Archived News:
A new developer's journal posted to Cavedog's Amen: The Awakening page
talks about the music in this upcoming shooter, going into the inspiration behind the
music as well as the techniques used to create it, offering up a sample as either a
high-quality .mp3 or in RealAudio format. Thanks Online Gaming News.
More sound thinking: There is an interview
with Stan Nuevo, sound effects engineer for Ion Storm's Daikatana talking about his work, posted on redchurch.com (a sound site).
PC.IGN.COM previews Outcast after a
viewing of the most recent build of this upcoming game from Infogrames. Here's a bit that
describes an aspect of game balance (they don't say what happens if you shoot too many
villagers):
One of the neatest features we learned about is how your actions will have
widespread impact on the game environment. One of the best examples of this deals with
simple Darwinian principles. Kill too many herbivores thereby depleting a major food
source for the more ravenous animals in the area and the carnivores will start attacking
villagers. On the other hand, if you shoot too many carnivores then the herbivores will
start multiplying at an alarming rate and devour the villager's crops. Outcast is
definitely going to be a game of balance and one where you'll have to think about your
actions before doing something drastic.
There are a half-dozen new Messiah screenshots on Messiah
Press with word that they plan on releasing a new set each day for a few days.
This
page offers a brief preview of Shiny's upcoming action title, Sacrifice, while this
page has movie showing off the first-ever look at gameplay from the game in RealPlayer format. Thanks John Doe.
The Zipper Interactive Home has word that they
have ceased distribution of the MechWarrior 3 movie they posted earlier ( story), saying simply, "Sorry, we've had to pull it off for a
while..." Thanks WidowMaker.
There are two exclusive new Official Blood
2 add-on screenshots on GA-Source showing off Blood2: The Nightmare Levels.
A press release on Datumplane::Starsiege.announces that a Starsiege
gold candidate that will "go through a 'stringent' 24 hour testing period before the
gold master is pressed." Word is Starsiege should ship some time in early March.
MagixX has posted a half-dozen new screenshots from
Activision's upcoming Heavy Gear II and five more screenshots from the Starsiege beta are
on Datumplane::Starsiege. Here's the lowdown on
which giant robots are in which games, courtesy of Derek Carroll at MechCommander.com:
'Mech is short for BattleMech (that's what the apostrophe is for) and is always
capitalized. BattleMech and 'Mech are registered trademarks of FASA Corporation.
Herc isn't short for anything that I'm aware of, it's just supposed to look and sound
like 'Mech.
Mecha is a generic term for any mechanized-robot-tank-thingy, usually large, always
armed to the teeth.
The newly opened Soldier-of-Fortune website
has posted an interview with Eric
(Turmanator) Turman, senior animator on Raven's upcoming Quake II engine game, Soldier
of Fortune.
FullOn3D/Hardware
interviews Brian Bruning asking 3Dfx's Interactive Developer Relations Manager about
memory configurations in the upcoming Voodoo3 lines, offering analysis of the answers.
BeNews has posted a follow-up about the
BeOS Quake II screenshots they posted yesterday ( story). To satisfy questions about the legitimacy of the shots, they
offer explanations for why the uptime figure in the background doesn't change from shot to
shot, and why the output was in a window in the first place.
This Silicon Investor
message board post sent along by RIVA3D yesterday
mentions John Carmack being a member of NVIDIA's Board. I fired off an email in the wee
hours to clarify this, but I see that Billy at Voodoo
Extreme managed to catch him at some point yesterday and got an answer already. Here's
what Mr. Carmack had to say:
I am on their technical advisory board (NOT board of directors), but I am also
on
3dfx's technical advisory board. I give honest opinions to any chip company that
seeks my advice (lately I have been working very closely with ati), but 3dfx and nvidia
have formalized the arrangement.
The Downloads page on the Zipper Interactive Home is a new movie trailer from
the upcoming MechWarrior 3 in AVI format. The download is about 8 MB. Thanks Gone Gold.
Word from Sgt. Hulka is that Odyssey
for Battlezone, TeamEvolve's upcoming mission pack for Battlezone, has gone
gold, and should be on store shelves sometime in March.
A new version 0.11 revision 056 Crystal
Space Beta is now available, offering an update to this free 3D engine. Thanks BetaNews.
Redwood has posted a brief but informative
update on his recent foray to id Software to check out Quake III Arena. The update goes
into detail about the workings of all of the weapons, including the new BFG, which he says
"think instant hit rockets and actually requires aiming now." I missed this in
my travels when it was first posted, if you did as well, you can find it over there under
February 16 news.
id Software Rocks the
Nation from the Heart of Texas with QuakeCon 99 is a press release announcing the
return of QuakeCon, this year as an official id event, offering the "first official
tournament for Quake III Arena." Thanks CalBear at FiringSquad. Break out your cricket shoes, the
event is slated for August 6-8, 1999 in Mesquite, Texas. Here's part of the release:
MESQUITE, Texas, Feb. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Id Software(TM), a leading independent
developer of entertainment software, today announced details surrounding the official
QUAKECON 99 event scheduled to invade Mesquite, Texas on August 6-8, 1999. QUAKECON 99
offers QUAKEŽ fans from around the world the ultimate opportunity to quench their quest
for survival with the first official tournament featuring id Software's groundbreaking 3-D
title, QUAKE III Arena(TM).
QUAKECON 99 will be co-sponsored by Activision, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATVI - news), Advanced
Micro Devices, Inc. (NYSE: AMD - news), Apple Computer (Nasdaq: APPL - news), and ATI
Technologies (Toronto: ATY - news; Nasdaq: ATYTF - news).
"QUAKECON 99 is a tribute to both new and lifelong fans of a phenomenon generated
by id games," said CEO of id Software, Todd Hollenshead. "QUAKECON 99 is the
perfect opportunity to showcase this remarkable fervor by inviting fans from all over the
world to meet the QUAKE III Arena challenge."
QUAKECON 99 is the event QUAKE players have been waiting for -- the ultimate
opportunity to frag in the intense multiplayer world of id's newest prodigy, QUAKE III
Arena. Attendance is free and limited to 1000 enthusiasts. Like-minded souls will gather
for intense deathmatch competitions throughout the event. In addition to the main
tournament, QUAKECON 99 will offer journalists attending the event a chance to test their
skills against each other during the exclusive QUAKECON 99 tournament held for media.
"The QUAKE phenomenon has swept the world and the frenzy will continue with QUAKE
III Arena at QUAKECON 99," states Eric Johnson, senior vice president of marketing
for Activision, Inc. "QUAKE III Arena will let gamers take their QUAKE experience to
new heights of interactivity and mayhem with amazing single and multiplayer-action
gameplay."
Along with the competitions, QUAKECON 99 will also host a variety of gaming workshops
conducted by the team behind the success and cultural phenomenon that is id Software.
Topics will range from discussions on level design and programming to the insightful
detail of art sketching and mod creations.
Datumplane::Starsiege has posted a
"bots" mod that serves as an illustration of how simple drones may be set up in
multi-player missions in Starsiege TRIBES. For this to work, the 1.2 (or greater) version
of Tribes is required for the server, and any version of the client.
There are about a gazillion screenshots (or should I say a gangload) from Kingpin: Life of Crime on
screenshots.net, and they say 37(!) of them are new.
3DsoundSurge has posted an interview with Stuart Denman
and Tim Ebling of Surreal Software focusing on the sound in Surreal's upcoming Drakan:
Order of the Flame. Also, Drakan.Net has posted a
brief Q&A with Surreal Software's John McWilliams. Here's word from that on what DM
will be like in Drakan:
DM in Drakan will be quite different from anything seen as of yet in multiplayer
gaming. Gameplay can take place in one of many modes which include, air only, and ground
only, as PCXL stated, but we expect the more popular modes to be Air & Ground, or our
fourth play style, which is still in development; Queen of the Dragon. QOTD bases its
gameplay on the idea of few dragons, and many guiders. This creates a scene where everyone
is racing for control of the dragons, and afterwards, the Frag Count. The very different
part comes with the combat style; in the air, you have all the traditional dragon breath
weapons, available as Quake style pickup weapons, and physical Dragon attacks, which can
be quite deadly.
Anachronox The Crux Of The
Matter is a Next-Generation Online
article that looks ahead at ION Storm's upcoming Quake II-engine RPG by interviewing the
game's designer, Tom Hall. Thanks CiDcO at StormTroopers.
There's a chat with the Descent 3 team members going on today at 6:00 PM PST at the Interplay Chat Channel. Thanks Deep Space.
When will the 550 MHz Pentium III debut? Second quarter this year, as reported by CBS
MarketWatch or will it be February 26 as reported by Sharky Extreme?
PC Magazine Graphics Cards
Retest describes how vendors submitted what turned out to be over-clocked video boards
to PC Mag's recent accelerator round-up. The culprits they name are two TNT-based cards,
the Diamond Viper V550 and the ELSA Erazor II and the Voodoo Banshee-based Diamond Monster
Fusion. The article also specifically says that retail samples tested the same for the
Creative Labs Graphics Blaster RIVA TNT AGP, the Real3D StarFighter, and the STB
Velocity 4400 AGP. Thanks RIVA3D.
Aureal Download page has new
Windows NT 4.0 drivers for Vortex 2 (AU8830) based sound cards only. Thanks Gregory.
FiringSquad's Turtle Beach
Montego II OEM review has been revised based on some new information, including the
availability of several daughterboards.
Eidos is holding a Build your own Tomb
for Lara to explore Contest for the best "3DML website." Also, The BC3K Page has word of the first Special Defense Fleet
competition offering a 12MB Voodoo2 for the best commander to complete "a highly
complex and in-depth Tour Of Duty deep in Gammulan territory."
I made several errors in several reports yesterday, one due to my inexperience using the
new system here, but the rest due simply to sloppiness, for which I apologize. Here's what
I managed to screw up: In the story
about the Half-Life Uplink Demo Lite I failed to include the URL (which would be this page right here). For some time the
article on the TF
Classic Classes image contained the mixed message that the image was both from
TeamFortress2 and TeamFortress Classic (it is from the latter), I thought I edited the
story properly in the database after catching the error upon posting it, but, well, I
failed, but it's fixed now. In the report about the Kick Interview I referred to the Kick 3D engine as free, but as the license page clearly illustrates, it
is not. Thanks Alan Eisinger. Patrick McNeill points out "You might want to clarify
that the OpenGL source release is only the GLX libraries, not OpenGL itself. GLX
is used to integrate OpenGL with X Windows, and does not handle the actual
rendering." Oh yeah, I also got the sizes on the Half-Life maps wrong when I first
posted them. Now for today's news: Black is white, and up is down. Expect any appropriate
corrections tomorrow.
I'm back in the Blue Tower, after a hit and run trip to Dallas (short enough that there
were no trips to Denny's). I thought I caught up by my last post of yesterday, but I found
a lot more between the cracks on second pass (like that QuakeCon '99 announcement), hopefully I've got most of everything up to
date now. As I mentioned, I was down there at STB with folks from a bunch of other
websites checking out the Voodoo3, but there's an embargo on releasing any information
learned yesterday or from evaluation boards until Monday, so the lack of info between now
and then will be made up for by a small flood of reviews at that time. I'd say more, but I
see the 3Dfx snipers out the window getting edgy. Hiya to Jay and Epp,
a couple of guys I ran into on the plane that turned out to be readers
(how wild is that?).
Also new from Valve are two new deathmatch maps, one called DoubleCross by
Dario Casali: and the other called RustMill by Valve's John Guthrie and Dave Riller. Again, the
mirror of Blue's News FTP courtesy of Walnut Creek CDROM.
Full descriptions accompany each map.
Gabe from Valve sent along a shot of the classes in Valve's upcoming TeamFortress Classic, along
with the names of each underneath to tell which is which. Here's your TFC enemy (and
friend) recognition chart:
The GT Web FTP Archives
has the multiplayer patch for Blood2, AKA the Point Release. Here's a local copy on Blue's
News FTP as well as our Walnut Creek CDROM mirror.
There's also a list of mirrors on PlanetBlood.
I received some info and images giving word on the upcoming release of a life-action short
film based on Half-Life Uplink by UK marketing agency Cruise Control. Here are the shots,
followed by a bunch from the press release:
  
"Half-Life : Uplink" : Live Action Film To Be Released On-Line!
Half-Life combines state of the art gameplay with all the suspense of a Hitchcock
movie. The game sets you inside a secret government research facility where a horrific
accident leaves you stranded deep underground and fighting for your life against marauding
aliens and marines.
Half-Life : Uplink follows a journalist who hears about ‘the accident’and
manages to break in to the Black Mesa base to see what’s going on….
The film was commissioned by Lisa Humphries, product manager for Half-Life at Cendant
Software. “This long awaited title has met all our expectations and more. The film
has been designed for two reasons, one to draw in new gamers and let them experience
Half-Life, and two, to supply the gaming fraternity with a different angle on the game.
Something to share and something to say thank you”.
Filming took place inside an underground military facility at a recently decommissioned
USAF base in Bedfordshire, UK. “The location was perfect and must have been exactly
how Valve imagined the Black Mesa base to look” said Chris Birch, producer of the
film. “We tried to stay as true the game as possible. With a perfect location we had
to get the right sound effects and thanks to Sierra we were able to draw on the entire
sound library from Half-Life itself”.
“Half-Life has such a strong following. The aim was to support and build upon that
as well as draw in new players whose interest will have been sparked by seeing the
film” said Chris Birch. Fans will even be able to download two different endings with
possibly a third to come. The second ending will be available two weeks after the release
of the film.
The Half-Life film will be available in a variety of formats on-line at www.cruisecontrol.uk.com from Monday 22nd
February. Please note that this website will not be active until Saturday 20th
February.
Quake II Coming to BeOS is a story on BeNews that offers Voodoo2 screenshots of
OpenGL Quake II on a Pentium III running BeOS R4.1 (currently undergoing beta testing and
expected to be available by the end of Q1 1999). The article goes on to say: "No
public date has been set for release of Quake II, however it is expected to be available
as a free download for purchasers of the original Windows CD shortly after the release of
BeOS R4.1."
PlanetStarSiege has posted some new
screenshots from the TRIBES OpenGL beta.
There are a bunch of Blood
2: The Nightmare Levels screenshots on The Adrenaline
Vault showing off action from Monolith's upcoming official Blood2 add-on, as well as a page of shots of
weapon and enemy models.
Fresh 3d interviews Martin Barlow, lead programmer for
the Kick Engine.
2015's Tom Kudirka sends word that Wages of Sin, their official Sin Mission Pack, has gone
gold, and is off to manufacture. Tom says the pack should be on store shelves next week sometime.
Gangland.Org has a post from Xatrix' Greg Goodich
that mentions plans for a full demo prior to the non-interactive demo release. Here's the lowdown:
It looks like we will most likely release the demo prior to the release of the non-interactive movie.
Let me explain why...
The demo is in its final stages now and will be ready for release very shortly. It will include the entire first episode and will most likely be quite large.
Non-interactive movie trailers in gaming serve a few purposes. The first is to generate excitement about the product (in the fan base) before an interactive demo is ready and the second is for retailers to play on the video monitors in
selected outlets. Unfortunately for us, the movie trailer we want to show you folks is much different (content wise) then what would be allowed to show in
retail outlets. Also, Sony/Columbia will not allow us to "give away" an entire song for free.
The result of all of this is that we have decided to get the demo out first in its "raw" and "un-censored" way and then follow it up with the movie which has been edited for viewing in the retail outlets.
Pel Interactive has posted an interview
with g.o.d.'s Mike Wilson. Talking about qtest, Quake, people, shareware, and many
more things.
Silicon Graphics Releases OpenGL Windowing
Code to Open Source Community Via World Wide Web is the announcement that's said to "Release Further Extends Proliferation of OpenGL Across All
Operating Systems." Thanks ShieldWolf.
Version 1.0 of the Starseige Tribes: Skynet Mod is out offering
new weapons, turrets, deployables, and kits. All original items and weapons are intact with a few exceptions described later.
Thanks PlanetStarSiege.
The Lone Gunman's TRIBES sniping guide has been updated with more tips as well as word from Dynamix's tim gift on custom reticle problems.
The newly opened Drakan.Net has an exclusive new
screenshot showing off their namesake game, Surreal's upcoming Drakan: Order of the Flame.
The monthly Eye on
Storm Newsletter is online, among its new features offering an interview with
Daikatana Producer Kelly Hoerner. Thanks CiDcO at StormTroopers.
This page has instructions on how users of
the registered Half-Life can combine the files from the Uplink demo with the normal
Half-Life installation to save space and make the Uplink demo act like a Half-Life add-on.
Also, Morpheus has cooked up a way for owners of the registered
Half-Life to install a variant on the demo after a small four-something MB download. I
wanted to make sure this second shortcut was okay with Valve before passing it along, and
they just wanted it known there are a few bugs with it (titles don't work, there's some
overlapping dialog, that will cause problems that aren't in the demo proper).
Dominik "BiTBUSTER" Volmer, one time unofficial
German translator for Blue's News, sends along a beta version 0.12 of his Volumer TRIBES
Volume extraction program, here's
a link to a local copy (189 KB), as well as a mirror thanks to the fine nuts over at Walnut Creek CDROM. This program can help those
interested in editing TRIBES to extract all the resources within the game's volume files.
As promised, The Coven Disposable Heroes
Downloads page now has the Linux port of version 3.0 of their M.A.D. mod for Quake II,
which makes for a full set of Linux and Solaris ports for all three Quake II mods
featured in the Disposable Heroes pack for Quake and Quake II.
QPL.ORG is holding a PaintBall QW league to play
Thursday nights with a cash prize of $20.
After originally posting the id Site Cracked story yesterday, I made a couple of corrections based
on responses: one to change the word hacked to cracked (something I've messed up on
before, but I think I'll get it right in the future), and another to correct the mention
of Kevin Mitnick being jailed for computer crimes.
Mr. Mitnick has been detained for just shy of four years now, but has never been convicted
of anything. Also, {EvEm]_Xtro admits it's a bit pedantic to point out, but in this
Starsiege Screenshot story yesterday, I used the word "mech," a MechWarrior
term, where it should be "herc."
Off in the wee wee hours in the BlueJet to the wilds of Dallas to check out the Voodoo3. I
head out at about 5:00 AM and hope to grab a chance to update around midday when I arrive,
and perhaps again in the afternoon, but there's a worst case scenario that I won't be back
online until pretty late this evening (I think the midday update should work out). More on
discussions of holidays and occasions, I've been chided (hey, get a calendar!) for failing
to note both the start of Mardi Gras, and the Vietnamese holiday of Tet. Today is Ash
Wednesday, as well. That's a mouthful, but I'm sure I've still forgotten something =]
Link of the day: Crow's
Rutherford B. Hayes speech (thanks Schwab), in honor of President's day.
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