Articles in the archive contain broken links because outdated files are removed.

Linux QSpy
I just noticed that I put Linux QSpy Beta on the QSpy Homepage:

We are releasing a beta of the Linux QSpy. This is a beta... there is no documentation, but hey, Linux isn't for wimps...

Download qspy_beta.tgz (787 KB)

If your browser tries to display it as a document, go back and click the link again while holding the <Shift> key.

Important!
This is a port, so send bug reports, suggestions, etc. to Paul Miller.

Maps Wanted
UKCL would like to start running its league matches on original maps. If you write levels, or have written levels and are willing to let the UKCL use them for league matches then please send them to jc.burton@dial.pipex.com. Maps should be suitable for deathmatch involving between 10-16 players.

Maps No Longer Wanted
Epic no longer is soliciting map authors. I got word from Sean Green of Shadows that Cliff (from Epic) said this on IRC:

"I've decided what I'm going to do as far as a "new" mapper goes. I'm going to look internally to someone I can trust instead of someone externally. I really appreciate all the submissions out there, though. There's a lot of great talent!"

Sitings
Quaaaaake! is back at http://www.scohop.com/quake/, welcome back from Real Life^TM to Scohop. A new CTF page has arisen, sink your grappling hook into PACO and CROMWELL.

The Words of Paradox
A big update from Paradox to his .plan today (thanks NicK KnighT ). Here's the Reader's Digest (condensed) version:

* 1/17/97
Whats New:
-Working hard on finishing up the pack. Putting FINAL tweaks on the levels and cleaning up anything else left to do. Its amazing how cool this pack has turned out. After four months of hard work, we have come out with 16 new cohesive single-player levels, 1 incredible deathmatch level, a start map, 3 new guns, 3 new monsters, 3 new powerups, a LOT of incredible "Not possible in the Quake engine" things, and a bunch of little extra's that add to Quake in many ways.
[...]
-Laying out a plan for my CTF level. I will most likely be getting it into Quake within the next week or so, once the pack is done. Expect the unexpected :)

+LEVEL EDITING TIP O'THE DAY: Putting Sky brushes where you would normally have roof stuff is less costly than doing a textured roof. Why? Because the Quake Engine dosent split the sky texture like a normal textured surface. Therefore, Having large areas of sky is actually faster than a closed off roof. Makes you wonder why there arent more outside places in Quake..eh?

(Jeeze, I sound like Mr. Wizard..eh?)

Jim Dose' also made a big update to his .plan yesterday as well. Entertaining and informative, (and very large). Well worth checking out.

QuakeCast Wrap-up
I had a lot of fun as usual with JudgeCal, GirlBomb and Mace Royer on the QuakeCast last night. It was a star-studded show, with Disruptor on to talk about QuakeWorld, his iguana Hecktor (and I thought the iguana story was a euphamism), and life without pants. He told us about the plans for Master Server stat consolidation (which will probably happen, but is in the early stages) and "unofficially" stated that the id master server would be back online soon. He also talked about the future of the Quakeworld front-end, which might be your web-browser, and mentioned that the Master Server team was looking for a couple of serious C programmers (contact qwmaster@idsoftware.com). A couple of the Rogue Entertainment dudes, Steve Tietze and Jim Molinets talked to us about their upcoming level pack, Dissolution of Eternity (I love the description of the lava nail-gun!), and life down the hall from id. These guys are very talented, and I can't wait to see their CD. Zoid the inventor of ThreeWave Capture the Flag gave us the latest word on the game's most popular add-on, as well as his new status as the Unix port coordinator. Finally, Sascha Dikiciyan of Cyber Age Studios came by to talk about Methods of Destruction, their Quake music CD, unfortunately, Sascha was the victim of our first show that had to finish on time, and due to our poor time management, got cut really short--for which we feel awful, we hope he forgives us enough to come on next week so we can finish talking to him. DEViOUS also came by with T-Bone from Clan Bong talking a little more about Kings of Capture tournament.

I thought our guests were great, and things went pretty well, though the show was not without its technical difficulties, which I have to learn to take more in stride. Dealing with a group production and live call-ins and RealAudio means sometimes not being in control of the situation (a little different than a website) but it sounded smoother to listen to than I imagined. As always I am very eager for feedback on the QuakeCast.

Mike Wilson Interview
Thanks to Matthew Walker for the word that there is a hefty interview with Mike Wilson, Ion Storm's new CEO, in Next-Generation.

Game of the Year
Gamecenter named Quake 1996 Action Game of the Year and the Game of the Year. (Thanks Raven).

Unreal
Diverse Joost Schuur is now also maintaining the Unreal section at ftp.cdrom.com.

QuakeCast
Damn I'm better at talking about other people's stuff than my own. Well better late than never... We have another star-studded QuakeCast on tap for this evening. JudgeCal and I will be talking (in no particular order) to Steve Tietze of Rogue Entertainment about their upcoming Quake add-on, Master of the Master Server Christian "Disruptor" Antkow, ThreeWave Capture the Flag inventor Dave "Zoid" Kirsch, and Sascha Dikiciyan of Cyber Age Studios, producers of the Quake music CD Methods of Destruction. The show has been extended to 90 minutes to accomodate all that, so the action begins live at 8:30 PM EST. If you can't get one of the live audio streams (there is currently a limit on the number of listeners during the show--we're working on that), you can check out the show at any time from the QuakeCast archives. You can also join the chat area on irc.pseudo.com, hope you'll check it out.

Free Banner Ads
As promised, Joost Schuur is now accepting banner ads for non-profit Quake sites that will appear on the page along with the Slipgate Central search engine results. Check the SC News Page for all the details.

QuakeWorld Rankings
Andrew Brennand of MINOS sends word that they've put together and posted the rankings from the European QuakeWorld Master server. Also Barf's QuakeWorld Rankings have been updated (thank you Eucker).

Client Cam
Paul Jordan sent along his new patch, the Client-cam (125 KB), which is based on the chase-cam, a camera that will follow the action and record demos from a third-person perspective. Here's the readme.

Jet Ski
Sadman has put up a beta of his Jet Ski patch on Sadman's World. He warns that it's probably only useful to map designers, because he needs maps (he suggests flooding your QuakeKart track).

VQuake
VQuake 1.06 Beta 12(!) has been uploaded to Rendition's site. Thanks to HurtQuake for letting me know when they put up the link (last night), and to Randy Perry for letting me know when there was (finally) a file to download (this afternoon). There's still a bit of confusion, as the file I downloaded was 272 KB, while the site lists its size as 639 KB (but the archive seems complete, so...).

What's new since Beta 10:

• fixed DOS-only cases where the command buffer was not handled properly due to it not being page-aligned.
• made sure that enough memory was available to be locked.

Quake Baby!
Mynx of #quake is expecting. She and the father, Mental4 also of #quake (I had no idea you could get pregnant via cybersex!) have put up a really great webpage to tell the story of how they learned the news. The site is complete with UltraSound photos of the little future Op, and hilarious little sperms as the forward and back buttons. It looks like they plan on chronicling the entire story on the page. Congratulations to both the happy future parents. Thanks to Alexander Cohen.

AdQuedit
I got news of this new editor from the author, Cable Hicks--check out AdQuedit on the AdQuedit homepage.

PowerBall Lives?
Word comes from Clan Defenders that they plan on picking up the dropped PowerBall, and continue work on that mod. Information on the state of the project can be found here.

Quake DemoLand
Intent on linking and reviewing every demo on the 'net, Quake DemoLand also includes instructions on how to view, record, and submit demos. It's like you died and went to demo heaven.

QuakeFest '97
The Association for Computing Machinery at Purdue University (Lafayette, Indiana) is hosting QuakeFest '97 the weekend of February 15th &16th 1997. This single-elimination tournament (I erroneously originally reported it as a double-elimination, thanks kill-9 of U|A for catching that) is a serious deathfest, supported by id in the form of 20 autographed CD's to give away as prizes, and 20 power-user Quake machines supplied by Intel. There's room for 512(!) contestants, there's a $10 registration fee, and no deadline to register (it's done when they're full). In addition to the CD's there are cash prizes and SpaceOrbs to be won.

Nakedman's TC List
Yep, Nakedman has arrived on the scene with his Nakedman's TC List, which will track the turbulent waters of Total and Partial Conversions on a day-to-day basis.

Mark D.
Mark Dochtermann did a big update to his .plan (thanks lech). Not much Quake-related, it's deeper issues that are covered here, but we do learn that Armagon is going to sound cool (actually, "pee your pants" is Mark's description of the anticipated reaction), and they seem to actually refer to Tom Mustaine as Level Pimp Paradox.

QuakeWorld Local
A new version of the program that allows you to run a scaled down QuakeWorld Master Server on your LAN has been released. QuakeWorld Local 1.3 (18 KB), by Nick Maher, features several bug fixes and now works properly with QSpy. Also available on the QuakeWorld Local Homepage.

Clan News
A nice looking new site covering things like Clan news, and Clan deathmatch/CTF demos, also has one of the longest names I've come across. Check out READ ALL ABOUT IT - The Quake Clan News Page.

Button
From time to time I get requests to use graphics from this site to use on webpages as links. If you want, you can use this button, sent along by the artist who did my logo, Walter '|2|' Costinak.

Linux QSpy
I'm kinda dopey sometimes. I host and maintain the QuakeSpy Homepage, and I managed to never mention the fact that we've posted a screenshot of Linux QSpy up there. It is not available yet, but you can expect a public beta soon*. There is also a screenshot up there of the proposed new login screen which TeamQSpy is soliciting opinions on.

* Soon. A loosely defined period of time that can range from minutes to years.

QuakeCast
That's another thing. It had to be pointed out that I never actually announced that I've accepted JudgeCal's offer to co-host the QuakeCast as a regular thing. The last couple of shows were improvements (IMO), and we have high hopes to continue the trend (there's still plenty of room for more improvement). Quakecast is a realaudio program on Pseudo.com live every Thursday at 9:00 PM EST.

ClanNET
ClanNET, the IRC network dedicated to clanplay, is back online, having identified the bad hub that was causing their repeated network splits. These are the three main servers that should remain permanent:

main.logic-net.com
quake.idsi.net
194.119.129.201 (UK)

More information,as always, on the ClanNET page.

CLP
The first Clan Leaders Poll results are up. Thanks to Leon 'Keil' Loo.

Impulse 1
Impulse 1 has added a framed version, which looks very nice--that's a professional looking website.

A little site related rambling. Toby chose to use one of those choice screens to pick frames or not. I just have a non-framed version that loads if your browser isn't frames ready--I figure if you hate frames that much (don't know why, but some people do), you probably have a browser that doesn't do them. I just wonder why this isn't something you can switch off in your browser (or am I missing something?)... Also, following my remark about visiting sCary's site through the frames link to make him think it was more popular, Scohop (remember Quaaaake?) wrote in suggesting I put a counter on the contents frame to compare how many people do and don't use frames. He doesn't realize there are other ways to tell these things (which is why sCary would be able to tell on his site). In case you're curious, as of last count, 92.7% of the visitors to this site are using frames (but of course, they are not given a choice).

Sujoy Quits
Sorry to say it's true. Sujoy Roy emailed me with the sad news that Real Life^TM reared its ugly head again, and has taken another great Quake Page. Sujoy's Quake Pages are going to be shutting down. F R A G S maintainer of the New Vore Times ("All The News Blue Doesn't Want"--LOL), which filled in during Sujoy's vacation, will now make that page an ongoing effort to try and fill the void. Sujoy says we may not have seen the last of him, though...

Book of Skins Website
There is now a Book of Skins website to show off Christopher Bolin's cool skins. To kick off the new site, Chis has released Book of Skins 0.4 which contains some new ones. There's also a shot of each skin in action (wrapped around a model, in addition to the flat "paper-doll" of the skin file).

Oooo Lala!
I got another email from Jojo from Clan CrackWhore (please don't tell Mrs. Blue) who wants to let everyone know that they've "upped the ante" on their Dress up the CrackWhores contest (looking for a new skin). The winner will now be named an honorary CrackWhore, and receive and autographed "personal" item from one of the ladies.

Now That's sCary
So I got this email from this guy at an AOL address that claimed to be sCary... Nope actually it was him, he's at his folks for an extra day, so don't expect an update to the Quakeholio till tomorrow (but you should visit anyway--and choose the frames version when you go--I want sCary to know that it's the more popular one...).

Ion Storm Distribution
There is an article in Online Gaming Review that says Eidos Interactive has acquired the rights to be the exclusive worldwide publisher and distributor for an unspecified number of Ion Storm titles. Thanks to Max.

Stomped/QuakeX Ripoff
Had a few problems with that Darned Internet^TM, so last night I didn't get to upload the story of the guys who put up the "Swiss Quake Page," before it came down (http://www.quake.ch/). Basically these guys took the Stomped layout, added a stolen QuakeX graphic, and voila! *sigh* They'll never learn... Direct comments to webmaster@quake.ch.

More on Translucency
I wrote Ion Storm's Kee Kimbrell about John Romero's reference to him adding translucency to the Quake engine, because I'd seen speculation that this was the translucent water that you can see into effect (like in Tomb Raider).

No we don't want to make the water translucent. It would increase the poly count too much and I suspect that the qbsp, vis and light programs would have to be modified.

However we are going to make brush models and alias models translucent. This means doors, walls, and monsters. (Finger kee@ionstorm.com for more info.)

Fingering his .plan shows that with Kee's effect, you will be able to have models fade in and out of view using QuakeC. You will also be able to create translucent textures, and he promises to send along some screen shots of a stained glass effect when he's got an example. In what's sure to be music to the ears of level designers, Kee says he really wants you to be able to specify a palette for each level, rather than be limited to the Quake palette.

Steve Fukuda Interview
There is an interview with Steve Fukuda of the QuakeLab on Quake Level Editing News.

Quake Source Code Downloaded
The source code to Quake was downloaded from Crack dot com's computer system by theives who broke through the firewall via their web site. In a brazen act, the source was then made available by the thieves on a web page on Crack dot com's server for some time before it was discovered. The group responsible, said to be FEH (though FEH officially denies it), also went on IRC channel #quake to brag about the hack. The FBI and CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) are investigating the break in, which also netted the intruders the source to Crack's Abuse and parts of their still-in-development, Golgotha.

I pulled this story after running it for a while so I could get an official response, as opposed to some of the inaccurate statements that accomapanied early reports. Here's a statement from id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead:

"...the hack was an unfortunate act perpetrated by immature individuals, whom I hope are caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced to an appropriate punishment. However, it would be nearly impossible for any legitimate company to actually "steal" the engine and use it commercially. Further, it would probably take a year or more to completely reverse-engineer the engine so that we wouldn't be able to prove it was ours. Add another year of game development before product release and id is already publishing the "Trinity" game. Thus, the time lag required to rip us off is long enough to make it economically infeasible, not to mention legally risky."

While this is a flashy crime, these perpetrators, like thieves of famous works of art, have a commodity that can't be publicly sold. Profit obviously wasn't their motivation anyway (it rarely is with these kinds of break-ins) since they originally posted the code on the web.

Zoid: Official UNIX Portmaster
Word comes from funkyj that John Carmack updated his .plan file:

Jan 12

We now have someone officially in charge of quake/quakeworld unix ports:

Dave 'Zoid' Kirsch.
zoid@threewave.com

Direct any correspondance about the linux ports of quake to him. If any other unix vendors would like to have quake ported to their environments, set up an equipment loan with him.

This is a volenteer position, so don't give him a hard time.

Editing Tips
Paradox's .plan has been updated (thanks NicK KnighT) with some tips on how to make your levels run faster for you editor-types. I'm glad to see this being stressed by some noteworthy sources. Hopefully were getting to a more sophisticated generation of user maps that are engineered for speedy gameplay.

QuakeWorld Rankings Page
Thanks to Eucker for the word that Barf's QuakeWorld Rankings page has been updated with a new top player list.

VRML Quake
I got an email from the authors of bsp2wrl the Quake BSP to VRML converter, which sounds pretty intriguing. The program outputs VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) 1.0, VRML 2.0, and OpenInventor. All lighting, viewpoints, texture mapping are properly implemented. According to the authors on a fast, memory-heavy machine with a good VRML browser, it looks just like the real thing. They also say they'll be working on this project over January, hopefully adding several enhancemebnts including a Win95 GUI for the converter and VRML 2.0 interactive sensors tied to doors. Their website has binaries and converted maps to download.

PowerBall Source
I see on the Void that the source code for PowerBall, the discontinued Quake modification, has been released on the PowerBall Page.

Quake Superheroes
Quake Superheroes, the SoulScythe-coded Quake modification I mentioned a while back, is now beta testing version .91. Check it out on the Quake Superheroes page.

Colored Lighting
Have you checked out the screenshots of the colored lighting effect on QuakeX? (Look in the news section.) WhaleBoy is doing some interesting stuff over there, it's worth taking a look.

Stoneless
Version 0.91 of Stoneless (Level Editor) is out on the Stoneless page.

QTeam
Quake Innovations now has two dedicated 16 player servers running QTeam on a T3. QTeam Capture the Shambler is running on 129.89.115.50 and QTeam Paintball is running on 129.89.115.71. You can play paintball without additonal files but to play Capture the Shambler you must get the client package from their homepage. The client package has custom maps for Capture the Shambler and Capture the Flag as well as new flag models and player models. They're also always looking for more servers so if you want to run QTeam CTF, Capture the Shambler (CTS), or Paintball on your server, contact them.

Single Player Quake
Single Player Quake has added a section called Q-Talk which contains a series of interviews with some of the very best Quake level designers.

Interviews
There is an interview with ThreeWave CTF creator Zoid on the New Vore Times. Thre's also an interview with the entire Rangers Clan!

Mergers and Acquisitions
Freeform Interactive (home of Future v. Fantasy Quake) has moved to PlanetQuake at http://www.planetquake.com/freeform/. The Quake-C Archives has also moved over to PQ at http://www.planetquake.com/qca/ and just to know that it's contagious, the QSoccer team has moved their pages over to the Quake-C Archives at http://www.planetquake.com/qca/qs/.

PlanetQuake
Cool! On the QuakeCast the other night we were giving Fargo (Fargo's Frontpage), a little ribbing (ribleting?) about PlanetQuake's heavy load times with all the graphics and Java and stuff. But now I see that the early phases of the re-organization over there have begun, with the removal of the big intro screen, a much faster load time, and one menu down the left frame that navigates the entire site, (rather than the cryptic hierarchy of the past) which is crucial, since the site's so big. It's already a 1000% improvement.

Quake Associated Poll
The following comes from QAP organizer Ryan Pohlman:

The Quake Associated Poll is up and ready to roll, so all clans that want to participate should head over to http://www.nauticom.net/www/sin/ and get registered. The temp page is down, and the real pages are up, or at least what will evolve into them. I'm graphically impaired, so don't expect anything flashy. Also, invitations for the Authority Poll will probably go out tonight, so if you consider yourself important, keep an eye on your mailbox.

New Bot
There's nothing to download yet, but there's a new bot in the works, names the Oak (apparently after Arnold Schwarzenneger) that is promising "state of the art tactics and brilliant AI."

Rogue Screenshots
There are some screenshots of Rogue Entertainment's upcoming Quake expansion CD up on What's New at Stomped.