Articles in the archive contain broken links because outdated files are removed.

New Threewave CTF Releases
There are two new server releases on Threewave. For regular servers: Threewave CTF 3.5, and Threewave CTF 1.0 for QuakeWorld.

Gatling Gun
The second beta of the gatling gun add on is available on the Means of Destruction.

American's .plan
Thanks to Jack Cummings for the news that American updated his .plan. Warning. I don't cook this stuff, I just serve it... I am not interested in feedback from animal cruelty types about this (though I will gladly forward referrals from licensed Psychologists...).

Cash .plan
Thanks ryan n. freebern for the word that John Cash updated his .plan:

Christams: done

New Years: with 2000 coming up, these next three will seem boring

Quake: working with Hipnotic and Rogue to help make their stuff cool for you

Quake2: yes, we are working on it
no, we are not going to talk about it

PowerBall
A beta of the "regular" (non-quakeworld) release of PowerBall (63 KB) is up on the PowerBall page. Thanks to Jon Kean (AKA PhatBud) for that. PowerBall is planned as the first QuakeWorld teamplay modification--the page says to expect the QuakeWorld release "within a week or so..."

New 3D Blaster Drivers
There are new Windows drivers (122 KB) for the Vérité-based PCI 3D Blaster on Creative Labs' site (thanks to Kev 'Zob the Slayer' Brown).

QuakeWorld on a LAN
I dunno if it works or anything, but Nick Maher sent along his program (25 KB), described as a scaled down master server - for use on a LAN or a standalone machine so you can run QuakeWorld without being connected to the Internet. This could be useful for testing QuakeWorld patches or deathmatching with NT machines on a LAN...

Bot Mania
Thanks to Jim "Howley" Rowley for the news that Cameron Newham has released his source code for the Eliminator Bot (124 KB) on his homepage. Also, while poking around for this, I noticed on the Terminator Bot Page that Olivier Montanuy has updated his client-side bot, the Terminator to version 0.91 (227 KB) here's the read me) which features bug fixes from version 0.9. Here's the source: zip (130 KB), or tar (114 KB).

Tim Willits' .plan
Thanks to ace newshound Jason "[Moogle]" Ritchie for pointing out that Tim Willits updated his .plan with the news that he would no longer be updating his .plan:

Hello

This will be the last regular update to my .plan. When I started my .plan it was to contrast John's oh-so boring and dry .plan and show a little humor here at id. Unfortunately I just don't have time to update it as much as I would like, I'm just too busy. Anyway American and John Cash seem to be funny enough for all of us. I am working very hard on Quake 2 and feel that 1997 will be a great year for id.

Thanks Tim

P.S. I'm not dead, I just need to focus on the job at hand.

New Editor
Thanks to Brian "Plucky" Ploeckelman (of Gulf Breeze) for the word on a new Quake level editor called Surface Works.

Quake Command
Wedge and Choryoth have bestowed upon us their Christmas present, a level containing a new weapon. Head over to Quake Command and check it out.

OpenGL Quake
There's more info on Stomped from John Carmack about OpenGL Quake.

Kings of Capture
I got an email from -DEViOUS- of Kings of Capture saying that their tournament is going to start on January 18th, with 256 teams playing in North America (both ISDN+ and POTS). There are prizes, and they'll be broadcasting updates via Pseudo's Online Network. (I think Joost and I will be appearing on their QuakeCast on Tuesday in an attempt to try and help them increase the content ratio a bit.)

So Why'd You Ask?
Gamecenter has a top games of 1996 thingy (thanks Don Petersen), and they have Quake and Duke listed as a tie for #3, which is pretty weird, considering they just had everyone go to the trouble to vote for their favorite between the two of them just a few weeks ago...

Logo
I've gotten a lot of favorable reaction on the new logo by Walter "|2|" Costinak, and I'd just like to thank him again....

Bloodpool
I've been remiss in setting up my local events calendar (my bad, sorry), but I will mention that I'll be attending Bloodpool, here in fabulous NYC on Saturday, where I'll finally get to meet Joost and the Stomped guys (and of course the other fine folk).

Happy Happy Joy, Joy
Thanks to all of you who sent along holiday cheer...

WorldCraft CD's to Ship Tomorrow
According to the WorldCraft Homepage, the CD's have arrived, and will be shipped tomorrow (the 27th).

Unreal Movies
There are two Unreal movies on Epic's Site. Thanks to Rukes for that one...

Season's Greetings
Hope this season finds you healthy and happy. Here's a little holiday cheer from the Wu-Tang clan:

Quake BBS Source
Donovan Young finds himself unable to continue development on his QuakeBBS patch, which is designed to provide user accounts, banning/kicking, and other organizational functions to Quake servers without using the QuakeWorld Client or Server. In an effort to see his work put to good use, however, Donovan is releasing his source code, under the terms of the GNU Public Licence (GPL). All he asks is that if someone makes any major changes or revisions, to please drop him a note at donovan@mindspring.com so he can try to keep up with any new progress. Here's the QuakeBBS Source, also available at the QuakeBBS Homepage.

Gatling Gun
There's a beta up on Means of Destruction (formerly the Quake Newsstand (formerly Q.L.E.N.)) of a Gatling Gun.

Future vs. Fantasy Quake v1.4
Here's Freeform Interactive's Quake Patch, Future vs. Fantasy Quake, (here's the FVF Homepage) featuring:

50 Different Weapons
8 Unique Player Classes
13 Class-Specific Powerups

It also supports Enhanced Teamplay and several noexiting options.

QuakeWorld Guide
Thanks Eucker for the word that there's a QuakeWorld Guide/Review on OGR.

Quake Argentina
Don't cry for me Argentina... just check out this Argentine Quake page, but only if you understand Spanish. Looks pretty cool, even if as far as site picks the maintainer has this to say: "personalmente recomiendo Scary's Quakeholio (muy actualizado)..."

3D Technology
If you can't get enough of stuff like this, here's a good resource for info that contains An Incomplete Guide to DirectDraw and Direct3D Immediate Mode Brian Hook and An Overview of the Microsoft Windows OpenGL Driver Models Brian Hook.

Hexen II Movies
Thanks to Oatmeal (of the Chaos Sphere) for pointing out that GameSlice has put up the promised QuickTime video clips from Hexen II.

New Editors
Thanks Brian "Plucky" Ploeckelman (of Gulf Breeze) for the news that version 0.62 of BSP has been released on the BSP Page. Also Derrick McKay (doesn't he play small forward for the Seattle SuperSonics?) sends along word that QuakeMap 2.6 has been released. More info on Derrick's QuakeMap Page, titled Derrick's QuakeMap Page.

Sujoy Roy Interview
Sujoy's on vacation, and he's left the task of presenting the offbeat side of the Quake universe to Kevin Bowen and the New Vore Times. Check it out as the tables get turned in the Sujoy Roy interview.

New Quake Pages
A new page has emerged, dedicated to creating modular, non-editor specific components to use in homebrew levels (not unlike the QuakeLab). Run by Liger, the site's called Darkness Descends. Also there's a new Quake News site called Um....Quake.

Logo
Big thanks to Walter \"|2|"\ Costinak for the swell new logo.

More From John Carmack on D3D Quake
I got an email from John Carmack that cleared up a misconception that I had (and I would guess others had too), which was that Direct3D Quake would have been an option for owners of current 3D video cards:

D3D quake is indeed canned. But this should not have any impact on current 3D card owners.

The only current card that would have been fast enough to run D3Dquake is 3dfx, and they can run glquake.

Glquake is implemented with blended lighting instead of surface caching, which gives a more level framerate at the expense of pushing twice as many pixels. The low end cards (S3, ATI, etc) have less than a third of the fill rate of 3DFX on real world data, so they would have been hard pressed to hit 15 fps running glquake/d3dquake. Anyone with one of these cards that was holding out for the D3D version would have been very dissapointed.

A custom, on-the-metal port to these cards might have been able to give performance almost as good as vquake (verite has exceptional potential for optimization if you go to the trouble, which compensates somewhat for the reletively low fill rates), but I don't think it is worth it.

The next generation of most vendors cards should be fast enough to run glquake and derivitives. Tell them they should support OpenGL.

John Carmack

No Direct 3D Quake
John Carmack has another very large .plan "installment" as he called it today, the subject of which is 3D API. Contained therein is the bombshell that there willl be no Direct 3D Quake:

I started porting glquake to Direct-3D IM with the intent of learning the api and doing a fair comparison.

Well, I have learned enough about it. I'm not going to finish the port. I have better things to do with my time.

So owners of most 3D video cards who have been waiting for Direct 3D Quake are kind of SOL, as it looks like OpenGL Quake has gone from an side experiment to the main attraction. I have played with OpenGL Quake on a 3Dfx-based Righteous 3D, and it was pretty impressive for a less than fully optimized beta. I know the 3Dfx uses some sort of drivers to achieve it's OpenGL-ness, but I'm not sure what, if any, other cards currently available or planned are OpenGL-able (articulate, ain't I?).

I am hoping that the vendors shipping second generation cards in the coming year can be convinced to support OpenGL. If this doesn't happen early on and there are capable cards that glquake does not run on, then I apologize, but I am taking a little stand in my little corner of the world with the hope of having some small influence on things that are going to effect us for many years to come.

Thank you Monty passing that one along.

RC Archive Moves
The Quake RC Archive (config files) has moved to a new home. Check out recent celebrity RC additons from Barrett Alexander and Tim Willits of id Software

Hipnotic Screenshot
Wesley Reaves sends along word of this screenshot on Next-Gen from the upcoming Hipnotic add-on.

Kudos
Quake wins Computer Shopper's coveted Best Game / Entertainment award for 1996. Thanks ryan n. freebern.

Hexen II
There are a bunch of new Hexen II screenshots up at GameSlice. Thanks Oatmeal.

Eloinz v0.7
Thanks to Paul Roy for the tip that Eloinz v0.7 is out on the Eloinz home page.

QuakeLab
The QuakeLab's had a makeover (thanks Andy )... very snappy...

Monkeys?
American was inspired to share a tale of warmth and love for the holidays in his .plan. Thanks to Bungalow Bill for the word.

Custom CTF Secrets Revealed
Threewave has been updated with demos of all the secrets on all the custom Threewave CTF levels. Thanks to Peter Ordal (a.k.a. Sonic) for the word.

QView QHost 3.0
Larry Sanders (hey now) sends along word that QView/QHost 3.0 has been released and can be downloaded at http://wasatchfault.com/tremors.htm (note that it is not yet at the Qview Homepage). This release features administrative QuakeWorld support, scheduling, and system diagnostics including CPU utilization. Also there is release of Web-Qview which is used to generate Quake server status HTML pages.

Toe Tag
Warren Marshall wrote in with the news that release 3 of the ToeTag (Quake Editor) beta has been released on the Toe Tag HQ.

Christmas Wreath
Ho ho ho. Wreath by John Cowan, who designed it for Sujoy (have you seen his Christmas layout?) but gave permission for me to use it as well.

Model Contest
The Quake C Archives is holding a 3D Modeling Contest, where the best new Quake Model wins a SpaceOrb. The Contest will last from December 23 - February 1, 1997.

frag.com
Check out frag.com's new look. Very nice.

Skeet-Shooting Part II
Jeff Hanna sent along his skeet-shooting patch which doesn't use the reaper bot. You shoot at ogres.

Scohop of Quaaaaake sent along a game he cooked up--Skeet Shooting. Just put skeet.bsp in your id1\maps\ dir, and fire up Quake with the Reaper Bot patch loaded (quake -game reaper) type impulse 103 at the console, and start shooting reapers out of the sky (they start with health of one, so you can use the shotgun). There might be a bug, cause I seemed to get into loops where the green bot repeatedly gets squished, but it was still pretty funny. Sorry about the link to Reaper version .80 before--thanks to Joe Kennebec (TeeOne) for catching that and a couple of other fatigue-induced screw-ups.

Happy Birthday Quake
Today marks six months since the release of the shareware. Thanks to Hobbex for the reminder.

QuakeWorld TeamFortress Quake
Robin of TeamFortess Quake (also take note of the new homepage address) sends along word that they've released a beta of Quake TeamFortress 2.0, which is designed for QuakeWorld. They are now looking for server operators who are interesting in testing it out. There are two versions: one is the patch that doesn't download anything other than skins, the other is the patch which uses some new graphics and sounds.

The Shambler Ate My Page
Sorry about the downtime, it was beyond my control... Seems like it was a storage problem on my host machine.

Carmack's .plan
Thanks once again to Jason \"[Moogle]\" Ritchie for word that John Carmack updated his .plan:

Dec 21:

Wow. Apple bought NeXT. That really brightened my day.

I haven't generally been unhappy developing on NT, but I had been carrying a bit of sadness over several of the things we left behind when we moved from NEXTSTEP.

I wouldn't touch a mac for development right now, but if apple does The Right Thing with NeXT...

American's .plan
Thanks to Jason \"[Moogle]\" Ritchie for the news that American's updated his .plan:

Winter solstice!
w00p! Darkest day of the year!
Uh, so... I'm going to go out and sacrifice
something.

Romero Interview
Thanks Liger for word that there's an article called John Romero Readies His Own Company--Doom designer at a new level on Computer Retail Week.

New QStat Alpha with QuakeWorld Support
QStat author Steve Jankowski has released an Alpha of QStat 1.6 (zip, or tar) which includes QuakeWorld support (QW servers can be checked at the same time ). If you're unfamiliar, QStat is a program that is integral to many server list web pages because it can querie Quake servers and report back various pieces of information. Here are the (minimal) release notes. The program is also available from Steve's site, activesw.com: qstat16a.tar.Z or qstat16a.zip. Steve also asks anyone with canonical information about the QW protocols, to please contact him, as his current, knowledge only comes from snooping packets.

Jack Mathews Interview
Jack Mathews, Team QSpy MFC Guru (I keep thinking about trying to become a guru, but the trial by fire thing really scares me...) um, where was I, oh yeah Jack did this cool interview on CNET's GameCenter.

Spanning the Globe
Thanks to gogo for sending me the URL of Hong Kong's Sing Tao daily newspaper's web site which in the middle of their QuakeWorld article, has a link here.

"Unfortunately the site is entirely in Chinese and you'll either need a Chinese system (eg. Chinese Win95) or an add-on from Microsoft which allows you to read Chinese web pages on non-chinese systems. But you should still be able to see your legendary flaming logo..."

For those of you with said Chinese compatibility:

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