According to the folks over at TheForce.net there has been a large scale group of resignations over at Lucas Arts. Steve Dauterman, the Director of Development and arguably the backbone of LucasArts, resigned this past week. Also departing LucasArts this week was Mark Haigh-Hutchinson, Project Leader for "Shadows of the Empire" and "Rogue Squadron". There were also a number of other employees who resigned that have not yet been named.

GA's got some new Messiah shots that you might want to check out. No hookers in those ones though. If you missed the new shots from yesterday, here they are again: shot1 shot2 shot3 shot4 shot5 and shot6.

GA-RPG has scored some new screenshots of Blade. You can also check out the PCZone preview of Blade.

The official FAKK2 page has been totally redesigned. Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.2, a $ 15 million, PG-13 animated feature produced in association with Sony Entertainment's Columbia/TriStar, will be released in 1999. So why should you be interested? Ritual Entertainment is currently working on a Quake3 engine based game using the same universe the movie uses. Check it out if you wanna know wtf FAKK stands for. Thanks loony via AiCN

The SpecForce.net page has yet another new screenshot of SpecOps2 in action.

A new game on the block I just got wind of being developed down in Austin, TX which should interest quite a few of you. ShadowBane by WolfPack Studios. It's a massive multiplayer online style game, but well here is their description:

Question: What IS Shadowbane?
The Goal - to Build an Alternate Reality
Most commonly, people will describe Shadowbane as an online game -- which seems natural, of course, as most of the technology used in it's creation is a direct result of recent advances in technology from the Gaming, Internet and Broadcast Entertainment (Television and Film) Industries.

Of course what you guys care about are screenshots though right? Well here are a couple of images below for you to check out that I thumbnailed, as well as shot3 and shot4.

Also speaking of bigass online multiplayer 3d games, Brad McQuad of Verant, the producer from EverQuest has updated his "producer letter" with some word on the EverQuest expansion pack in development that will be showing at GenCon.

GA-Games has some exclusive new videos with footage from Venom, a new FPS game being developed by GSC Game World using an engine called "Vital Engine ZL"

CGO does the preview thing taking a look-see at No One Lives Forever from Monolith. Yeah, it's that whole spoof of GoldenEye thingie. Check out these screenshots if you're feeling frisky: shot1 shot2 shot3 shot4 shot5 shot6

Double dose of sequels for ya. Next-Generation has some info on DeltaForce2 in development right now chatting about this newfangled "commanders screen" which may remind you of TRIBES. Then we've got SpecForce.net scoring a new screenshot of SpecOps2 which is in progress as well.

GameSpot UK has slapped up a few movies with footage of the Gathering of Developers titles in progress right now. Games including : Max Payne, Nocurne, Heavy Metal & Kiss . Also GameSpot TV has a new Unreal Tournament preview featuring surprisingly enough video footage of UT action going down.

Unreal Tournament promises to keep gameplay fresh by including several play modes. These include classics like Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Last Man Standing, and new variations such as Assault (like team Team Fortress), and a team-based mode called Domination.

The guys over at AVault are reporting that TombRaider4 is in development from the Core guys and we should be seeing an announcement within a couple of weeks. They have also gotten word that the gameplay will be swinging back towards exploration instead of the heavy gameplay/fighting stuff that we all saw in TR3. The big question though, are they gonna recycle that god awful outdated engine for another title?

Just caught this during my daily .plan browsing: Kingpin thug, Ryan Feltrin updates his .plan file again with the announcement that the Linux server is now available:

The Linux Kingpin dedicated server is now available. This is considered a BETA release, although it may not be marked as such, we have only tested it for about 16 hours on a half-dozen servers. There are currently two packages available.

Dedicated server PACK. This includes all maps and player models required to run a dedicated server only. (10.5mb)

Intel386 Linux glibc 2.0.7 binaries. (0.5mb)

Make sure to read the kp_linux_readme.txt for installation and usage notes. Please report any bugs to me asap. I'm new to Linux development, so be as informative as possible with any reports.

One of the coolest things I saw at E3 was the LithTech2.0 technology demo. Flipcode takes a peak at this engine in the form of an interview with Mike Dussault:

The landscapes we're working on don't really classify as a special effect, but they will be pretty impressive. The E3 demo we did really only was the beginning. Things that helped the landscapes look good were volumetric fog, the water reflection, and detail textures. The scale is also pretty staggering. We are going to great pains to not have a fog-clipping-plane thing in our terrains :)

Voodoo Extreme fired off a question to John Carmack regarding the state of Q3 and the video and sound. Since there's no other way to do this, I'm gonna have to rip it:

Billy's Question on Q3: Since you don't really have a time frame of when Q3 will be done ("When it's done, dammit"), are you planning on doing anything else to the engine, as far as visuals? Also, any word on 3D audio support, last I heard (from Brian, way back when), was that it was still up in the air.

John Carmack Responds:Most of the work now is optimization, and trying to get everyone to utilize the features we already have. The latest levels look tons better, but it is due to better texture and geometry use, rather than new features.

3D sound is still not implemented.

John Carmack

Not really a 'view, but just a word to those trapped on a Mac that Quake 2 is now shipping.

Shack once again features Samhell, this time with 10 questions with Charlie Brown of Valve Software. Interesting stuff as always, but here's a sample anyways:

4. Are there any plans in the works for you to aid Valve in developing their own proprietary engine?
Someday in the future, a full proprietary engine may emerge. The current "Valve" engine has evolved quite a bit from the Quake engine.  Valve has spent over 3 years enhancing and modifying the original source code. There was a lot of Valve in Half-Life. :)  TF2 is a further modification and I think gamers will be pleased with the result.

Developer Quest Magazine picks Aaron Leiby's (SFX programmer at Legend) brain on general Wheel of Time development stuff and, of course, eye candy:

I also like to think of myself as the Special Effects programmer for WoT. I've added a few of the cooler features (IMHO) to WoT. Such features include weather effects like the rain we showed off at E3, and a generalized particle system that we use extensively throughout WoT -- from the ter'angreal effects to campfires to healing zones. I also added the ability to leave scorchmarks and bloodsplatters on surfaces throughout the levels. This increases the player's immersion level by making them feel like they're really affecting the level around them -- many times, it's the simple things that make the biggest impact. Such effects usually stem from one of the level designers coming down to my office and saying, "you know what would be cool...", and shortly thereafter, its in the game. I provide the toys, and the level designers use them in their levels.

Hey looks like our new comment system caught the eye of Mike Werckle of Human Head, currently working on Rune. He made a .plan update in regards to this post that I made the other day all about their goals for Rune.

There are companies out there that take a popular game and remake it with only cosmetic changes. Human Head is *not* one of those companies. With RUNE we are trying to push the envelope by exploring new modes of gameplay and expanding in new directions. Personally I liked Tomb Raider and Heretic2, but their major flaw was that the weapons were mostly ranged or area effects. I know that a lot of people, myself included, played Heretic2 using only the melee staff, which was uprgraded several times through the game. There was something very satisfying about running up to a creature and spinning around and slicing them into chunks. For me, the great lesson of Heretic2 is that First Person games are better for aiming ranged weapons, and Third Person games are better for Hand to Hand combat. It is with this wisdom that we are creating RUNE. We want to take that awesome feeling of power that we all experienced with the staff in Heretic2 and expand it into a robust combat system with many different kinds of weapons. In RUNE, the Viking RAGNAR *is* the weapon: Each weapon he picks up will have it's own special attack that will be refelcted in RAGNAR'S animation. RUNE isn't a "poke and run" type of game. The combat will contain a great deal of complexity, through a very simple set of controls.

Tim Sweeney is at it again, but this time with an editorial with his view on graphics technology (accelerators, engines, etc...) over the past couple of years. It's an interesting read, check it out.

When a company like Epic or id Software builds a 3D engine, we do it with the expectation of it powering games that sell a few million copies, between our games and licensee projects.  We make money from each one, and that realization drives investment in making more and better tools.  This gives our engines a price, performance, and feature advantage over "in-house" engines made specifically for one game, and over less-capable engines designed for niche markets.  We amortize our R&D investment over ~10X more units sold.  This licensing model has already proven successful with mainstream game developers, but now it's starting to overflow into non-game markets too.  We have this great 3D engine, why not use it for your architectural walkthrough?

Ryan Feltrin of Xatrix updates the .plan in hopes to help those who are having Kingpin problems with long CD load times, and some bits about a Linux server.

First, the response to Kingpin Deathmatch and Teamplay (BagMan) has been great. However, this has caused a severe shortage of servers, so I have been working feverishly on the linux dedicated server port, which I'm happy to say is ready for small-scale testing.

<snip> Hopefully this first stage of testing will go smoothly and if so, the linux server will be just a few days away.

I have no idea if the fixes work as I haven't got my hands on Kingpin yet.