Remember QuakeCon99? Well if the Shack QuakeCon Picturebook wasnt enough for you then you should check out the pictures the Ritualistic guys took. Also the Lilith & Eve show will be showing some footage from the event on tonight's show. Lastly Blue pointed out that Cowboy Carnage Radio has a wrap-up as well.

The loon on location has put up his Q3A Tour Bus Day Four Report over on Blue's, as well as some shots showing a map that's not in the Test. Here's the chase, shot1, shot2, and shot3. So what do you think? More gothic?

Guess it's never too early for a Quake3 programmer mailing list. With the announcement of the tools release by John Carmack CRT sends word that PlanetQuake is hosting a couple of mailing list for those of you interested in hax0ring Quake3.

Q3Coding is a moderated list for discussion of the actual code, including "how to" questions, the client DLL, porting Quake 2 mods, bugs and fixes, etc. This list probably won't get much traffic until the actual code is released, but you can subscribe now A second unmoderated list has been set up for general Quake 3 Coding discussion (e.g. mod ideas, compiling help, general C/coding questions) and can be joined here

A new version of Q3Tweak has been released. Grab the util, make Quake3 fast.

Well, I've got a bunch of other stuff to still get ready for posting but I figured you guys would want to see this news right away. John Carmack has an extremely long .plan update that covers all sorts of stuff. The biggest news being a new Q3Test is scheduled for release in the middle of September which will feature all the latest fixes AND DM BOTS. Yup, we finally get to see the fabled bots for Quake3.

The current plan is that we will have another test release around the middle of next month. This version will be running game/cgame/ui with the virtual machine, and will include single player play against bots. No new maps.   I will be releasing the source for all the VM modules with it, and setting the executable up so that it will allow modified modules to be used.
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John also goes on to list off all of the latest changes and fixes he has made in his .plan file including (thank god) he fixed players getting stuck in each other. Here are a few of the other changes that homeboy has made. The discussion has already begun over at the Quake3 messageboard, have at it but play nice kids!

* fixed players getting stuck together
* new pak file support
* intro/loop option for music files
* fixed lerp-through-world when changing teams
* show ping and netgraph for spectators
* fixed timescale off by one problem
* tracked down player count wrong on server list
* info_spectator_start entity
* fixed can't-respawn-when-someone-is-on-your-body

Reactions to the Ottawa Sun story from yesterday have cropped up all over my finger shack. Ok, actually, two people so far :)
update by Steve: it looks like the article has been pulled. No word on why but probably that huge amount of email don't ya think?

3DRealms' Charlie Wiederhold

This story that several of the news pages linked (I first read it off of Blue) is simply too much to handle. I normally try to avoid the subject except in certain controlled forums as it just leads to frustration for everyone. However, I'd encourage anyone here who actually cares about getting some sort of honest reporting about this industry and our games to write this editor and point out the glaring problems in the article

id's Todd Hollenshead shows us the letter he wrote:

I'm sure you're getting a mountain of email from people angry about the number of factual inaccuracies in the story, so I'll just trust that you'll fix that tomorrow. I wanted to let you know that you can email me directly if you would like to fact check articles that discuss our games in the future.

And if this hasn't been made painfully clear to you already, Grossman's contention that Quake III Arena has been pulled from the market is no more accurate than any of his other assertions about id Software or our games. We're looking forward to an enormously successful launch of Quake III Arena later this year. You can see what we're working on for yourself at http://www.quake3arena.com." rel="nofollow" target="_blank" class="external

Here is an article from the Ottawa SUN that Sean sent in and it doesnt exactly shine a good light on the whole 3D shooter market. In fact this is probably one of the worst ones yet. I encourage you guys to read Rob Granastein's article, then think about emailing Greg Oliver the content director over there. Stuff like this is just plain dumb:

Grossman said a game called Quake 3 was pulled from the market recently because it allowed players to scan in pictures of real people and then kill them

The loony Quake3Arena bus tour reports keep coming in. The update today however features a couple new shots of Quake3 characters you probably havent seen. Check out the female Athena and the alien looking Orbb. I dig the female chick, but that alien eyeball thing just doesnt do a whole lot for me. Plus it's a pain in the ass to aim at that guy.

ShackTourney v2.0 is in full swing. It looks like Zapaan had all the info and the messageboard burps didnt hurt the tourney much at all. I'm not quite sure why but the # of postings on the Q3 messageboard is insane lately. Make sure and tell Zapaan what an incredible job he is doing. (Don't mail the guy, he is getting flooded as it is) There is even a shoutcast server you can listen to late at night when the matches are going on at 209.53.26.196:8000

I forgot to mention this the other day, the CPL GroundZero tournament in NYC on Sept 9th has added another $5,600 in cash prizes along with the $10,000 cash 1st place prize to the tournament winner pot. 2nd place now scores $4,000 along with other prizes. The number of top level players who plan on attending the event is pretty impressive. Anyone betting on winners yet? I wouldnt mind seeing a Rix-r3v / immortal rematch in Quake3. (They are both attending)

The Q3Center guys are awful proud of their updated console command list for Q3Test. The TrendKill guys have a list as well. Speaking of stuff like this, a new version of Q3Stats has been released which will generate all kinds of nifty statistics from your server logs.

If you're curious how they did it try typing cmdlist or cvarlist at the console. A trick I'm not sure many people are aware of is wildcards. For example if you type this:

cvarlist cg_
the console returns all of the cvars containing the characters cg_
cg_gun, cg_gibs, etc etc.

As I sit here trying to recover everything after that nasty crash today, I (broken link) Quake3 Messageboard which has to be one of the most impressive uses of time I've seen in a while. Keep in mind you gotta have some free time of your own to want to read this. Just read the comments

Fragapalooza99 concluded yesterday with Pure-r3v of Clan R3V taking home the win in blowout style. Making 2 major tournaments in a row by two different R3V players following DieharD-r3v's win at QuakeCon99. (Hey I'm proud of my clan ok? hehe) So anyone have some predictions on who will win GroundZero?

Q3Center.com is giving away a V3 3500 TV card in the form of a "rail trail" contest.

It appears that our Shack Q3 Tournament 2.0 has been growing quite quickly now with over 200 entries, and counting. Well Steve has broken open the piggy bank and is giving $250 to the winners of the tournament! Click here for the current Tourney update in the Q3 Messageboard.

The Exxtreme3D guys have a cute little run down of the evolution of Q3Test.

Zapaan in the Shack Q3 Messageboards is organizing another Shack Q3 Tournament. There will be both 1vs1s and FFAs, and the sign-ups will be open until the end of the weekend. Check it out!

Firingsquad has posted a set of comparison shots from the pre-release version of Q3Test 1 & 2 maps, and the current ones of today. The older "development" ones have more of and old-school Quake flavor, ya?

Paul Steed sent along an "exclusive" Quake III Arena image over to Blue that was created for magazine advertisements. Here's the link to the jpg, and here's the link to the 849KB zip of the BMP for those of you high on IQ (Image Quality, that is).

I'm not quite sure where the Quake3Nation guys dug up this information, but they have a full character list of all of the players to be included in the full version of Quake3. The list includes an impressive 60+ characters including the Doom marine, Quake "Ranger" and Quake2 "Bitterman"

Bitterman - [More Information]
Your favorite lead character from Quake II is back from kicking Stroggs ass.  This vetran will show you how not to play.  He uses the "Razor" model with Bitterman skin.