Those hoping to relive the glory days of Q3Test are in luck: id Software's web-based Quake 3 throwback Quake Live is now open for beta signups on the official website.

Quake Live will be a free multiplayer FPS accessed through a single web portal--quakelive.com--which will also offer free friends lists, sponsored events, tournaments, and matchmaking services.

Kenn Hoekstra over at Raven Software has a .plan update announcing the Soldier of Fortune demo downloads have gotten to levels near the first Q3Test download numbers. He also has a fix for Yamaha soundcard owners.

Thursday, January 27th, 2000 - Webmasters are reporting Soldier of Fortune download traffic as comparable to Kingpin and the first Q3:A test... Not a bad showing if I do say so myself! I'm continuing to lead the tech support charge on our message boards and we seem to have most problems nailed down. The biggest one that I'm aware of is the fact that the demo hangs on a blue/gray screen for users who havea YAMAHA DX-SG sound card or similar YAMAHA model.
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Paul Jaquays from id Software has made a huge followup on the lost Quake3 maps story that went up yesterday in the comments here. He covers all kinds of topics like why the railgun trial changed, what happened to those nifty pulsating textures, and some in depth detail on Q3DM8 among other things. Pretty interesting stuff. Here's a bit:

OK, now let's talk about that weapon with the particle trail that the 'xian' model is shooting. I'm pretty certain that was an early version of the plasma gun. It looks cool and I like the particles. We could have done some awesome things with them as the shader functions matured, but as a game feature in Q3A, they were problematic, at best. Everyone talks about how cool the rail trail was in early shots of Quake 3 Arena (pretty much just like the Q2 rail). However, while testing Q3Test2 (now Q3dm17), we learned that a single rail shot added an instant hit of 3000+ polygons to the map. In bigger space maps, it would have been worse. Ouch. So the art changed. We had similar problems with other functions using particles. And so, particles left the game.

The guys at the newly opened Challenge-US have an article up talking about gameplay comparisons between Quake1 DM3 and Q3Test Q3DM7

For the FreeBSD users out there, you here are all the files you will need to get the latest Q3TestDEMO working under the OS. It's not 100% solid or anything just yet, but you can expect more updates to appear on the page. Thanks loony

As if the server wasnt totally bogged down enough already. Mike Wardwell of the CPL was kind enough to hand over the FRAG3 final 8 demos to myself to release to you guys. As many of you guys know Q3Test v1.08 has some problems with demo playback. I would recommend checking out either the comments on this news item (which will be a bit slow, sorry) Hope you guys enjoy the demos, and thanks to Damage for hosting the files. Oh, almost forgot. Here is the link to the demos!

Well, I think another Q3Test preview article would be a bit of overkill. However I got the OK from Graeme to go ahead and answer a few questions for you guys that you may have for the game (assuming I know the answer.. heh). Here is your chance, just slap a question in the comments and I'll compile up a bunch of them and answer what I can late this evening. Please try and read through everyone elses questions before posting your own to avoid repeats. Also be sure and check out my 1.09 preview from earlier to see if your question might have already been answered.

To round out the evening, SharkyExtreme has an Intel P3-800mhz CPU already. Actually they got a non-locked P3-733 and cranked it to 800mhz. But the benchmarks they got should prove to be about the same. It's interesting to note that Sharky shows the Athlon faster than a P3-667 in Q3Test, and Anand shows the other way around with the Intel 667 on top.

update: Just realized Anand used a GeForce and Sharky used a TNT2. So... oops.

Hard OCP has a follow up to their look at Q3test SMP, they've now tested a second processor to act as a kind of a geometry accelerator (hey hey they even mentioned Steve :) ).

Team Abuse updated their Q3Tourney guide, which is turning out to be a pretty darn big guide filed with tips and tricks for the Q3Test tournament map.

Yet another evening .plan update from John Carmack on the latest changes he's made to Quake3. It's mostly just technical mumbo jumbo. He's like, working on it or something though I'm pretty sure. I guess the only real change that might really interest you guys is he's now got a seperate sound channel setup for all local client sounds so you don't miss any. I'm guessing that means no more missing the "hit tone" when you tag someone with a rail on Q3Test2 eh?

There are some quotes from an upcoming interview from Games Business with id's Graeme Devine up on FGNOnline, where Graeme describes how they are using user feedback from Q3test for improvement of the full version of Quake III Arena.

He said, "Most of the criticisms are to do with either gun or weapon balance but we haven’t really made too many changes because the maps we have out there aren't really a good indication of the full retail product. One is very open and spacey and meant to just test modem play. The other shifts lots of polygons."

He added, "We have listened to their concerns on network play, for example. We've addressed their issues and we're trying to balance a hell of a lot more; trying to give players the gameplay that they want. We try and listen to the new consumers and the old faithful consumers as well."

We're just gonna call today Benchmark-o-rama day. I'm still working on all of the documentation, but for those of you who can't wait here are the raw benchmarks which includes a P2-300, P3-450, and Athlon600 for a GeForce256, TNT2U, and V3-3500.  I will be adding more benchmarks including a "fastest" set of benchmarks later this week, as well as a "high poly" set. I'll also look at adding Unreal Tournament benchmarks. Pay close attention to the settings I used (no sound, no brass ejection) before attempting to compare your own system benchmarks. I would also recommend looking at this older set of benchmarks conducted by Brian Hook which compares other video cards like the Savage and TNT1. Here are the Athlon600 numbers to interest you guys:

Make sure and check out the rest of the benchmarks. Also, for those of you who keep saying Q3Test does not use the GeForce GPU, here is an explanation from Jack Mathews of Ritual:

Steve: Hey, fuckbag, what's the deal with Quake 3 and the use of T&L?

Jack: Quake 3 does indeed use T&L and will take advantage of any hardware supporting it.  It uses OpenGL's transformation pipeline for all rendering operations, which is exactly what T&L cards such as the GeForce accelerate.

Well what if Q3 used the other stuff besides the transform engine?  The other three real features are the per-vertex lighting, the vertex blending, and the cube environment mapping.  Since Quake 3 has static world lighting, one of the only places for the lighting to be useful would be for the character lighting, especially for dynamic lights.   The current character lighting implementation is pretty quick though, I don't really see *too* much of an improvement there, though it is worth mentioning.  The vertex blending may help skeletal animation, but since the current test has no skeletal animation, it would not help it at all in the current benchmarks. And the cube environment mapping won't help the game at all, since the game doesn't use cube environment mapping to begin with.

While I'm at it, the use of OpenGL doesn't necessarily mean that all games will be accelerated by the GeForce's T&L.  Such examples are Unreal engine (including UT) based games.  Its architecture is very different from QuakeX's and cannot benefit from T&L hardware without rearchitecting the renderer, as Tim Sweeney has said before.

Also, since doing the initial benchmarks I've discovered that the GeForce I have is highly overclockable, although it does not impact the benchmarks at lower resolutions (CPU limited), the 800x600 numbers and above really climb. For example the 800x600 high quality Q3Test score jumps from 80fps to an astonishing 103fps. I'm working on a number of follow-ups for you guys to be posted some time Tuesday afternoon.

Argh, ok well with the help of Jack and his excel wizardry (heh) I've got 35 (!) charts showing off benchmarks of the GeForce, V3 3500, and TNT2Ultra running Q3Test and Quake2 in all sorts of video settings and running on 300mhz, 450mhz, and a 600mhz cpu. Hopefully this will be one of those end-all be-all benchmark pages that should keep you guys happy for a little while. Gotta jpg them all up and all that jazz, still on schedule for posting late this evening.

Also, I added the ability to comment on views/tech sections for those of you who wanna post something like "These new drivers are screwed" etc. Gotta get that array error fixed, but it's a bit lower on the priority list for now.

Well, as I mentioned yesterday afternoon before I flew home I've finally gotten my hands on a NVidia GeForce256 card. I'll be spending the weekend benchmarking the card and have already started to do a bit of that before the need to pass out has overtaken me. I've made a couple of interesting discoveries already which won't interest you guys a whole lot aside from making my benchmarks more accurate than I believe most others have been. I'll have the completed GeForce article ready to roll tomorrow evening but I wanted to give you guys a taste of the benchmarks I've come up with:

System: Athlon 600mhz, 256megs pc133 ram.
Settings: High Quality, no sound.
Game: Q3Test v1.08
Creative TNT2Ultra @ 800x600 = 60.3fps
NVidia GeForce256 @ 800x600 = 80.4fps

Very interesting yes? I'll have all of the other resolutions covered, as well as several other cpus included in the benchmarks come tomorrow night (hopefully) for you guys. Oh yeah, and NVidia sent me some email I'll post for you guys later not very happy about that post I made yesterday.

One of the most amusing PR moves by NVidia I've seen so far. Someone at the office discovered the r_subdivisions console command in Q3Test and now they claim GeForcemakes it better. Just look at the shots!

There's a "Godlike Q3Test guide" on the Godlike Q3A page.

This website has info on the Q3test 3 v 3 Invitational Tournament which will go down during the Frag 3. The tournament is open for registeration to any team that will be present at the Frag 3. 16 teams will be picked by to participate in the tournament. There will be prizes from Abit and Erazor.

Carried over from yesterday: As I mentioned a couple of days ago I took a trip down to id Software to check out the latest build of Q3Test, I was actually just there to help Carmack tweak the lightning gun but as always I ended up playing a whole lot more. I wrote up my impressions of the latest build and listed off some of the features for you guys. I shared a few more of my opinions than usual in this one, lets see if it pisses any of you guys off eh? Here's a quote from Carmack on the rocketlauncher:

Steve: how many units wide is the rocket splash?
Carmack: 120 units, mesured from the point of impact to the edge of a characters bounding box. It does 100 points damage if it hits directly, scaling linearly down to 0 at the 120 range.

You guys can of course leave your comments here, or (preferably)head over to the Quake3 messageboard which doesnt hurt my server so much so I can hopefully keep the server online for the rest of the evening.

George Broussard made a post to the 3DR boards with word that they will be releasing a few new screenshots of Duke4Ever, but not until the end of November when the December PCGamer is released. (Big Duke4 feature) Havent seen many new Duke4 shots in a while, Here are all the shots of Duke4Ever I have: [shot1] [shot2] [shot3] [shot4] [shot5] [shot6]

Oh yeah, and I updated the suckage as promised to you guys. Working on my Q3Test report this evening, it will be ready hopefully late tonight.