturday, October 31

Half Life News [1:13pm]
Already? Wow. The thing isn't even Gold yet, and there are already Mission Packs for Half Life! Saw on Voodoo Extreme that a company with a pretty cool name, Aerotic Software is going to be devloping a mission pack. I've also heard from a couple sources saying that Half Life is going GOLD Sunday. Also, they are still saying it will be in stores by Thanksgiving. Of course, you warez weenies will have it sooner. GO BUY IT. sheesh.

Trick or Treat (smell my feet) [1:13pm]
So, you are going out trick or treating tonight? Heres a tip: hit the condos and apartments. Just you and 5 or 6 people and canvas the area. High density area. Your munchy needs will be fufilled for months. The Onion has a few tips for those of you sending your kiddies out.

 

Friday, October 30

Friday, Bloody Friday? [1:13pm]
Doods. Devil's night. OMG. What a weird coincidence. Anyway, the Blood 2 demo is out. Monolith, totally going against the grain of meeting deadlines, has got the demo up BEFORE THEY SAID THEY WOULD! Anyway, check it out: 36MB, 2 Big Single Player Levels. The encourage you to drench innards everywhere.

I'll stick more links up when i see them. If you know any, send em right here.

Let the Playoffs Begin! [1:13pm]
Well, in place of the NBA regular season, we get the G4 Tournament. Featuring the 16 best LPB and HPB QuakeWorld teams in the world, this will be a winner takes all battle to the finish. Dunno what they get, maybe a trophy or a mention on Blue's or something. Anyway, The #1 HPB Team was Clan Southern Comfort and #1 LPB was Fire in the Hole. Top LPB Player was Triad from Versus and Southern Comfort boasts of the #1 HPB, Grendel. Check it out.

The Golden SiN [1:13pm]
Well, it was bound to happen. Paradox let the world know that SiN has gone golden and will be on shelves within a week. Start saving your lunch money kids, you know you want to go around and hit the phones and drink machines. Maybe there will be a strip club, no?

AGHHHH! WHO ARE YOU? [1:13pm]
In order to keep all his loyal minions from offing themselves in despair due to lack of updates, I've been assigned the job of drudging up some tasty morsels for you guys to dig on. Heh. Like sCary ever updated reguarly before. Jerk. Email him and tell him to get those weeklys up. Insult him, if possible. By the way, this is Huntsman, the forum administrator. I feel I need a mug shot up there for this to be complete :) (tell me where the mug shot comment came from and uhhh I'll stick yer name up here)

The Father of the Messiah Speaks [1:13pm]
Wouldn't that be God? Is Dave Perry God? He may think so. Grow your hair out and you can be a star too! Anyway, saw on Blue's and Voodoo Extreme that Gaming Age had an Interview with Dave Perry, talking about what he's up to. His Messiah project is supposed to "have a lot of polygons".

Multiplayer UNREALized [1:13pm]
Well, seeing as Tim Sweeny has been patching the rather broken Unreal multiplayer code, he needed to take a break and did this interview with PlanetUnreal.

WOOOOOO PS/2! [1:13pm]
Heh, that rhymes. Anyhow, this guy [R2]Redbone thinks he's smart and came up with explanation on PS/2 Mouse Rates. Also while you are there, check it out on the newly revamped Rangers Page that I did. You thought they disappeared, didn't you? (Hey, I'm a self serving, self promoting pud who landed some webspace. Lemme alone.)

Getting the API Groove On [1:13pm]
Heh, what? You thought this would die? The always ultra spicey, super saucy hoochie coochie nudie showing crack addicted (but not like that) Voodoo Extreme has another Ask Da Grandmastuh B (get up) article talking about Direct3D vs. OpenGL with a few comments by SupaFly T (Tim Sweeney). Hey, as long as it runs on my computer, I couldn't care less.

Oh, Man, i wish i could make smartass comments like this... [1:13pm]
Mr Joe Siegler updated his .plan with a top 10 list, shooting off, well, 10 zingers at the game community. While it largely made very valid points, man, for his sake, I hope he doesn't get beaten up and have his lunch money taken away. I hear some of these game makers have mutated into huge, pissed off monsters due to monitor radiation and give really mean swirlys.

FRAG2 Bound [4:31am]
Yeah, I have to show up there at 9 stinking AM because of my ride. Kind of puts a damper on updates. Hopefully I can get a hold of something to update from while I'm there. I would just count on not much getting posted till late evening though. Check out www.thefrag2.com if you have no clue why I'm gone all day. I'm gonna try and get a couple of hours of sleep.

Also.. Good luck to Charlie Wiederhold, the most recent departure from Ritual Entertainment (and my roomate until a couple days ago), this time in favor of 3DRealms. (Check Broussard's .plan update). Thanks for covering my ass all that time buddy. Even after I pay you back, I'll still be in debt to you.

Blood2 Demo MIDNIGHT! [4:31am]
The Blood2.com website has been updated with word that the Monolith guys are getting a bit ambitious and have decided they can push that demo out the door by midnight tonight! Speaking of demos, someone remind me to finish my Heretic2 article?

Unreal [4:31am]
Next-Generation has posted a very optimistic article discussing the latest incarnation of Unreal from the hands of Tim Sweeney is apparently going quite well.

On Monday, Epic quietly released a patch (version 218) for public beta testing that, by all accounts, seems to have completely vanquished its internet play woes. The new patch contained some significant improvements by in-house Epic wizard (and owner) Tim Sweeney. Among the improvements were things like: Loss-free packet sequencing and retransmission, bitstream packet compression, optimized file downloading, and a new NETSPEED command with real-time status display that helps users easily tune their network play.

werd
I appreciate all the email about my Quake3 ramblings yesterday but the motive really was to get you guys to post your thoughts to the msgboard, not just email me personally ya know?

 

Thursday, October 29

Vampire: The Masquerade [2:31pm]
The boys at Nihilistic are finally giving out a few details on their game and the technology it will use. Check out www.jediknight.net and of course the Nihilistic webiste at www.nihilstic.com

I'd love to be able to give a full feature list, but we're not quite ready for that yet, because things are still in development and we wouldn't want to announce a feature and then not deliver it to you.

What I can say (I hope!) is that we are developing a brand new engine that is specifically tuned for both hardware acceleration and an RPG 3rd person perspective. One of the biggest trade-offs made on Jedi was to done to support a wider range of hardware than Quake2 (which also came out after Jedi Knight). With this engine, we are focusing on hardware accelerators which gives us a lot more freedom when choosing features.

Half-Life [2:31pm]
GameSpot UK has thrown together a new review of what is hopefully the near final version of Half-Life that we can hopefully expect to see before Thanksgiving.

FRAG2 [2:31pm]
The big FRAG2 Tournament going down here in Dallas (setup is today actually) is about to get underway and Dan Hammas aka RIX, the defending CPL champion is interviewed over at AVault. A bit of chat about the switch to Quake2 and some other bits of interest. Check out the main article as well discussing contenders.

MS EATS ASS [3:31am]

Daikatana [3:31am]
The ION Storm website has some updates from team members during "crunch time" over there on the Daikatan project.

As October winds down, the Daikatana team is hard at work on John Romero’s upcoming FPS. We decided to find out what specific projects team members are working on these days.

The Big Guy
John Romero reports that he’s been working with Producer Kelly Hoerner to "make sure that all the details (and large items) are covered for our latest milestone which is due by the end of the week."
"It's pretty hectic around here right now!" he says.

The Code
Mike Maynard says that he’s "putting the finishing touches on the first half of the weapons."
"Specifically, making the effects as badass (I finally used "badass" in a sentence) as possible and making sure all third person aspects of the weapons are working," he adds. "The other weapons are at beta stage and will be finalized shortly after I finish these."

In Soo Park reports that he’s been "working on monster AI for past few months, trying to make them behave somewhat intelligently."

Quake3 Stuff [8:01am]
So I'm sitting here having a brain fart contemplaing Quake3 and a few interesting "features" have come to mind for what would make a fun DM game in my eyes while still keeping it simple. Um I'll just ramble because I can.

- SIMPLE. Ever heard of the KISS philosophy? Zoid subscribes to it I believe, Keep It Simple Stupid. Having 15 weapons as interesting as it may sound, is just confusing. If you take a look at multiplayer games and which ones have been the most successful it tends to be the simple one. Not to say that is the only formula for success but you know...

- Custom Powers? Perhaps the ability to adjust the players run speed, jump height, armor value, reload time, etc? A given base value for all attributes and the customizability of about 5% per attribute? Not a drastic impact on gameplay, and only an advanced option that the general player doesnt mess with.

- Defense? This was brought up on the msgboard, A defense button or ability? However I think that would just end up being another alias that players always leave on unless firing. Perhaps only being able to hold defense up 5 seconds per minute? Getting hit while in "defense" mode would only decrease damage by 5-10% maybe? Pretty drastic gameplay impact.

- "Comp DM Mode" which standardizes things like sound / playermodels? The competitive scene will probably explode with a game like this, planning ahead for the "most even" playing ground possible is probably a good idea.

So yeah.. I dunno what prompted me to splurge all this. Head over to the Quake3 msgboard and post what you think eh?

Drakan [3:31am]
The boys at Surreal gave a little bit of insight to the multiplayer action that we can see in Drakan from FGO, here's a snip:

"There is definite merit to the conclusion that multiplaying is the future of the games industry," stated Stuart Denman of Surreal. "Surreal hopes to be a pioneer in that area, starting with Drakan: Order of the Flame. Once bandwidths start increasing, we'll see increased realism in multiplayer games, especially when people are able to speak to one another over the network. Drakan is already showing advances in animation, where you can see other players move and attack with more fidelity than ever before." Surreal is "shooting for a release some time in the first quarter of ‘99."

Weekly Demos [3:31am]
Got 3 demos this week. 2 of the 3on3's from R3V and the 3rd from Zith and DR.

Mouse Sampling Bonanza (95/8&NT) [3:31am]
For those of you who are still putting off trying out these utils you are missing out pretty damn big. If setting up a shortcut to auto start in Windows95/98 proved a bit too difficult for you, the Qizmo page has posted a new version of the util with a nifty interface that will handle it for you. Also Blue has gotten a hold of a utility that handles what many of you NT users have probably figured out with those REG keys I posted a couple of days ago.

Blood2 [3:31am]
Looks like Monolith is gonna hit us with another game demo. Blood2 should be in our hands by this weekend. Looking forward to it, can't say I really dug on SHOGO too much. Maybe if I was a fan of that Robotech stuff more.. oh well. Check out Jay Wilson's .plan update:

Just a quick update. The demo is pretty much done on the content side, and is very cool. We're just working out a few of the bugs. Should be released very soon, definitely by the weekend. We've got an army of GT muscle ready to promote it for us, so once it goes up it should be available from a large number of sources. That's it. :)

Unreal [3:31am]
More news from Tim Sweeney who is doing his best to keep the world informed on his work with Unreal.

Drivers we consider playable, in best-to-worst order

The others should be playable pending public release of improved Direct3D drivers for their hardware.

Messiah Slips [3:31am]
Word from the boys at FGNOnline is that the Shiny Messiah project has slipped into next year. It was scheduled for release this holiday season and featured some incredible character stuff. Oh well. They are shooting for "mid 1999" now.

Views [8:15am]

Tech Etc [8:15am]

werd
Got a few demos for you to check out today. Next week should have a few Quake2 demos to from FRAG2 which will be going down this weekend. Hope to see you guys there, I'll be the guy making a fool of himself on the microphone. (Yeah, same old thing eh?)

 

Wednesday, October 28

"IT" Grows [8:15am]
The three ex-Ritual/3dfx employees have added one more player to the team. Gary McTaggart & Charlie Brown, the pair of programmers who were working on the much hyped "uber engine" and Mike "giggler" Wardwell ex-Ritual level designer are joined by Jack 'morbid' Mathews from 3dfx and GameSpy.

This might come as a yawn to a lot of you, but it should spice up things from the boring ol "Patch this" and "Mouse that" of .plans lately :). I'm leaving 3Dfx to work with Charlie Brown, Gary McTaggart, and Mike Wardwell. This decision has been quite a long time in the making, and it's just now come to the right time.

Before anyone wonders if I'm "jumping ship" from 3Dfx for stock or any other reasons, that's not it at all. I'm happy as a clam at 3Dfx, it's a great place to work, and there's absolutely wonderful people around me. It's just that opportunities like this don't come around very often, and I'm following my heart and taking a leap to do what I really want to. 3Dfx's stock price, working conditions, or salaries had absolutely nothing to do with this decision, so please don't be posting around stuff like "See how shitty 3dfx is doing jack mattttttttthews is leaving its proof that my conspiracy theory was right along."

I won't thank people at the company one at a time, as there have been too many nice people to name
off, but I want to thank them for putting up with the arrogant bastard I am, and for the incredible amount of learning I've done. It's been the most incredible experience of my (albeit short) life.

For those wondering, I will still remain as I have been with GameSpy. I can't think of a compelling reason to leave that endeavor, as it's something I enjoy doing and hope to continue doing for awhile. Plus, Joe and Tim stuck with me during a few months when I didn't know how to balance responsibilities... Can't let them down now :) Hmmm, yeah, think that's about it. :)

Heretic2 [8:15am]
Daily dose of Heretic2 stuff for you guys to mull over. Check out this updated list of all the Heretic2 console commands on Blue's that you can shake a stick at with a bit of context to help you understand them and utilize them like a true jedi master. John Scott has a .plan update with a few tips on launching Heretic2 with the userdir paramaters. You also gotta check out Kenn Hoekstra's list of reviews in his .plan update as well as him pouring out his heart:

October 28th, 1998 - It's time to pull out all the stops.  I'm not screwing around with this anymore!  Heretic II is, hands down, the best Raven game to date!  I have never had so much fun DeathMatching in my entire life!!!  I think it's more fun in DM than the original and the most fun I've had playing DM since Doom II!!!!  I think I'm going to cry....  *sniff*  In all seriousness...if you are wondering if the demo is worth downloading and more importantly, if if the full game is worth buying, check out all of these reviews!  I compiled them all as they came in and it should make for some interesting browsing.  Enjoy!  And once again...a big congratulations to the whole Heretic II team!  You are an inspiration to us all.

Linkage [8:15am]
Wack Ass Links done got posted . 2 of them dissapeared since I got the new list ready a couple of days ago. Can you believe some guy emailed me asking me to mark the ones that have pictures of naked chicks? He wanted me to save him time...

Views [8:15am]

KaosKontrol Productions, the developer of Genocide, is currently working on a new 3D Real-Time Urban Warfare game, by the name of BlockWar. The following is an interview we conducted with Gustaaf Frankel the Lead Designer, which reveals a lot of new information on what to expect.

Tech Etc [8:15am]

Included in KNI are so-called Single Instruction, Multiple Data instructions, optimized for the way that many software applications repeat certain operations over and over, and to process those operations in parallel. While Intel's MMX technology includes SIMD instructions for integer data types, KNI extends those capabilities to include floating point data, which is crucial for the swift execution of multimedia programs.

Yo [6:55am]
With that cool sampling ps2 registry haxoring I posted yesterday, I've now made the switch to NT4 as my primary OS of choice. Gotta say I was getting mighty sick of having to reboot Win98 whenever a single program crashed. It's no linux.. but hey :)

Yeah, switched on over to the PlanetQuake Finger tracker for a bit. I'm just a little .plan tracker slut. Thanks dwoemer.

Tuesday, October 27

Heretic2 [6:11pm]
The Raven boys are still .plan happy updating about anything and everything related to the demo. (A good thing) Rick Johnson as well as Mike Gummelt both have updates concerning multiplayer DM and some possible problems joining servers. most recently John Scott updates with news of the known bugs list. Oh, and don't forget the "freezeworld" command which Jeremy Statz mentions in his .plan:

Something neat to try with the demo:

alias +freezelook "freezeworld 1; +lookaround;"
alias -freezelook "freezeworld 0; -lookaround;"

Then bind a key to +freezelook. This is something Josh Weier first did... it freezes the game world (all the effects, animations, etc) and frees the camera so that it can move freely around the character at the same time. Release the button and all goes back to normal. Really cool for taking screenshots, and getting a good close look at the gore.

Windows 2000 [6:11pm]
As posted on www.betanews.com earlier, Microsoft today announced that the Windows NT5 project has been renamed to Window 2000 in an attempt to unify the OS's that are currently split in the 98/NT varieties. Here is the announcement from ZDNet. Thanks Redwood

PS2Rate [6:11pm]
For those of you who have been emailing me with questions about that util that I DID NOT WRITE Squirrel over at Ion Storm has posted a bit of a FAQ in his .plan file that will hopefully answer the questions that a number of you had.

Mouse Sampling in NT [6:11pm]
Speaking of which, as that FAQ states it does not work in NT, however Suicide20 forwarded me these instructions to get similar results in NT:

1.) open regedit...
2.) open HKLM\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\PointerClass This will tell you the pointer class that the system is using. It points to the registry entry that we need to find...
3.) open said registry key...
Mine was HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\msi8042
4.) Open sub registry key \Parameters
5.) You should now see SampleRate This is a DWORD value set in Hex format.
6.) Change mnouse to the required value and reboot...
Milage may very...

Blood2 [6:21am]
Jay Wilson is updating his .plan a bit more talking about Blood2 and the demo everyone is hoping to see this week released on the net from Monolith. The game should be going gold this week, the demo will weigh in at about 35megs with a pair of levels for you to play through. Here's a bit more:

But how will it run on those requirements?

Well, they are called "minimum" requirements for a reason. You can run Blood 2 on that kind of system, and possibly even get pretty decent performance if you tweak your configuration and run the lower detail settings. I've seen B2 run well on a P166, but I've seen it run fairly poorly as well. But you should not expect stellar performance on the minimum requirement. I would recommend a P200-233 with a Voodoo card for optimal performance. On the upside, B2 runs very well with a Voodoo2 on most machines, and I've seen a P2-300 run it at 1024x768 at high frame rates using a TNT card.

Wheel of Time [6:21am]
Legend Entertainment's Wheel of Time project which is being updated regularly over at their website has some more news on the current progress.

Scott continues to bang away at the next multi-player prototype, polishing the Whitecloaks' primitives and diving into design for the remaining two citadels.   Warren has finished his Shadar Logoth variant and jumped onto his Whitecloak variant.  And, finally, our mystery mapper is coming up to speed with the SL primitives for his first map, "The Streets of Shadar Logoth."

Unreal [6:21am]
Tim Sweeney is still updating the Unreal Tech page with more followup on the release of the version 218 patch for Unreal a couple of days ago. He talks about mostly video card stuff and people having problems with D3D or whatever. Check out the known issues list.

Heretic2 [6:21am]
The boys over at www.hereticii.com have poste an email exchange with level designer John Zuk from Raven.

Ted Mielczarek has created a new utility that will converst PCX files to the M8 format that Heretic2 uses. This way you can import any old PCX you like into the game.

At the insistence of a guy who really wanted it, I coded up a PCX -> M8 converter. It preserves the palette present in the pcx file, so you can make non-quake2 new textures for Heretic II. It borrows code from Trey Harrison's PCX2WAL and from Brent McLeod's wal2m8, both of whom have been credited. It can be found at http://www.Lehigh.EDU/~tam4/pcx2m8.zip.

Views [4:35am]

Tech Etc [4:35am]

werd
Yap, caught up now and stuff. Got the suckage posted and half done with my mini Heretic2 article. Oh.. as for Klingon Honor Guard.. it's not even worth a review. Don't waste your time. If you dig on Star Trek maybe..

Teehee, Kansas City lost.. good! you guys realize the Raiders are gonna win the SuperBowl right? I mean.. who the hell needs an offense, obviously not Oakland..

Gripe of the day: Raven Software apparently doesnt understand the concept of .pak files. What the hell is up with that? Tell you what I'll slap those files into a .pak for you.

 

Monday, October 26

Q2 Extremities From id [8:21pm]
Check it out, word from id Software with some actual details on the Quake2 expansion pack they plan to release. They also answer the concern that many people including myself had about if the original mod authors would see some profit sharing. Kinda silly that I would doubt that but oh well :)

Just wanted to drop a line that we're nearing the final packaging design for Extremities. Activision has been very supportive of our efforts and Focus2 has created some of the coolest designs for this compilation. Extremities will introduce many people to the works of some very talented authors. We hope this cooperative effort will be the first in a line of products that increases public awareness of the Quake online community. We've gotten great responses from the mod authors. Each of the chosen authors will be receiving royalties in addition to the well deserved credit for their great efforts. We are all looking forward to the release of Extremities.
The following is the list of contributors to Extremities: Player models and skins by: Rowan "Sumaleth" Crawford Deathmatch Maps by: Sten 'Ztn' Uusvali and Daniel 'Trebz' Nolan
The mods: - QWar2 - Kick - Capture! - PowerBall - Rail Arena - Red Rover - Rocket Arena 2 - Action Quake 2 - Eraser Bot by Ridah - Jailbreak by Team Reaction - C.H.A.O.S. Deathmatch by Chaotic Dreams * CTF will be included with the latest patch update of Quake II.

200hz PS2 Utility [8:21pm]
Who says you have to have USB to have a high mouse sampling rate for your mouse? The author of Qizmo has answered the prayers of Quake players out there who don't have a USB port or don't have the cash to go buy a new USB mouse. The author has also released a new version of Qizmo which removes the much haggled over location proxy stuff and ads a few more features to help combat cheaters. A big thanks to Hud for the email!

More Unreal [8:21pm]
Tim Sweeney made some followup updates to the Unreal tech page with some user results from the patch that was released earlier today. There is also a performance survey for you to fill out over at PlanetUnreal.

werd werd
Yikes, I um.. slept for like over 12hours straight? Dunno what the hell caused that.. Double my normal amount of sleep. I guess moving giggler's furniture was enough to tire me out. Sorry! I'll have

More Tech Etc [4:35am]

Heretic2 [7:21am]
Of course have to lead off the Monday with a bit more Heretic2. You knobs to realize its a cool game right? Rick Johnson updated his .plan with some more info on Heretic II. He explains about a Heretic II server patch for multiplayer. Check out this info:

As Pat, CodeKing, said in his .plan file, we were made aware of a method to cheat in deathmatch games. We also addressed the issue of names showing up for clients that were ghosted. You only need to download this file if you are running a deathmatch server. Otherwise, it doesn't do you any good. "Nothing to see here...move along..."

Also, I may have a potential fix for those of you that experience the problem of the Dial Up Networking annoyance. Try starting the game from the MsDOS Prompt as follows: heretic2.bat +set noudp 0 +set noipx 0 I've not tested this nor have I looked further into the problem, so this solution may not work. I suspect it has more to do with WinSock being initialized, but that requires a code fix. Let me know if it does work. Heretic2 Demo Server Patch, 369,195 bytes

Might as well check out a review or two of the demo as well right? Game Complex has thrown up their review of the Heretic II demo.

Josh Wier over at Raven has word on some tips with those of you playing with the nifty doublebind feature in Heretic2. (Hit a key twice and it calls a different function)

Might as well check out this serverlist online for those of you who just cant seem to figure out that incredibly simple GameSpy that is packaged with the demo.

Lastly, Brent "Veldrin" McLeod points out to Blue that you can actually open Quake2 maps into Heretic2.

It is possible to load Quake2 levels into Heretic II, and is also possible to make new Heretic II levels with standard Quake2 level compiling utils. Below is a link to a few texture conversion utilites to help people get started. Pat Lipo has stated that the BSP format was left the same intentionally. http://home.ienet.com/~veldrin/h2utils.zip

Unreal Beta v2.18 [7:21am]
Yup, a new version of Unreal that is aimed towards fixing the multiplayer woes that plague Unreal. Tim Sweeney is gonna work it till its right. Check out this page with some new benchmarks posted on the patch while you are at it.

Unreal 218 is now available. I've posted it along with release notes at http://unreal.epicgames.com/versions.htm

Important: 218 is not network-compatible with previous versions, so players and servers will both have to upgrade in order to take advantage of it.

Since our T1 line is perpetually saturated, if anybody is able to mirror it, that would be greatly appreciated.

Our testing session, including a lot of 28.8K players, and even some overseas players with modem connections, went very well! We're looking forward to hearing what the rest of the community thinks about the improved network play. If their experience mirrors ours, then we'll be beyond Unreal's big internet problems, and ready to go into incremental refinement & tweaking. We have a lot of further enhancements in the queue, along with some cool surprises.

Tech Etc [4:35am]

werd
Eh! Changing dialups with a ISDN router back and forth is much more time consuming than it should be. I'll slap you guys upside the head with some suckage this afternoon. Wanna finish up some other stuff first.

 

Sunday, October 25

More Heretic2 [4:37pm]
Pat Lipo of Raven Software updated his .plan addressing a number of different questions people have had. Here's a clip that should get your panties in a wad:

--If you have any problems with your Voodoo cards I can almost guarantee that you need an updated Glide driver... This was put in because of relability concerns, but my only regret was that the error message that comes up wasn't bigger... Voodoo 1: v2.43 Voodoo Rush: v2.45 Voodoo 2: v2.53 Voodoo Banshee: v2.60

--As has been stated, we didn't want to support game saving in the demo until we were sure it was 100% solid. Yes, you can bind these at the console, but do so at your own risk. Coop mode is the same... we've got it in the demo, but it isn't supported. Good luck!

--We've got support for demos in the game, and some of you may have downloaded the one that John Cash apparently made... Cool that you made one, John, but <snip>

--Two things that I will warn you right now that won't make it by ship date. We NEVER promised these in to be the box, so don't get in a huff, but nonetheless we know what your average Quake player expects and want to deliver. These things are team deathmatch and custom skin downloading. The custom skins particularly met with some complications early on, due to us switching to a system that allowed us to maintain damage skins AND plague variations on those skins. It is our intent to provide gamers with an update as soon as possible for these features. As, to add a sugar to your medicine, expect some additional surprises as well!

--While people have talked about adding a female model (The thought is intriguing, but we can't promise to add a feature so involved off the cuff), there is one thing that I'm afraid we won't be able to offer veteran Quakers, custom downloadable player meshes. With all his intricacies, model parts, skeletal bones and animation frames, it would just be prohibitive to have these be dynamically downloaded during play. Imagine, you're playing in a deathmatch server, having a great time, when suddenly--- BAM! Somebody new's joined in and you have to wait for a 3MB model to download. I don't think so.

--I have been implementing and tweaking weapons left and right, and really want to make sure they're balanced and perfect. Any thoughts on the current weapons, their balance, their effects, and any future weapons and spells would be most appreciated. Email me please at plipo@mail.ravensoft.com

Heretic2 [EARLY]
If you havent downloaded the Heretic2 demo yet do yourself a favor and go grab it! Some of the best artwork to have ever graced a 3D action game. Deathmatch is a hoot as well. Anyways a few notes on the release of the demo. First off for the people who have already downloaded it and want some cheat codes here you go via HereticII.com & VE

victor - killing all level monsters
twoweeks - powerup on/off
suckitdown all - all items ???
aquaticape - notarget on/off
kiwi - noclip on/off
playbetter - GOD on/off
angermonsters - angering all level monsters (game speed sux down!)
crazymonsters - berzerking all level monsters

Then a few of you guys are probably wondering how to get that mousewheel to work in the demo eh? Check out BuzzKill's page for the info on a workaround homeboy has figured out.

Also for you guys out there running Heretic2 multiplayer servers Rick Johnson updates his .plan with the info that most of you guys probably know if you run a Quake2 server. use the "setmaster" command at the console or just use the command line +set public 1 when you launch the server.

If you are looking to give your input on what you thought of the demo look no further than Mike Gummelt. He is saying just email him what you thought about the demo! Drop him a line at mgummelt@mail.ravensoft.com

Blood2 [EARLY]
Brian Goble is at it again updating his .plan with a bit more excitement leading into the Blood2 demo that will hopefully be released next week from Monolith. Brian also mentions "thats why we call it alpha" in reference to the crash problems people have been having with SHOGO mutiplayer.

I just sent out a build of the Blood2 demo to the whole team! I am still waiting on a couple of level tweaks from billv and one more splash screen from gforce...but it's getting really close now. The second level's intro cinematic is incredible!

The zip file for the Blood2 demo is probably going to be right around 34 Meg. Look for it early this coming week! :)

SHOGO [EARLY]
Speaking of SHOGO and multiplayer, there are a few tips for those of you adventerous enough to try the early alpha version of Monolith's multiplayer endeavor.

Ok one more piece of info. Sounds like a lot of people didn't read patch.txt (hell I never do!) The best way to improve your performance with the Shogo alpha patch is to go into your autoexec.cfg and add these lines at the BOTTOM:
UpdateRate 5
MaxFPS 30
Make sure to turn on Saturate by going into the console and typing: Saturate 1

Views [4:35pm]

Tech Etc [4:35pm]

werd
Thanks for the emails about those autoresume programs. I personally use BPFTP whenever I'm getting tired of browser crashes. One of the coolest FTP proggy's I've come across. *cough* Raiders are gonna beat those pussy Bengals *cough*

Btw, thanks kids for helping me out with those banner clicks. I should finally be getting some $ to help dig my way out of debt. Currently if I know a person, I probably owe them money. Soon it will change!

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