Some screenshot action for ya early this afternoon to brighten your day. GA-Source has some new shots of that VRND project attempting to recreate the Notre Dame cathedral in the Unreal engine which is getting more and more impressive. After you dig on those check out the new Alone in the Dark 4 shots.

FPSGamers sends word of an interview with Garth Chouteau of the PGL talking about where pro gaming is going and how they never take cheap shots at the CPL.

AVault has a new preview of Revenant which has caught the eye of a number of gaming mags recently as being a hot competitor to Diablo2.

In follow-up to the story yesterday mentioning the first TombRaider 4 screenshots, GameSpot UK has a new interview with the Core Designs operations director.

3DGaming.net takes a look at Omikron: Nomad Soul.

The guys at B4Itsdone have scored a bunch of screenshots of Darkstone which are all quite impressive looking. Make sure to check it out.

GA-RPG has a new interview with Jared Hosh of Mushroom Blue Entertainment talking about work on Survival, a huge online RPG-esque game.

A recent GameSpot article has some new screenshots of Tomb Raider 4 in action. Check out the high poly boob action.

Human Soft's SEED game has a few new screenshots popping up around the net. You can check out GA-Source for 6 new screenshots of their game in action. You can also checck out VE for a pair of new shots as well.

3DPalette interviews Darren Pattendon of Bullfrog Entertainment who can take credit for a lot of work on Dungeon Keeper 2.

AVault has a new preview of SpecOps2 which is worth a look. It's pretty in depth and gives some new details on the game (At least they are new to me ok?) Thanks VE

3DGaming.net digs up the afro wigs and takes a look at I82.

The GA-Source guys have slapped up a new screenshot of the Werwolf game as well as a bit from Travis Williams about the "Z-Lock" camera system they are using in the game to make it more "visceral". While you are there also have a look at the new Thief2 article.

Some inevitable .plan updates at id following the release of the updated Q3Test. Graeme Devine updates about some variable things they missed or are hard to find in the readme:

g_gametype

A value of 0 here indicates classic “Free For All”, a value of 1 indicates “Tournament Play” and a value of 2 indicates “Team Deathmatch”.

So, to start a dedicated server in tournament mode, you would use:

quake3 +set dedicated 2 +set zone tournaments +set g_gametype 1 +map q3tourney

The warmup time for tournament play is set with g_warmup. A tournament game is implicitly a one on one match, and further players are automatically entered as spectators (note, when the game starts, all clients, including the spectators respawn). You can follow the players by using “team follow1”, “team follow2”, and you can be a scoreboard by using “team scoreboard”.

Graeme continues on about broken joystick support and the master server bobbing up and down.

CGO reports that Sierra, Valve, etc. are planning to showcase some of the most impressive Half Life mods in a cafe in San Francisco:

• Action Half-Life, a multiplayer MOD that brings the excitement of Hong Kong action films to Half-Life.
• Counterstrike, a military simulation MOD that pits a hostage rescue team against terrorists.
• Science & Industry, a multiplayer MOD where the key to success lies in your team's ability to discover new weapon technologies
• Kanonball, a rugby-style sports game set in beautifully rendered futuristic arenas
• Chemical Existence, a challenging single-player game where the hero fights gangs, mutants, and evil corporations
• Gunman, a total conversion of Half-Life's single player game that blends science fiction with elements from the Old West
• USS Darkstar, a single-player action adventure set in a starship in deep space

'pache of VE spotted on Bot Epidemic that specwarguru posted an interview with Valve's very own Robin Walker (Team Fortress 2). It's a pretty good read for a slow  night! (14 questions with pretty detailed answers):

Draco : How would you rate the realism factor of Team Fortress 2 ? I know the game is supposed to be fun and adds realism through the need for teamwork, but can you tell us more about the efectiveness of the weapons ? How easy is it to die in the game ?

A: Our goal in regards to realism is to create an easily recognisable environment, so that new players understand what's going on. If I give my father a purple gun that fires a green glowy thing, he doesn't know what it does. If I give him an assault rifle, and dump him into an amphibious landing craft that transports him onto a beach where enemies begin firing at him, he knows exactly what he should do. He knows what the assault rifle will do when he fires it, and he knows what will happen if he doesn't run from that grenade that just landed in front of him. So, we look real, but we're not trying to be real. Real war isn't fun. Dying two seconds after the front of the boat drops isn't fun. We know the kind of gameplay we want, and we try to fit reality to it whenever we can.

Serberus has just sent word that he has released the first beta of his Q3 config tool. Here's what it's supposed to do in a nutshell:

Quake3Arena Configuration Tool helps players exploit Q3A console commands not found in the in-game menus and provides the facilities to tune Q3A for best performance, best visual quality or a combination.

and this is what it did for him (btw, what is he doing with a Voodoo1 on a P2-450?)

I had a look at the new Q3Test this morning. Pretty cool, I don't know if Carmack has been busy optimising performance but I was surprised to see when I chose the 'Best Performance' option in Q3Tweak my lowly Pure3D (Voodoo 1 - 6MB) held a steady frame rate of 60FPS!!!

Here's some stuff that you guys might want to muck around with now that the new Q3Test is out- to enable cheats (thanks gibbles:)

Start a map in the console using:
devmap q3test1
devmap q3test2
devmap q3tourney

To get all weapons and the grappling hook simply hit F4. For god mode, hit F10.

And to get some "true" benchmark numbers, here's the timedemo feature (thanks Moto-Chow)

• Pull down the console
• Type timedemo 1
• Type demo q3testdemo1.dm3 or demo q3testdemo2.dm3

3D-Unlimited has posted an interview with Mike Werckle from Human Head Software talking about their upcoming Unreal engine Adverture game, Rune. They discussed, engine use, eye candy, plot, characters, weapons, what to expect for new features.

Mortyr.net reports that the demo has been pushed a tad to early next week, but should be out before Wednesday unless something really big shows up. It will still be out long before the game is out.