Brian Raffel from over at Raven Software updated his little .plan thingy saying the Soldier of Fortune demo should be out like real soon, but also that Raven will be entering the console market by developing a Playstation 2 game. Check it:

Well, The SOF Demo is looking VERY good and should pass through QA by the end of this week. We will keep you posted as to when you will be able to down load the demo and from what site. The Demo will include one single player level and two multiplayer levels.

I am also proud to announce that Raven Software will be doing a Playstation2 title, which will be announce in the near future. We are very excited about venturing into the console market, particularly on the PX2. We finally got all of our development systems and they are awesome.

Reader idea, thanks hoover :) Since news is so slow currently, why don't we have a demo contest? Make a demo in Q3 of one minute or less showing something cool that you can do in the game, be it a minute long of bouncing, some ninja rocket jump moves or similar things. I'd suggest just zipping up the demos and putting them on a public server for the others to check out. I'll even watch them all to select a winner who will, euh, receive worldfame and a lap dance by Steve.

A playable demo of Thief2 has been released over on 3DFiles.com I'm on my way home, sorry for the brief update etc. I'll see ya guys later tonight with a bit more stuff. Someone post a comment to tell us if it's worth the download eh? Here is a link to the website.

Raven's Rick Johnson posted to this thread on the Soldier of Fortune forums, where someone was wondering if the demo would be out this year. Here's what the man had to say (thanks chris):

In answer to your question, a demo will NOT be available this year. The holiday season disrupts the whole development process too much (as well as QA won't be available).

Sorry, but we aren't rushing this out.

If you havent checked out the sequel to C&C from Westwood yet, they have a playable demo now available on their FTP. Thanks Ant.

This story on EETimes has word of AMD demonstrating a 900mhz version of their Athlon using the copper interconnects that the Dresden fab in Germany produces. Seems AMD has no problems upping up the mhz ante over Intel. The article also notes that the 800-MHz Athlon will be out next quarter, with the 1GHz coming out mid-2000. Thanks Chris Tom.

Word from Graeme Devine is that the Mac Q3Demo will finally be released some time tonight. I'll let you guys know when it's available (unless someone in the comments beats me to it, which I'm sure they will.. bah!)

update: Yup, the demo is out. (and some punk in the comments beat me to it) you can grab it from the Quake3Arena.com page here.

For those still without the retail version of Q3 (A lot of Europeans >:( ) and running Linux, id has released the Official Q3A Demo. No word on the Mac release.

Looks like the official Soldier of Fortune demo is just about ready to release. Rick Johnson has a new .plan update (Thanks Redwood) with a quick question about network support while he's at it. If you havent taken a look at SoF yet here's a bunch of screenshots.

12/13/99
We're getting close to putting out a public demo of SoF. While we are busy working on that, along with finishing up the main game, we've also been working hard on networking and various DM games / modes. My question to everyone is, how important is IPX support? Does anyone really use this anymore (i.e. can we drop support for it in SoF)? Let me know...

The guys at Tweak3D have posted a new 'push your system' Quake3 demo for benchmarking in case you're into the whole testing your fill rate and cpu thing.

As mentioned by Graeme earlier, the Q3Demo is ready to you can grab it over at the official Quake3Arena page, also AVault , 3DAG , FilePlanet, and Blues. Also, Disruptor has an important .plan update for those of you who already have your CD keys. The CD key is stored in your config.cfg so if you ever copy the game over or give your config to a friend, make sure and edit the config.cfg to gank out your CD key!

Please treat your retail config files as you would the alarm code to your house, or the PIN number on your bank card. If you must send your configs to someone, please make sure to edit out the "set cl_cdkey xxx..." line.

Wondering where the full demo of Q3A is? Here is the .plan update from Graeme Devine up at id Software with the latest word. It looks like the demo is in final QA testing up at Activision right now so we can hopefully expect it any day now. Also, the master is going down again some time today.

In preparation for the full release.

The motd/master/auth servers run on ports 27950, 27951, 27952. The default game server is on port 27960. If you’re firewalled against these ports you’ll need to get unfirewalled to play the game. If we work on the servers from now on we’ll notify the community and schedule the maintenance for the slowest period of the day (currently around 6am Dallas time).

We have what we consider a “gold” build of the demo. We’re putting it through the final push of QA at Activision before releasing it since this build is going to be more or less prevalent throughout the known universe.

A day late, but with a lot of stuff fixed and added, Shiny has released the updated Messiah demo. Voodoo Extreme has got the exclusive, grab it here. They have both the new demo and a patch for the old demo. This new version will make dialup users cry even more though, as the demo is now 90.6mb (compared to 70mb last time) and the patch is 39.1mb. Here are a few things that have been fixed

- Get rid of 32 bit resolution check
- Fixed A3D bug in their audio card detect code
- Mip mapping enabled (speed increase...looks better)
- Fixed 3DFX palette error bug
- Fixed TnL buffer size (Nvidia GeForce 3D card issue)
- Updated some AI states, improving gun-fights

Apparently an old bug slipped by though, as you are still required to set your card to 16-bit, and it still won't work in 32-bit. That's pretty stupid imho. How do you like the new version? Post your your comments.

There's a new Delta Force demo out, this time with multiplayer support unlike the first one. Anyone tried this thing, multiplay any fun? Grab it at AVault, 36mb. Thanks Valiance.

Westlake Interactive released version 348m4 of the Mac Unreal Tournament demo. You can grab the patch here.

A playable demo of Star Trek: Hidden Evil has been released by Activision. Thanks Ant for the word. It's a nice comfy 24meg demo which is a pleasant surprise given the latest trends of 70+ meg demos. Dunno if it's any good or not, but the screenshots are fairly cool looking.

Well with the announcement of Quake3 going gold the big question is where is the official Q3Demo release? Here is word from our man Graeme. A little known fact about Graeme is that he collects hubcaps from any Chevrolet car built in the 70's. The man is truely an enigma.

I’m working on updating the full demo today. We’ll bash on it a bit and get it out there over the next few days. Once it’s out there I’ll be updating the cdkey authorize server to the final version. Unfortunately this is not compatible with the demo test, so you’ll need to upgrade to either the full version of Q3A (woo hoo!) or download the new demo.

Also, I just dug up this press release from Activision that came out this morning which mentions Quake3 shipping.

Kenn Hoekstra updated his .plan with an update to the news posted this morning, saying that there WILL be a Soldier of Fortune demo.

After some investigating, I can tell you that apparently I DID miss a meeting somewhere. There WILL be a public demo for Soldier of Fortune that will be released for everyone to download and enjoy. The demo will support both single player and multiplayer. When I said "not anytime soon" I meant we haven't sent a demo build to QA yet, so there's still some time to wait. I can't give any "official" date for the demo (I know better than that), but with any luck, Raven fans will be able to give Soldier of Fortune a spin while they're home for the holidays.

Here is word from GA-Source on the possible SoF OEM demo we were hearing so much about a few weeks ago. Kenn Hoekstra had this to say:

Kenn Hoekstra, Raven Software Project Administrator, sent GA-Source the latest word on the Soldier of Fortune demo. And unfortunately it's not looking like gamer's will be getting to play it anytime soon. "There are no plans to release a SoF demo anytime soon... unless I missed a meeting or something?" Hoekstra said. "No final decisions have been made about a demo after the OEM leak."

Saw over at Slashdot that the Linux Quake III Arena Demo Test (how's that for a title?) has been released over at the Q3 Demo Page. Here they are in RPM packaging and good old tarball format. Also just in case you were in a hole somewhere, here's the Win32 and Mac versions. Everybody go here and talk amongst yourselves.