A new version of Q3Tweak has been released. Making it so even someone with 10 thumbs can get better framerates in Quake3.

AVault has begun their coverage of the NYC Quake3 GroundZero tournament which is starting this Thursday.

IMG, a Mac Games mag has an interview up with John Carmack discussing programming on the Macs, gaming performance, the new G4 and what the "base iMac" should be (64MB RAM, Rage128 Vid Card, better speakers and a better mouse. Here's a quote:

Bernier: Why do fast Macs (B&W G3), even though they often beat Pentium machines in Photoshop head-to-head, trail behind PC machines in 3D games?

Carmack: Photoshop filters are excellent optimization testbeds, but they are rarely apples to apples comparisons because of their hand tuned nature. I'm pretty sure that if Intel put some of their top guys on the task, they could be competitive with PPC on most Photoshop filters. There are certain tasks that AltiVec can be much better at, but in general, the raw computational rates are pretty close.

Word from the guys at Truegamers.net is that Eric Paik, aka Batch has won the ECTS Q3Test tournament with a close 15-14 victory over Rix-r3v and then a 14-11 victory over Sujoy for the finals. Check out QuakeNation.com as well for more info.

The ServerWatch guys have released a new version of their nifty util that funny enough watches a LAN for Q3Test servers to pop up, as well as TRIBES.

Another late night .plan update from John Carmack at fingershack.com. It looks like Quake3 will be going to a skeletal animation system. (As opposed to vertex based animation, which Q3 does right now) The benefit of the new system that Carmack didnt mention in this .plan update is saving extra memory. With vertex based animation the locations of all vertices have to be stored in memory, with bones it's much simpler as several vertices are tied to single bones making less coordinates to have to be stored in memory. At least I'm pretty sure. :)

I implemented the loading and rendering support this weekend and tested it with a couple hand-inserted bones, so now we just need to write the glue between character studio and the new .md4 format.  The new format is bone based, but it is NOT hierarchial. Each vertex just has an arbitrary weighted list of the bones that influence it. Bones are just 4x3 matricies of floats.

The NVNews guys have a Quake3 Tweaking guide which are always handy.

gBi0Tch's Home Page has busted out a new Q3Test log analyzer which spits out some really impressive stats. If you're running a large Quake3 server it's pretty damn cool. Thanks Hutama

Stayne's House of Demos has posted another interesting 1on1 demo. Have a good look at Sujoy Roy playing some 1on1 in his recent weekend frag fest.

Carried this one over since it happened so late. John Carmack has a .plan update in response to a lot of people asking him to comment on the new "NVidia card with the funny name" and the Apple G4. Here is his take ont he GeForce256, and you can read the whole .plan at fingershack.com for what he thinks of the G4

Nvidia's new geometry accelerated card with the funny name.
It is fast. Very, very fast. It has the highest fill rate of any card we have ever tested, has improved image quality over TNT2, and it gives timedemo scores 40% faster than the next closest score with extremely raw beta drivers. The throughput will definately improve even more as their drivers mature.For max framerates in OpenGL games, this card is going to be very hard to beat. Q3's target of about 10,000 triangles a frame doesn't stress this card at all. If you want more polygons out of Q3, you can do:

r_lodBias -2 // don't use lower detail models
r_subdivisions 1 // lots more triangles in curves
r_lodCurveError 10000 // don't drop curve rows for a long time

Just got word of this ZDTV Interview with John Carmack which took place at the QuakeCon99 event a few weeks ago. They were kind enough to break up the interview into several parts. Here ya go ION Storm, his favorite Q3A weapon, and Quake III Arena strategies, and Before Wolfenstein 3-D, on Half-Life, Quake III Arena design philosophy, and what's next for id. RealPlayer, or Equivalent, required. Thanks Blue

Graeme Devine updates his .plan on naked lizards, squishing the rumors of a Matrix game (haven't heard that one myself though), and some other misc. stuff. Here it is:

I see a lot of people are playing with nude reptiles!

We are not doing a Matrix game. When we finish Q3A we'll start on the next project. We will try and fit the words "welcome to my underground lair" into the next game, mostly because we think Steed would be good at making fembots.

Okay, that's more of a suggestion than a truth. We'll probably do something completely different based on stories of the Quake 3 Bus and the Nevada desert.

Redwood got some email from Paul Steed over at id Software talking about the possible skeletal animation that John Carmack mentioned the other day. It's not for sure if they will be moving Quake3 to that or not yet but here is a bit of what Paul had to say:

Accordingly I doubt it's implementation will be much more than that of Half Life's skeletal animation system and net us some memory 'belt-loosening' as opposed to a revolutionary way for me to breath more life into the characters. BUT, you never know. I have this bad habit of taking the technological limitations imposed by the exceedingly superior coding of Mr. Carmack and making something cool out of it.

With the word yesterday of problems with the master server reporting empty servers, according to Stomped the GameSpy guys finally figured out how to get around things on their end and you should be seeing larger server listings again. If I may chant the PQ theme along with Mr Heaslip, ROCK!

Also, I failed to mention this yesterday but in the 2nd part of Graeme Devine's .plan update he challenges people to compare the net codes of Quake, QuakeWorld, Quake2, and Quake3. Honestly, with the horrid player collision code, and the players lerping around in Quake3 right now I'd choose QW or Quake2. Also I'll try and squeeze and explanation outa Jack on the time-spanned error correction in Quake3 which bugs the hell outa me.

Well, instead of me explaining this one just check out the .plan update from Graeme Devine up there at id Software. Those Quake3 servers didnt dissapear off the master server, they are just empty. He explains how to get them back:

Some of you have commented on the master server being a bit odd right now. It's actually running just fine, it's just responding to queries for protocol 41, which is not entirely compatible with protocol 40. Only servers with people on there will actually show up. You can force showing the empty servers with the keyword "empty", but this isn't so useful since in 1.08 you can't combine that with game types (e.g. you can't say "empty tourney"). For completeness's sake, you can also say "full". But heck, if you type in "nude reptiles", you can scan that too and get exactly zip.
<snip>

John Carmack made an update to the old fingershack with is .plan talking about memory issues and Quake3 which he mentioned in his previous .plan update not too long ago. Big news for all the teamplay clan players out there too, dig the snip I added to the end.

Loading a large map with full resolution, 32 bit textures and mipmaps consumes almost 40 megs of texture space. The default of picmip 1 and 16 bit textures reduces that to six or seven (not all images observe picmip) in theory, but some OpenGL implementations keep a 32 bit version of the texture around even if the card only uses 16 bit (I consider this inapropriate), so it may still be twelve or more megs just for the images.
<snip>
* reduced lightning damage by 10%
* reduced starting machinegun ammo in teamplay to 50 from 100

Total Mayhem, the largest organized Quake3 team tournament so far has entered the final 4. The remaining teams are Stickmen, SilverSurfers, Digital Homicide, and my own fake clan, KMA. (R3V did not enter the tourney, however 3 R3V members are playing for KMA)

Another new Q3Tourney strategy guide for you guys courtesy of a|WiseGuy to have a look at. With GroundZero closing it now might be a good time to brush up on those 1on1 skills and win $10,000 eh?

John Carmack, who rumor has it is a programmer over at id Software has another .plan update with some good news for a lot of you guys who are among the HPB contingency. I snagged a few of the latest changes and slapped them here. Check out the fingershack for the full update.

* spinning machinegun barrel
* changed q3data -origin option to -offset, defaulted to
0 0 24 for all player grabs
* removed second parm from -lod in q3data
* fixed 0 ping on last player killed before fraglimit
* better ping calculation right after transitions
* add time back to scoreboard
* sv_maxRate option to force all clients to play with a max rate. This can be used to limit the advantage of LPB, or to cap bandwidth utilization for a server. Note that rate is ignored for clients that are on the same LAN.
* reduced client to server bandwidth by 35%

AlchemyZone sent word of this id Software interview they got from EDGE magazine a couple of days ago but had no word of permission from the original authors. Apparently though they have scored permission from the blokes over in the UK. The article features some nifty new screenshots and chats with several member of the id staff. Havent had a chance to read it myself but the purty pictures are nice.

Quake III: Arena looks like a deathmatch, even when you’re up against the bots. Compared to Half-Life, it’s very old school. But since id first broke the news in August that QIII will be deathmatch only, the world has come around to the idea that the AIs could present enough of a challenge to make the singleplayer game interesting for the modem-less. Devine is more strident. “This is a classic singleplayer game,” he says, pointing out the inadequacies of conventional firstperson shooters. Games like Unreal, Quake or Half-Life are seen as better because you’re constantly exploring new areas. But such games not only sacrifice speed for graphic density, but also the finer points of fighting.