Where is the love?
From: Sean [Clan Pooh]

Just thought I would mention something.  Why is it that there is such a hate for BFG's in the Quake2 community.  I know they are not all 12 year olds because I saw some posts in alt.games.quake2 by people I know were adults.  Well here is where all this is coming from.  We had one of our Clan Pooh Smoking conferences and decided we would try something out this weekend.  Since we had switched out CTF Server to Lithium II CTF we noticed that we could not only ban BFGs but give everyone one to start with.  So I set it so everyone starts with a BFG and 250 cells and changed the name of the server to Clan Pooh BFG Party LithIICTF.  I figured all those BFG haters would be able to read and would not jump in.

Well it was kinda wild to play.  BFG balls flyin' everywhere.  People gettin fragged left and right.  Total Mayhem and lotsa fun.  But it seemed that one out of every three people who joined would start yellin' "BFG Pussy" and what not.  The still kept it up even after people pointed out the name of the server.  Jeez if they hate BFG's so much why do the play on a server that says BFG Party?

I have never had a problem with the BFG being in the game.  All you have to do is drop behind something to avoid and if you can't well you get killed and you respawn and get to try again.  It's just a game.

I have been checking your site for over a year now and I have felt that recently your site has become more of an advertisement for Hardware, in particular 3d cards and drivers and the focus has come off bringing cool news, links, files and reports for Quake, Q2, unreal etc.... 

Just look at your motto "All the carnage thats fit to post" not "all the 3D card advertisements you can shake a stick at", sorry for the sarcasm, no offense. I will continue to check your site and i hope that your site returns back to the good ol' fun, informative, well composed and enjoyable Blues News that we all remember.

I don't mind you putting links to places to find Quake3 screenshots. But please make sure (you haven't yet) not to put images directly on your page.

I don't wanna see a SINGLE screenshot.  I want the game to blow me away, and screenshots will stop that. So don't post any directly to your page. Post maybe the logo. But please, let us decide if we wanna see it. Some gamers want the game to be a crazy  experience.

Here's a subject maybe of interest to others which I didn't know much about and am still learning -  "soft modems".

I've been crunching along with a Hayes 33.6, and wanted to upgrade to a 56K. So far so good.  With the Hayes I was getting pings of 180+ in Q2, very playable, but a little clumsy.

My first upgrade was a Creative (Digicom) Blaster.  Pings went to hell - 500+. Didn't make much sense to me, so I swapped out for a Zoom 56K PCI Dual. Again, even with good 44k connections, pings were 500+.  Totally unplayable.  What gives????  So I start learning about Host Signal Processing, (HSP) and controlless modems:  Also known as WIN modems, which use the CPU to handle modem through-put.  They usually are low cost modems, and they cut the price by leaving the chip off the modem and relying on the CPU.

WIN modems can be very hard to detect.  Neither Creative nor Zoom said anything about this on their packaging, and their tech support has not yet answered my queries to confirm this after three days.

Needless to say, I'm back to my Hayes, and looking for a good Q2 modem.  I've heard some good things about Zoom (non-PCI) and Shark, but I've searched high and low for good gaming hardware recommendations from people with experience. Not much out there.

The CK Home Page has a beta of a Quake II proxy that allows private point to point voice and text messaging going to your teammates (sounds like the type of thing that will revolutionize serious teamplay).

Actually, it's not nearly as much help as you would think.  The head of our clan works for one of the long distance companies and can get us all on a conference call during a match (most of us have two phone lines.)  We ended up dropping the conference call in favor of keyboard binds.  The conference call turned out to be far too chaotic to be of any use.  You get one person screaming about a bogus kill and nobody can hear the important messages. Hearing, "Look out!" doesn't do much good without spatial clues, either.  You have no idea who is warning who.

I had never really noticed before, but fighter pilots have incredible radio discipline in order to get useful information to his teammates accurately and concisely.  The average clan member doesn't have anywhere near enough discipline.  The advantage of the keyboard binds is it limits each member to only pertinent information.  I think you'll find the good clans sticking to keyboards for that reason.

Well Blue, I'm not sure what some of your readers are smoking, but the human eye can detect about 120 events per second due to saccadic eye movement.  Also, the Virtual Boy did NOT use a laser.  It used a column of LEDs that scanned across the eye.  And yes, there does exist "linger" as one of your readers calls it, case in point the 4th of July sparkler.

I find most people just don't respect the human eye.  In the latest issue of Maximum PC (formerly Boot), they talk about how the optic nerve can only register 60 fps.  WTF?  The optic nerve can register a nearly infinite number of FPS, the issue is saccadic eye movement.  I don't think anyone would have a problem differentiating between a 60hz, 75hz, 85hz, 100hz and a 120hz refresh rate on a monitor.

Anyway, find that guy Czar and tell him to read the General Psychology notes under http://www.mtech.edu/psych.  Hopefully then he'll stop talking out of his ass.

In reponse to one of the previous mailbags:

"Everybody with a brain as wide as their asshole knows Pepsi is the best friggin drink ever FREAX."

Well, if your asshole is truly as big as a human brain, then that explains why you like that fu-fu drink pepsi.  Coffee straight up, no cream, no sugar, heat optional.

Thank you very much.

Editor's note: s'right. =]

--MrCoffee

This is a reply to the paranoid delusional spoutings of Czar on the fps thing..

>Stop throwing money away by doing exactly what your favorite mag is telling you to do. So long as you people are willing to run to the latest card because it is X FPS better than that, engineers can demand higher salaries, and prices of 3D hardware will continue to rise. But I guess I can't expect much. Look at what people are willing to do because it was on TV, or in that movie, or some celebrity does it. DON"T GET CAUGHT IN THE HYPE!!

Czar - you completely miss the point -

1> FPS as given by most benchmarks is an average...  this means that if you're getting 30 fps (about the maximum of human perception, but it varies from person to person) then at times you're hitting way below 30, which is noticable.  Depending on the situations where such benchmarks are taking place, they often give a figure high above the situation where you have 5 or 6 people in a room firing dynamically lit rockets about, which tends to suck a lotta cpu power. 

2> Just because you can't visually perceive it doesn't mean you can't react to it.  If you computer is only getting 30 fps, then you can only react in those 30 fps.  Higher fps = smoother control and reaction ability.  Quake, like any skill that is practiced and enhanced over time, like driving a car or practicing a martial art, becomes hard-wired into our neuropathways.  A person who has never played quake would be unlikely to be able to do a "flick shot"  - a perfect 180 fire, which is an instantaneous motion.  This skill takes time to pick up and perfect.  It is also very hard to do sucessfully if you have a slow framerate, because your computer ticks the input in the incorrect frame, sending your rocket shooting in an incorrect direction.  (don't get me started about q2 and its 10hz problem, I'm talking q1 here)  When you "know" where someone is through mastery of the game (you don't necessarily see them, but a triangulation of rocket trajectorys or a successful shot to their feet has launched them into the air) these extra frames mean everything because your brain and hands know where to be aiming and firing even if you can't "see" what is happening... 

When you reach this state of mastery in the game, you no longer actively think about things like aim and movement.  Your brain does these things as back processes, much like you can drive a car while messing with your stereo and talking to a friend, without actively thinking about how much gas you are applying or how much to turn the steering wheel.  A person who has reached a high level of martial arts does not sit back and think "there is a hand flying toward my face...  I must put my arm up in order to block."  Their body and mind have been hard-wired to automatically respond to such stimuli and respond accordingly.  Given such an example, I would imagine a lot more martial artists would get smacked in the face if they could only react at 30fps.  I think you will notice that the "best players" around will agree with the idea that more FPS, even beyond 30fps = better control...  As to your comments about animation - again, it has nothing to do with the graphics, everything to do with control and gameplay. 

As to your opinion that "So long as you people are willing to run to the latest card because it is X FPS better than that, engineers can demand higher salaries, and prices of 3D hardware will continue to rise."  This is nothing more than hysteria at best.  I'm wondering how much crack you smoked before you wrote this letter. 

First, I'm not sure where you get the idea that 3d hardware's prices are rising.  In fact, they are lowering while continually giving us more bang for the buck.  Initial voodoo cards sold for over $300 with 4 megs of RAM.  Now, a voodoo 2, which has way more power and 12 megs of RAM can be bought for under $200.  The Riva TNT is a similar case, but is a 2d/3d card with 16 megs of RAM and sells for below $200.  The more support there is for high performance 3d cards, the -cheaper- they will get, not more expensive.  The upcoming banshee card will have almost v2 level of performance (more than in some cases) and also support 2d.  It will sell for somewhere around $100.  Every person that goes out and buys a nice 3d card is going to be rewarded with faster, better graphics in 3d games, and a continued lowering of the 3d videocard prices.  Much like modems and sound cards used to be several hundred dollar items that were not considered standard equipment but for the use of special groups of people, soon, 3d cards will merge with videocards as a whole and become standard equipment, and also enter the budget area where anyone who can buy a computer can afford one. 

Second - you seem to think that the 3D card manufactures are somehow "out to get us!"  Too much X-Files? Sorry, but I don't think the smoking man is the puppet master behind the 3D hardware companies, manipulating the gaming public.  People simply like getting better graphics that run faster.  As for the media - most of the internet based gaming sites that are reviewing hardware like this are gamers themselves. They appreciate better graphics and better framerates, just like the rest of us gamers (except for you apparently) do.

I just read your mailbag with the little blurb from Owen Williams. Hahaha

Steven Spielberg did all of what he is talking about on purpose to create that old war film effect without making it black and white. He didn't want it to be Black and White because he wanted people to see blood, but thats besides the point. All of the film effects he used just added to the overall *effect* of the movie.