Archived News:
There's a Zoid Interview on
linuxpower.org talking with the birthday boy about Linux and Quake III Arena. Thanks
Magnet.
Dominik 'BiTBUSTER' Volmer sent along a new version 0.20
of his TRIBES Volumer,
(mirror courtesy of Walnut Creek CDROM) the volume
extraction tool for Starsiege TRIBES. Here's word on the update from the author:
I just finished coding the PBMP -> BMP routine. Now you are able to extract
all the graphics, textures and backgrounds from Tribes, modify these BMP's and add them to
your new vol. You'll get new gfx in your mod's.
Next release will have Vol-File Creation Support so that you don't need the dos program
that comes from Dynamix. It'll be easier to create your own Vol Files then.
Have Fun with this Tool.
Epic's Unreal Page contain's an
interesting announcement about a Knowledge Adventure title that will use the Unreal engine
as well as word about the PIII optimizations that will be in Unreal Tourney. Here's the
lowdown on both:
Knowledge Adventure has announced that they are using the Unreal Engine to
create Dr. Brain™ Thinking Games: Action/Reaction, a new edutainment title designed
for kids ages 10 and up. The title was demonstrated this week at Intel´s Pentium III
Processor Preview Day. Knowledge Adventure is a leader in multimedia educational software
having created the very popular Math Blaster® and JumpStart Learning System™ game
series. Read the full Knowledge Adventure press release HERE.
At Intel´s Pentium® III Processor Preview Day, Epic participated by showing Unreal
Tournament which has been optimized for the Pentium III processor. The Pentium III
optimized version of Unreal Tournament was also shown at the S3 stand with high resolution
S3TC textures. Both technologies will appear in the final release version of Unreal
Tournament and will be incorporated into the Unreal Engine for the use of Epic's
licensees.
The new Descent 3 Preview
on GameSpot UK offers up some new screenshots of
Interplay's upcoming Descent installment that they say "should win hearts among the
Descent faithful" with its "Refined missions and return to core concept."
Also up on GameSpot UK is a first look at Mortyr,
the upcoming time-travelling World War II game.
PlanetStarSiege has posted three more new
screenshots from the upcoming TRIBES OpenGL patch showing off the broadside map. There's
also word there that the Renegades
patch has changed its name from the SkyNet mod, has moved in to P.S.S., and is available
for download as server-only mod.
Acclaim.Net has posted a Turok 2 1.04 patch that
"addresses most of the reported issues with the game." The patch updates the
shipping version 1.03 of T2, but clients are inter-operable with the new release (you
don't have to upgrade to play on 1.04 servers). The patch addresses some multiplayer bugs
and tweaks down the damage dealt by the War Blade. Additionally the fix offers an updated
version of GameSpy Lite that patches a bug that mis-reports ping times. Thanks The Turok Cave.
The GameHost Page has a new
beta 1.30 of the GameHost server control program that allows you to easily setup, run, and
manage many popular network games, including Quake, QuakeWorld, Quake II, Hexen
II, Half-Life and Sin. The beta has very few changes (a few bug fixes), and if no major
bugs surface it will become GameHost 1.0. The new release will give you another 30 days to
try GameHost since online ordering isn't up yet (if you want the extra days, don't
uninstall the previous version).
There's a Redline Server Hosting
Application on the Accolade site offering the
first 45 registrants this deal: Host a Redline demo server at least eight hours a day for
30 days and receive three free games of your choice.
Raven's Pat Lipo updated his .plan with word that the Heretic II Enhancement Pack is but a
single bug away from release, as well as word that he will be attending GamesCon in Toronto at the end of this month, along
with Dynamix's Scott Youngblood, ION Storms Tom Hall, and Zoid (I have plans to attend
myself). Here's the part about the Enhancement Pack:
The Heretic II EP is almost there. QA and we are both hammering on one tiny
remaining bug. Thanks to all the beta testers for all their assistance, support and
patience!
Mplayer's Daikatana DM site has
word of another Daikatana Deathmatch chat, this time with Programmer Justin
"Logic" Randall and Director of Web Operations William Haskins. The chat is today from
4:00 to 5:00 PM Pacific time in the Mplayer Onstage Chat Lobby.
Kick Engine website has an updated
version of their Next-Generation 3D demo for RIVA TNT and ATI Rage 128 cards (only).
Thanks Billy at Voodoo Extreme. The new
version of the demo adds 2048*2048 textures, a FPS counter, and Volumetric Fog (making it
true vaporware).
A new version 1.17 of ZDoom, a Doom for Win32
project based on the id source code, is now available. Thanks Doomworld (where a mirror of the release can be
found). The new offering has the simultaneous release of a DOS version (although it does
not support MIDI/MUS music or a joystick like the Win version), bugfixes, a significant speed boost (near 2X)
on "modern processors," a chasecam, a particle system (particle blood splats and
bullet puffs), and more.
For those who edit: Version 0.7 of MapSpy, the freeware Quake II map editing diagnostic
utility is out on Mad Dog's CFG
Aliases-Configs-Map Editing page. The update adds new error checks, refined report
output, and a "slick" search option to help find entities.
Battle for the border: It's Canada
versus USA in LMCTF.
- There's a new demo edition tutorial on the Zarathustra
Studios site covering the menu-based special effects available from within Keygrip2...
- Clan Database is looking to become a
comprehensive listing groups participating in online competition, and they request that
all clans who wish to be listed pop over and register...
- Here's a poll on what you
like in gameplay to help mod authors plan their projects...
- More pollage: The single Game Survey Question on
the Atlantis Enterprises page asks "If you
could make your own game, what would it be like?"...
- Here are some never revealed cheat codes for the
Abyss Of Pandemonium Quake Mission pack...
Happy Birthday to id Software's Zoid, Raven's Chris Foster, Ritual's onethumb, and
old-school 3D guru Nicolaus Copernicus...I know I recently mentioned getting some of the
department pages updated, but getting the database online more quickly than I imagined
threw that off schedule. Now with the Voodoo3 in the Blue Labs for testing, it may be a
while longer before those are addressed, though I did get some missing Viper V550
benchmarks on the Benchmarks page in preparation for the
new benchmarks that will be added there soon (actually that bad boy needs a redesign
before I try and plop another column of numbers in there, doesn't it?).
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 QUAKE® 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?).
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