go to www.shugashack.com for up to date news.

 

Friday, September 11

Bork [6:51pm]
I'll try and get resume working on the server over the weekend. (That means I'll bug our server admin, hehe)

The video posted in "werd" came from trippingtherift.com btw. Thanks Michael. Also, here is the homepage for one of the authors.

Rainbow 6 Patch [6:15pm]
Red Storm Entertainment has released their massive patch for Rainbow Six. This patch fixes most known bugs. For a complete list of big fixes, view the readme at http://rainbow6.com/rainbow_six/readme.txt. You can download the file from r6102.zip

Also, Check out this "He Said, She Said" review of Rainbow 6 posted over at GameGirlz.

Anachrnonox Shots [4:15pm]
Just because its based on the Q2 engine, and cool looking to boot. Check out the 5 new screenshots of Anachronox posted over at OGR. Speaking of Anox, there is a chat tonight at 8pm pst hosted at www.ionstorm.com

Knob Gobbler Award [4:15pm]
Guess I should put out my 2 cents about what everyone else is getting upset about. The latest Wicked3D Voodoo2 drivers offer the ability to see through walls in GL mode. I'm sure it didnt even occur to the guys at Metabyte what a bad move this was. But, hey, just like some guy who was dumb enough trip over the power cord on your computer. Just because the guy just didnt know any better, doesnt make him less of an asshole. That means you Metabyte!

More Views [5:55am]

More Tech Etc [5:55am]

Quake3 & Hardware Again! [6:45am]
Billy over at VE slapped some email to Brian Hook about optimizing Quake3 for AMD's 3DNow! or the new Intel Katmai stuff.

1) Is id planning on implementing any support for either 3DNow or KNI into the Quake III Arena engine?  If not, why?  If so, is the implementation of such difficult and a real pain in the ass, or is it pretty easy to sneak in their for a bump-up in performance?

We anticipate supporting both.  Currently we have an architecture that encapsulates our heavy floating point routines into a single function table.  At run-time we select a specific calc subsystem depending on the underlying processor.  We intend on having calc subsystems for 3DNow!, KNI, ANSI C, and x87 (pre-KNI).  We don't anticipate the implementation being that difficult.   Hopefully the CPU manufacturers will help out with the core stuff, but even in the case where we have to code everything ourselves I don't see any big problems.

MessageBoard! [6:45am]
Just for the hell of it, I'm gonna open a messageboard up here on the page. It wont be monitored extremely heavily, but I will be quick triggered in banning ip's / masks etc. I'm thinking 3 categories, (General Stuff , Quake1/QW , Quake2) right now. Other subjects etc I feel are covered elsewhere just fine. (HL, SIN) Drop me some email if you have any suggestions.

SHOGO? [6:45am]
PlanetQuake is posting their coverage from ECTS, and SHOGO didnt fair so well:

My first impressions of Shogo weren't too good. The game felt sluggish, the LithTech engine didn't look any better than Quake II on the surface, coloured lighting was overused, the level design wasn't particularly exciting or atmospheric... The whole thing felt frighteningly like a Quake TC. I summed it up in my notes with two words - "Nothing special"

Heretic2 [6:45am]
It's getting closer... feel it? Check out the new preview of Heretic2 at www.heretic2.com of all places.

Now, as you all know by now, if you haven't been living in a cave for the past four or so months, that Heretic II will be using the Quake II engine definitely. No switches. Most of you reading this by now are thinking that the Quake II engine is being used in way too many games, and why do we need it yet again in this kind of game?

Also, Jake Simpson updated his .plan with some info on the development of H2:

Software is much settled. Still not frantically fast, but not frantically slow either. More than was originally imagined, but still, in these days of 3D hardware cards, not as speedy as would be dreamt of. Mind you, if it was, who'd need hardware in the first place. We are starting to get comments back from the Early Beta testers out there. By and large, the reaction is very positive. Those negative comments we have had are all pretty much stuff we within the team have agreed either need work or need to be implemented. The new physics system is giving us some teething pains. We broke more than we thought when we introduced the new and improved system. We are hard at work fixing stuff we broke, and improving the quality of the stuff that used the old physics system. Client prediction is moving along. Most of the grunt work has been accomplished, now we just have to get it to work.

Views [5:55am]

Dynamix's Tribes Players site tribesplayers.com released a short AVI file of a female skin snuffing it -- it can be downloaded from deadfemale.avi. In case you're willing to milk another screenshot of the day feature, there's also a new screenshot today at screen0910.html. (They post new screenshots every weekday around 3 PM PST, just fill in the month and date for the last four digits before .html).

Tech Etc [5:55am]

werd
Ok guys, you *have* to check out this video. Hopefully I dont get arrested or anything for posting it. It's about 20 megs and contains some pretty mature content, so um. yea. Hope you enjoy. :)

 

Thursday, September 10

Q2 v3.19 Linux [6:25pm]
Zoid has released a few more files for Linux Q2 users:

I missed including an object file in the gamei386.so for the 3.19 Linux builds. > This results in a server crash if a spectator tries to go into camera mode. > The server will die with an unresolved symbol (GetChaseTarget) since I forgot > to link the camera code in. Sorry. This requires rebuilding the kit. I've put together new 3.19a set of builds. > The only change is a relink to include the missing object. This doesn't > affect players much, but does affect people running servers. > > New kits:
quake2-3.19a-2.i386.rpm
Quake2 for i386 libc5 Systems (RedHat 4.x, Slackware, et al.) in RPM format.
quake2-3.19a-glibc-2.i386.rpm
Quake2 for i386 glibc (libc6) Systems (RedHat 5.x, et al.) in RPM format.
quake2-3.19a-i386-unknown-linux2.0.tar.gz
Quake2 for i386 libc5 Systems (RedHat 4.x, Slackware, et al.) in TAR format.
quake2-3.19a-glibc-i386-unknown-linux2.0.tar.gz
Quake2 for i386 glibc (libc6) Systems (RedHat 5.x, et al.) in TAR format.
q2ded-3.19a-glibc-2.alpha.rpm
Quake2 Dedicated Server for alpha glibc (libc6) Systems (RedHat 5.x, et al.) in RPM format.
q2ded-3.19a-glibc-alpha-unknown-linux2.0.tar.gz
Quake2 Dedicated Server for alpha glibc (libc6) Systems (RedHat 5.x, et al.) in TAR format.
/// Zoid.

Daikatana [4:25pm]
Gamers Alliance has posted a new preview of Daikatana.

Q3 & Hardware [2:45pm]
John Carmack talking about multiple processors and Quake3. He also goes in depth about some crazy optimization stuff he was doing on the renderer.

For single player games where there is a lot of cpu time spent running the server, there could conceivably be up to an 80% speed improvement, but for network games and timedemos a more realistic goal is a 40% or so speed increase. I will be very satisfied if I can makes a dual pentium-pro 200 system perform like a pII-300

Also, Brian Hook made a .plan update stating TNT is the "current champ" of 3D accelerators. At least when it applies to Quake3

- ran some quick benchmarks to test triangle throughput of the various accelerators available today. The surprise winner was the Intel i740, which decimated the competition pretty handily. Wow. Very very impressive. However, with sufficient tuning I'm sure the other drivers will catch up in short time.

Following getting spammed with email, Brian said this:

This is why I hate plan updates. I do an update, then I get 7000 e-mails asking me questions. Okay, clarification: performance comparisons so far have NO included Banshee (due to lack of drivers) or V2 SLI (since we don't have a board near our test machine).

The numbers are for prelim versions of Q3:Arena, NOT Quake2.

Half-Life Shots [7:45am]
Level Alpha has posted a pair of new screenshots of Half-Life they scored from Valve. If you havent read the preview I did of Half-Life yet, do so. 6 more screenshots there to check out.


The first screenshot is of an extremely powerful and deadly energy blast that has killed a scientist and destroyed part of a wall. The second is of Gordon Freeman (Half-Life's main character) shooting at a grunt.

Weekly Links [5:55am]
Since you people have been good boys and girls you get the links today extra early. Take your time and click the links wisely, Thems is dangerous.

Unreal & TNT [5:55am]
While we are at it, check out what PlanetRIVA says about TNT's and Unreal:

The Riva TNT works with all of the OpenGL patches that I've released except the most recent one. The reason for this is that I introduced a bug that I am now working on with nVidia. A version that works optimally with the TNT should be released this week.

Q2 v3.19 Repost (FIXED!) [5:55am]
Teehee, Well if you were running v3.18 already and grabbed v3.19 yesterday, you should be fine since this was just a problem with the VWEP implementation. Here is Disruptors .plan:

The q2-319-x86.exe that I released earlier did not include the files necessary for you to take advantage of the VWEP code implemented in 3.19.
I have since updated; q2-319-x86.exe ... to include the pak2.pak which includes the VWEP models, but if any of you have already downloaded the update, and wish to take advantage of Visible Weapons in deathmatch, you may download; q2-319-vwep.exe ... and it will get you up and running.

Views [5:55am]

Tech Etc [5:55am]

Video Board 640x480 800x600 1024x768
Voodoo Banshee (16MB)

60.1

44.4

34.2

Voodoo2 (8MB)

69.8

49.9

N/A

Velocity V4400 (16MB)

59.4

41.5

32.0

werd
Holy hell that's a lot of email. Well I'm glad everyone seems to be happy that I'll be dropping the coverage of all that extra stuff and just concentrating the page back to where it belongs. Also, I dunno whats up with that demo I wanted to post. I'll try and get a hold of it today I guess. Check out this random demo I made earlier this week though if you're bored.

 

Wednesday, September 9

Quake2 v3.19 Released [5:25pm]
Christian "Disruptor" Antkow released the new Quake 2 v3.19 patch. here's the .plan update.

We've put up the Quake 2 v3.19 update patch on our FTP site.
I'll be sure to make the *-full (DM Maps)and *-full-ctf (DM Maps + CTF) releases available later on this eveing. There is an Alpha version of v3.19 available which we have marked as a beta because it has not been extensively tested. Mileage may vary.

q2-319-x86.exe
q2-319-axp-beta.zip

More Unreal Patch [7:05pm]
Ok, we've heard enough about the damn thing, just work on it or release it already. Here is part of the post from Tim Sweeney on the Unreal Tech page.

The Patch

I'm still working on the next patch. I'm becoming guilty of major feature creep here. Sorry, folks. The version is looking good, though, and is really close.

Oh well, there goes my great reputation for predicting release dates. :)

Other stuff I've been working on: Made the moving brush code about 30% faster. Eliminated another 1 meg of memory usage in gameplay. Cleaned up a lot of windowing code to improve stability under the upcoming OpenGL/Direct3D renderers. It's surprising how little time I spend programming big features, and how much time I spend on little tiny issues. This seems to be the nature of game development.

Half-Life OEM Shipping [3:25pm]
According to this story on CGO, Half-Life: Day One, the OEM version of the game has begun shipping to hardware manufacturers to be packaged with gaming hardware.

It indeed looks like Sierra’s long-awaited first-person action shooter, Half-Life, is nearing completion. While the game is scheduled for release sometime next month, Sierra has already begun shipping to hardware manufacturers an abridged OEM (original equipment manufacturer) version of the game, titled Half-Life: Day One

Also, you can check out the full press release from Sierra that was sent out. Oh, also check out the 2 new screenshots Dark Portal Map Database scored.

SHOGO [3:25pm]
GameSpot has posted a new preview of Monolith's SHOGO

What happens when you combine a newly created 3D-shooter engine with a love for anime such as Patlabor, Macross, or Neon Genesis Evangelion? The answer is Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, Monolith Production's next game. Coverage on Shogo has been a little sparse, but GameSpot recently got hold of an early build. After playing it extensively, we can safely say that Shogo is one of the most underrated action games of recent memory and will probably be a sleeper hit when it comes out this fall.

Blood2 @ VE [3:25pm]
A new interview with Jay Wilson of Monlith along with screenshots has shown up over at VE. There are also a couple of new shots.

Blood 2 will support any D3D compatible card, but I would recommend going with a Voodoo card, since they have produced some of the best performance, and allow support for all of our features.

I'm not commenting on framerates right now, mainly because we have just started optimizations, and the B2, like every game, isn't running spectacularly pre-optimization. Shogo is running great, and we'll have similar performance to them. 

Unreal FAQ [3:25pm]
You guessed it, The Unreal FAQ has been updated.

Views [3:25pm]

Tech Etc [3:25pm]

werd
After getting a couple of emails I've decided to refocus the page a bit. The page has been going off way out into nowhere land covering stuff like patches for racing games etc. I'm taking the page back to the "roots" of from which it came. 3D shooters. I'll still be covering hardware stuff however, because it's what we all play Quake on right?

Also, if things go as planned, my page will be completely advertisement free within a couple of months. Cross your fingers. Oh yea, in the mean time I scored a smaller banner to put up top there which isnt half as huge or irritating as the previous one. If it still bugs you guys I'll yank it though. I'll of course still be going off topic here a bit, but if you want to see stuff like racing games, sports simulations, and anything else 3D that is what www.3dnews.net is for.

Lastly, I'm don't have a local copy of the weekly DM demo I planned on posting. Give me a little while to get it and post. I goofed. :)

 

Tuesday, September 8

Doh? [11:35pm]
I guess I have issues. I sorta forgot to upload the weekly section today.. teehee. It's up now. I'm sorry for being such an inept turd. :) Oh, btw I took Monday off.. so that means no Monday section, get over it already! Thanks for all the email, I'm glad you guys enjoy this stuff. Half the fun is getting responses.

Broussard & Duke4 [2:25pm]
Bleh, forgot to link this the other day. If you guys are getting antsy about Duke4 you should check out the interview on LoonyGames with George Broussard.

Q:I hear that Duke Nukem Forever will be the last Duke game? Is this just a rumor?
A:Not just no, but HELL no. ;)

Stuff [2:25pm]
Done posted the weekly section, Also everyone has their panties in a wad over the fact that a new version of Winamp is out over at www.winamp.com so go have fun. v2.0!

Half-Life [12:35pm]
GameSpot UK kicked off an interview with Gabe Newell, managing director of Valve Software. There is also an image gallery of Half-life, although not all shots are new, there are still some awesome ones.

Max Payne & Images [12:35pm]
Once again GameSpot UK's got the best ECTS 98 coverage. They just posted some juicy info on Max Payne. Some of it is quoted below.

The most interesting feature of Max Payne is its weapons model. Set in contemporary New York, the game will not draw upon science-fiction elements for its weapons array. Instead, each gun has a real-world equivalent.

Following their preview of Max Payne, GameSpot UK has a Max Payne screen shot gallery up with bunch of cool and new screen shots

Daikatana SideKicks & Images [12:35pm]
According to OGR, the Daikatana SideKicks have finally been implemented into the game.

ION Storm announced that their first-person shooter Daikatana has "reached a critical milestone". According to ION Storm, the two sidekicks, Mikiko and Superfly, are now in the game and accompany the main character, Hiro, through the single-player game. ION Storm Lead Programmer Jonathan Wright created the bots (Jonathan also created the popular Zeus bot for Quake). "Daikatana's sidekicks are alive and kicking," said Romero.

Right after that, Blue's has gotten a hold of 4 images of them in action. Shot1 , Shot2 , Shot3 , Shot4 Don't forget to check out StormTroopers Daikatana ECTS coverage as well.

More Tech Etc [11:15am]

Quake3 & Hardware [2:15am]
John Carmack, lead programmer at id Software made a .plan update discussing different hardware and compatibility with Quake3 among other things.

<snip>
There aren't any troublesome aspects to TNT. Its just great. Good work, Nvidia.

In terms of raw speed, a 16 bit color multitexture app (like quake / quake 2) should still run a bit faster on a voodoo2, and an SLI voodoo2 should be faster for all 16 bit color rendering, but TNT has a lot of other things going for it:

<snip>
We will be releasing preliminary QuakeArena benchmarks on all the new boards in a few weeks. Quake 2 is still a very good benchmark for moderate polygon counts, so our test scenes for QA involve very high polygon counts, which stresses driver quality a lot more. There are a few surprises in the current timings...

King Pin [2:15am]
GameSpot UK continues their ECTS 98 coverage with a first look at Kingpin. Xatrix is developing this game with an enhanced version of the Quake II engine. GameSpot UK also has a screen shot gallery of Kingpin up. Check out this little snip from the first look.

With a surreal blend of action and adventure, Kingpin's emphasis never strays too far from non-stop blasting action. However one of its most intriguing features is the use of Trans-Levels - special sequences set between the normal episodes, which are used to advance the plot and usually involve piloting one of an assortment of vehicles. The one on show sees you flying a gyro-copter to hijack an airship and its load of advanced weaponry. Top stuff.

Messiah Soon?[2:15am]
Dave Perry of Shiny sent Billy Wilson of VE this response to his email.

The Messiah engine is complete and will be shown at the ECTS show in London on the 6th of Sept.  120 rooms are built, about 30 characters are built, the Neural AI is working...  We are now just adding pure gameplay...  We were hoping to meet Christmas, but until I get a handle on exactly how flexible we can make the game, we cannot give a final date.  I want it to be ultra flexible.

The minute I lock it down, the date will be up on Messiah.COM  I will be making this decision after I get back.  (I am in England at the moment.) dp

Views [11:15am]

Tech Etc [11:15am]

werd
Ahh... nice bit of relaxation and goofin off yesterday. Yea, the nerve of me taking a day off, what a jerk!

 

Monday, September 7

Holiday! [1:45pm]
Taking it easy myself for a day, hope you guys are having fun today skipping out on work.

Half-Life [1:45pm]
Mike Harrington of Valve Software posted a note on Contaminated.net's forum clearing up the confusion regarding the OEM version of Half-life that is suppose to be out in a week. Here is the post, thanks to Level Alpha for the news.

What is an OEM version? An OEM demo/release is a version of the game that is bundled with the hardware. Generally speaking, when you get buy a piece of add-on hardware like a Joystick, sound card or 3d card, it usually comes with some bundled games. Sometimes, especially when a game has been out for a while, a full version is bundled. Other times, when a game is still new to the market, a smaller demo version of the game is included.

What is the difference between an OEM demo and a public domain demo? The OEM demos are often much larger than a public domain demo. OEM demos are only distributed on CDs that come with the hardware. It is not intended that it be downloaded by the general public.

Nothing has changed on the public demo front. As we’ve said before, there will be no public demo released before the retail version of Half-Life ships.

We’re all working very hard to get HL out the door as soon as possible. Please don’t ask for a specific date because we just don’t have one. As soon as it is ready, we’ll get it out the door and into stores as fast as possible. Trust me, no one wants to see HL ship more than us!

-Mike

werd
I'll hook you knobs up with some more news action late this evening. Stay outa trouble!

 

Sunday, September 6

Genocide 4 QuakeWorld Tourney [5:25pm]
Here you go, the culmination of all that practice and hard work by all the Quake players in North America, Genocide4. With many of the "oldschool" netquake players making the switch to the more popular QuakeWorld, G4 looks to be the largest Quake Clan tournament ever, and the festivities start tomorrow! http://g4.giblets.net

Diablo2 = 3D Accelerated [5:25pm]
News from GameSpot over at ECTS that Diablo2 will actually take advantage of 3D accelerators! w00. Check out the big report over there and dig on a few more details of the game as well.

Unreal Update [5:25pm]
The boys over at www.planetunreal.com have posted this update from Mark Rein about Unreal

I finally got to see Unreal on the TNT last night. It was running beautifully in a Window but when we went to full screen there were a lot of strange artifacts showing up. I'm pretty sure the problem stemmed from having an incorrect version of nVidia's TNT D3D driver which should be resolved this morning. When we were running in a window let me tell you that it looked AMAZING! Really, really amazing; no banding at all, even in the torches outside the castle fly-by. It had excellent color reproduction, superb visual quality and it was pretty fast even at high resolutions. We also tried some impossibly high resolutions like 1280x1024 and, speed-wise, it actually held up a lot better than one would think. These resolutions will be wonderful for screen shots for ads and boxes. I was surprised that performance was pretty good at 1024x768 - especially considering that we're not done optimizing. In fact even when we release the first beta version of the D3D driver we'll be far from completely optimized and still working to make it faster. Hopefully by this morning they've located the proper driver and we'll be looking as spectacular at full screen as we did in a Window. I'll try to let you know later.

Half-Life Update [12:35pm]
This is sent along from Max of www.valveworld.com

Well that's day one of ECTS over and with the crowds and work I haven't had a real chance to look at Half-Life. Robin Walker of TF2 fame and Gabe Newell are there for Half-Life and I should get to say hi tomorrow with a bit of luck.

One tidbit I did gather is about a) release date and b) "demo" version.

According to Robin and a Sierra employee of my acquaintance, they hope to have Half-Life out within 4 weeks (this ties in with the rumours) and the OEM version in a week. The OEM will be around 25% of the whole game so in other words, plenty to keep people busy until the start of October. For the numerically challenged, that means the street date should be around the 5th October in the US probably the 9th over here in England.

Savage3D [12:35pm]
Kert unleashed a six part S3 Savage 3D review recently. What he tested was a reference board. Check the review out, it's very complete with load of good info.

Frag 2 Quake2 Maps Selected [10:45am]
The Cyberathlete Organization has selected the three deathmatch levels that will be used for the on-one-on Quake™ 2 tournament at the upcoming Frag 2 CPL event in Dallas, Texas. The levels will be:

The Edge - Q2DM1 Reckless Abandon - match1 The Frag Pipe - Q2DM3

Deus Ex [10:45am]
The boys over at PlanetUnreal scored an interview with Deus Ex's design team leader, Harvey Smith. Here is some stuff they talked about.

Has Deus Ex reached a point where it's a recognizable core of a game? Or is it still in the 'design docs stage'?

I cannot believe how far along DE has come in such a short time. Our programming staff, led by Chris Norden (of Longbow fame), is really good. Also, the Unreal package has helped us leap past a bunch of time-consuming stuff. It's important to note that we are working on a real RPG, not just some 'conversion' using the Unreal technology. We have a conversation system, NPC's, player-character skills, nano-tech-based augmentations ('powers'), an inventory system and other such elements. The game is prototypically playable right now--you can run around int he world, pick things up, drop them, talk to people, unlock doors, use inventory items, break glass and of course shoot things.

Views [11:15am]

Hardware Etc [11:15am]

werd
That's not right.. I gave that to you on the fu$@king list!

 

3DNews.net Last Weeks News copyright Steve Gibson 1998