CF TF interviews Valve/TeamFortress Software's Robin Walker, talking about their upcoming free TeamFortress Classic multiplayer add-on for Half-Life, and TeamFortress2, their upcoming standalone multiplayer game.

Brian Hook made a .plan update to follow-up on his earlier update (story), or as he calls it "the usual 'answer all the questions my last .plan update asked' update," talking further about support for 3D accelerators that are no longer state-of-the-art.

Okay, time for the usual "answer all the questions my last .plan update asked" update:

- "If you're willing to do this, why not do all kinds of workarounds so that you can support [insert orphaned graphics accelerator here]"

Because that's a lot of work, and we have to be very careful about how much we're willing to uglify our code and accept significant design limitations. We could add things like 4-bpp palettized textures to make the Permedia2 run even faster, but that would be a lot of work to help only Permedia2 users.

Our vertex lighting path helps _everyone_, but it especially helps out the lower end cards.

- "Are you going to support S3TC"

Yes. We are willing to support any compression mechanism that does not require precomputed data on our part. Right now we support the GL_S3_s3tc standard and it works quite well.

- "What are your new minimum system requirements"

This is still up in the air. While it should _run_ on any Pentium, that doesn't mean it'll run _well_ on any Pentium. We haven't done wide scalability testing, but with a small viewport and greatly reduced LOD on models then something like a P200MMX w/ Voodoo should be playable. No promises though until we have all our features implemented and have had time to do some optimization work on a wide range of hardware.

- "Would you recommend the vertex lighting mechanism for Voodoo?"

Yes, for maximum performance then I would recommend the vertex lighting mechanism and/or running at 512x384.

- "Is a V2 SLI going to have any benefits for Q3"

Obviously, more fill rate is better, but a lot will depend on the screen resolution you're running at and the quality of 3Dfx's OpenGL drivers when we ship. If their drivers aren't performing well, then a V2 SLI isn't going to be much help since we won't be fill rate limited. If their drivers are performing well, then yeah, the V2 SLI should kick ass. Keep in mind that a V2 SLI in our lightmapped case provides the equivalent of 360Mpixels/ second of rendering, which is REALLY REALLY fast.

I hope to have new benchmark numbers posted in a couple weeks after the IHVs get a fair chance to update their drivers.

Sharky Extreme is on the Accolade kick today, posting previews of both Redline (with a bunch of screenshots), which will offer combat both on foot and driving in cars, and Slave Zero, offering the chance to crush cities while operating a giant robot.

Sharky Extreme has posted still more that adds to the anticipation of upcoming products offering dual accelerator support from non-3Dfx products, this time from Hercules:

Hercules has considered the possibility of doing Non-3Dfx based SLI products. Currently, we're working on a number of other enhancements that we're very excited about as well. Stay tuned...

Raven's Rick Johnson updated his .plan with a tech update on their upcoming Quake II-engine game, Soldier of Fortune, talking about support for things like 3DNow!, SSE extensions, and 3D sound APIs:

Thought I would give a little tech update about SoF.

Right now, we are putting in some of the 3dNow! enhancements made to the Q2 engine. Not all of them are usable, as some concentrated on the software renderer, and other routines that we have changed are no longer compatible with the original 3dNow! changes. So we should have some 3dNow! support out of the box. As for how much support we will have is uncertain, as getting the game completed is a difficult enough task, let alone, adding MMX, 3dNow!, and PIII special instructions all take time.

We will also be supporting A3D and SBLive! out of the box. The support should be better than Heretic2, so expect to hear good results.

We also have plenty of rendering options to make sure the game runs well on the lower-end cards. Our "low-end" card is a VooDoo1 chipset. Currently, SoF looks great on TNT cards. Minor *nudge* to 3dfx to place priorities on those OpenGL drivers.

2015 President Tom Kudirka sends word that they have released an AVI-format movie showing off gameplay from their upcoming official Sin mission pack, Wages of Sin (which I'm told is now available in some stores). Here's a local copy of the movie (9.3 MB), mirror courtesy of the swell folks over at Walnut Creek CDROM.

3DNews.Net continues their marathon interview with a bunch of folks from the industry on various topics, today asking the assembled group of experts about game violence and the female gaming market.

MagixX has posted a Mortyr Special including a bunch of storyboards and screenshots from this upcoming game that sends a soldier from the future back to do battle in World War II. Word on MagixX is that this game will not be published in their native Germany.

iLERNeT interviews Kevin Lambert of Monolith Productions in a ten question interview that kicks off a week-long series of interviews there. The interview focuses more on Kevin's thoughts on websites, publicity, and the community than games.

The Adrenaline Vault reviews the Intel Pentium III offering benchmarks to demonstrate improved performance using the SSE extensions versus when they are turned off in a review written by Marcia and Barry Press, noted authors of several books on hardware, including the PC Upgrade and Repair Bible Professional Edition.

The L-Fire Development Group Home has a new version 1.20 of L-Fire CTF for Quake II available for download. The new release fixes a couple of bugs in the id source that would cause the techs and flags to be lost until the level was restarted (which can significantly impact scoring in a CTF match), and another that made it impossible to enable friendly fire.

Two more previews of Team Fortress Classic are online as Valve and TeamFortress Software tour around showing off this upcoming free multiplayer-only add-on for Half-Life. Here's PC.IGN.COM's TF Classic preview, and here's GameCenter's TF Classic preview. If you're unfamiliar with TeamFortress (originally developed for Quake, here's the Team Fortress Home if you want to check that out), here's a concise summary from the PC.IGN.COM piece:

Players take on the roles of different character classes--soldier, medic, demolitions expert--and work together to defeat the opposition. Each class has its own strengths and disadvantages...

id Software programmer Brian Hook made an update to his .plan talking about adding a new way of approximating lightmaps on lower-end accelerators to make them more capable of acceptable performance (if not visual quality) in Quake III Arena. Here's the update:

John had been nagging me to implement our vertex lit approximation of lightmaps for lower end cards. This has several key benefits. The obvious one is better performance -- single pass instead of two pass lighting, effectively halving the number of triangles tossed down the API on non-multitexture hardware. The second, and biggest (to me), benefit is enhanced compatibility with lower end hardware.

A couple cards have sort of been nagging at the back of our minds when it comes to market saturation, compatibility, and performance. While working on Quake3 we've primarily tested and worried about the real high performance, high quality accelerators such as ATI Rage128 and NVidia RivaTNT, and we know other accelerators such as Permedia3 and Savage4 and Voodoo3 will run our stuff just great. But there are a few cards that have been problematic for us because A.) they don't have all the features or performance we need and B.) there are about a zillion of them out there in our customer base.

While differences in fill rate are a source of concern, it's easy enough to scale for fill rate by moving down video modes (320x240 has 1/4 the pixel fill rate requirements of 640x480). Triangle throughput, however, is much more difficult to compensate for since we don't do level-of-detail on the world, and we only do a very coarse LOD on models. Going to a vertex lit model halves the number of triangles rendered in the world compared to lightmapping, which helps both slower graphics cards and slower CPUs.

The other problem is the Permedia2's lack of src*dst blending. This has been a sticking point for quite some time, where we've been tempted to say "Well, screw the Permedia2, it's the odd man out and it's in workstations anyway, not consumer machines". By doing the vertex lighting we've removed this problem AND given the P2 a little performance boost.

So I'm now very confident that we'll run reliably and fairly quickly on fairly low end hardware, i.e. hardware that has not been our conscious target platform.

The vertex lit model has one major drawback -- it's not exactly attractive. It's not horrible -- Jedi Knight and Descent both used vertex lighting -- but it's not very competitive in terms of image quality with, say, Quake3's native rendering method. But I take some comfort knowing that no matter what, those early cards had some serious image quality issues (lack of proper MIP mapping, cracks/gaps/sparkles, missing blend modes), so this isn't a huge loss.

The current angle of attack is that on Permedia2 we'll automatically turn on vertex lighting. For Rage Pro and Rendition V2200 we'll probably recommend it. All users will have the option of going for the "fast and ugly" path, and I'm sure you hardcore players out there will do just that so you can hit your 390fps on a TNT at 320x240 with no lightmaps. :-)

Quake3's range of scalability is going to be very good. My hope is that we can get fairly consistent performance from a PII/233 with a Rage Pro all the way up to a PIII/550 w/ Rage128/TNT2/Voodoo3.

MagixX has posted three more new screenshots from Interactive Magic's upcoming World War II shooter, Mortyr. Also, there's a new Mortyr screenshot on 3D-Unlimited that's the third of six they are posting over the course of a week or more (consider that a half-time report).

The Rainbow 6 Toolkit Homepage has a new beta 0.7 of the Rainbow Six toolkit, a collection of programs to enhance your R6 experience. The new version adds a working mouse sensitivity slider, an option to disable the intro movie in R6, a new IP display so you can easily copy your current IP address to the clipboard, and a change that allows you to enter servers by name as well as IP.

A couple of follow-ups on the story about the possibility of using dual TNTs in some systems. First, as a couple of readers have pointed out, referring to using two video cards in tandem shouldn't be called SLI mode, since SLI means "scan line interleave," where every other line is drawn by the other card (interleaved), and the discussions of the TNT implementation refer to the screen being drawn in two different halves (top and bottom) each handled by one card. A bit more on this has been written on the prospect of using a pair of TNTs in tandem since the original story, including a GrandMaster B update that's skeptical of the whole report, and, in contrast, an update to the Sharky Extreme message board by Kerry Philpott, a Metabyte employee, that makes this all sound like a foregone conclusion:

By the way, this technology is only a small part of what we are working on here at Metabyte. We are working our engineers overtime to get you guys the bomb in a graphics config.

Did you ever think that you would be able to play Quake2 on three monitors with every available slot filled with Wicked3D graphics cards? with eyeSCREAM? Thought not - I have... :) Anybody interested?? How many slots would you fill?? Would you use more than two?? Just curious. :)

There's an interview with Tim Gerritsen on GA-Source, talking with the Project Manager of Human Head Studios, about RUNE, an upcoming Unreal-engine action/adventure game tinged in Norse mythology being developed by this group of seven former Raven Software programmers and artists and a former producer from FASA Interactive in conjunction with Epic Games.

AGN3D previews Giants, the upcoming action/adventure game from PlanetMoon Studios, offering up a couple of screenshots along the way.

To follow-up on the report about the closing of Sierra's Yosemite Entertainment Division (story), Sierra Online founder Ken Williams made a post to the Black Monday Forum with an open letter to former Sierra employees with an explanation of the events that lead to the closing of the Yosemite offices, going into detail about the road Sierra has traveled to get where they are today. Thanks GA-Source. As the letter says, "There is really nothing good that can be said. This is a sad ending to Sierra's twenty-year operating history in Oakhurst, which at one time, represented over 550 Oakhurst-based employees."

The Qizmo page has a new version 2.60 of the Qizmo proxy program for QuakeWorld. Thanks Zibbo. The new release offers several exciting innovations, including enhanced data compression they say allows a modem player to set his rate to 10000 (ISDN territory). Also new in this release is a change to demo recording so that it no longer disables delta compression, and a feature for LPBs with high packet loss that allows them to get each packet sent repeatedly to increase the chance of each packet getting through.

Sharky Extreme's Diamond Stealth Savage4 hands-on preview looks at Diamond's new card based on S3's new chipset. More on the latest and greatest in upcoming video cards can be found in another report on Sharky Extreme where there's word that Matrox Graphics will unveil their next generation accelerator, the G400, for the first time at CeBit '99 in Hannover, Germany (March 18), with initial release dates of cards based off of the chipset said to be second quarter 1999.

• There's a review of EagleWatch on thestation.net looking at this new official add-on for Red Storm Entertainment's Rainbow Six.
• Gibbed.com reviews Eagle Watch as well.
• CPR Extreme reviews Unreal for the Macintosh.

• WarZone is giving away a Pentium III and Motherboard.
• The European Quake Championships 1999 are getting underway this weekend, PlanetQuake's EuroQuake Coverage will keep you up to date on all the festivities.
• The North American TRIBES League season one is underway, you can still sign up as a replacement clan (err, tribe) in case any participants drop out, and in signing up as a back-up, you are guaranteed a slot in season two.
• Finally, though it's not strictly a competition, I wanted to mention that this weekend I'm going to be checking out the festivities in GamesCon up in Toronto (the zero temperatures in New York have been a bit too balmy for me lately), so if you're there, I'll be the one surrounded by the cloud of frozen Cohiba smoke.

• Two new shows on AGN3D TV span the globe to bring the latest in hardware, with this show covering the Voodoo3 festivities in Dallas last week including the trip to Mexico to see STB's plant, and an interview with Thresh. Also, this show talks with Diamond Multimedia about their upcoming Savage4 card, touching on the idea of using two of these in tandem (like in recent discussing of doing so with two TNTs). RealPlayer required...
• The LoneGunmen (you've got to love a group of loners) have updated their TRIBES Sniping Guide with more on how to keep adding notches to your laser rifle. They've also posted some new replacement crosshairs for download...
• Loki's Minion's Capture The Flag personalized t-shirts are now available. Word on LMCTF 5.0 is that it will be out within a week...
• Intervju med DC_Sujoy is a conversation (in English) with feared deathmatcher/humorist Sujoy Roy about an upcoming showdown between his Clan_UK and Sweden's Clan 9...
• Off-topic download of the day: Bungie Software has a new version 1.2 patch for Myth II: SoulBlighter...

Thanks to all the HTML gurus out there who were quick to point out the foible that was causing the mystery linefeed after the Search! box in MSIE. If you're interested, it was repaired by placing the form tags around the table cell tags, rather than within them, though it's not clear which browser is formatting the output improperly. I tweaked the left frame a bit for those who said the changes produced a horizontal scroll bar (mostly folks using large fonts) so hopefully that's fixed. Finally, I'm told I may be busting my all-browser compatibility, as an Opera user said the search (err, Search!) form doesn't output properly under this alternative browser, which I'll look into.

Link of the day: NGR - Gaming's Hottest Guys Pin-up Calendar. Thanks Ron Little (warning, if you are drinking milk, point your nose away from the keyboard before clicking that link).

PlanetQuake interviews Christian Antkow talking to Disruptor about his work as a level designer at id, Quake III Arena, and what to expect from it.

There's a preview of Team Fortress Classic on GameSpot that offers up nine screenshots, as well as descriptions of the weapons and classes in this upcoming free add-on from Valve/Team Fortress Software for Half-Life. Thanks Ant.

Beta Testers Champion Daikatana Deathmatch Demo is a report on The Adrenaline Vault that talks of the merits of the upcoming deathmatch only Daikatana demo offering enthusiastic endorsements from beta testers.

Creative Technical Support Download Files page has new 3DBlaster Banshee BIOS and Win95/98 drivers for Creative Labs' Voodoo Banshee based board. Thanks Voodoo Extreme.

A follow up on a story posted earlier: Intel links alleged Pentium flaw to software is a Reuters story covering Intel's announcement that the discovery by a German magazine of a way to turn the Pentium III serial number on without the owners knowledge or consent was due to a flaw in software, not the chip itself. As for what this ultimately means about the problem is unclear, as the article says "Intel said it is still in talks with the German magazine, Computer Technology, which on Tuesday alleged a flaw in the software Intel provided for turning off the serial number, to determine what, if anything is wrong with its system."

Epic's Cliff Bleszinski updated his .plan with a rundown of what Unreal Tourney is all about written by Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart to help get out the word, since "it doesn't really get attention from the various news sites." Here's the poop:

Brandon "Greenmarine" Reinhart posted this to our messageboard (megaboard.epicgames.com) and I think it says a lot about UT:

"I think its really important to reiterate that UT isn't just multiplayer. I've been spending a lot of time working out the code and story for the single player side of the game. You don't have to have a net connection to enjoy UT, you don't have to play online. The single player game consists of a ladder through each of the four game types, plus a special ladder at the end. Every map has a bit of story that describes how the various environments fit together. Before entering a team game you have a chance to customize your team and view the bio's for enemy bots. The bio's are very cool. You might run into a criminal from the Mars Prison Colonies who is a total psycho. His description will tell you that he enjoys close quarter fighting...likes to rip his enemies up and when you play against him he'll move in close with the Impact Hammer. Or maybe you'll run into one of the Necris Phayder. The Necris are a new race (human, but with dead pale skin) who are attempting to destabilize the New Earth Government through guerilla warfare. The Phayder are a dangerous secret society of Necris assassins. The bot combat in Unreal Tournament isn't just a training mode. Its an actual single player game. Sure, you aren't running through the normal single player environments, but you are playing an organized series of games. Each match has a bit of story behind it. (More than, say, a Mortal Kombat match.) The skill levels in UT are very controllable. If you really suck at deathmatch you can play on the lowest skill level and feel like a frag master. We've also included tutorials for every gametype (including deathmatch) to get people started. Of course, if you are a badass, you'll be hard pressed to beat the game on the hardest skill level. Anyway, I thought I'd take a chance to describe exactly what that side of UT was. Since it doesn't really get attention from the various news sites. If you have any questions feel free to ask. Oh, one other thing. For team games in the single player where bots are on your side, there is an orders menu that lets you deploy the bots as you see fit. You can tell them to guard specific locations or general tasks like "roam and attack."

Gamers.Com's Half-Life config guide is up offering suggestions on how to bind your keys so your keys can keep you out of binds.

3DNews.Net's Industry Interview continues, with today's questions for the insider roundtable about "graphic junkies" and company size.

Tonight's PyroPimps Show (fun audio program with a multimedia "Dream On" kind of feel) offers an interview with Kali author Jay Cotton.

Dynamix' David Scott updated his .plan with word that Starsiege, the game of Herc (giant robot) combat set between the Earthsiege series and TRIBES, has been approved for duplication. The update offers some acknowledgements, and a confirmation that the only OpenGL support working out of the box is for the RIVA TNT, with plans for a patch to support other cards ASAP, possibly before the game hits shelves. In a semi-related note, The Adrenaline Vault is reporting that MechWarrior III has entered (private) beta testing. Finally, in our cavalcade of games, word from Acclaim is that South Park for the PC is shipping, and should be on retail shelves about March 1 (if they said April 1, I'd be bracing for a Terrence and Phillip game).

sCary has posted some high resolution versions of some recently released Quake III Arena screenshots on the Shugashack, one of them in a whopping 2048x1152 resolution.

After the Sin has Sung is a new article on Ritualistic by Ritual's own Levelord offering up his opinions on what went right and wrong during the development of Sin, and how that impacted the way the game turned out.

GameLinks.Net interviews Scott McNutt, Raven Software level designer, about Raven's upcoming Soldier of Fortune game.

Rust Interviews Scott 'Dr. Rigormortis' Dalton, Legend Entertainment level designer, about their upcoming Wheel of Time game, and lots of other stuff in a freewheeling conversation.

CNNfn's report on the Intel Pentium III security flaw speculates that Intel may actually recall the PIII's already in the pipeline that are due to be unveiled in just a few days. Thanks Scatterblak. The big I is quoted as saying they are unsure the flaw, based on the results of some experiments by the German magazine Computer Technology (c/t) exists, but they will work with the magazine to see what's been done. c/t says they can demonstrate that the embedded serial number in Pentium III chips can be turned on remotely without the user's knowledge. The serial number scheme announced for the PIII has come under heavy fire from security and privacy groups, whose protests resulted in Intel's decision to make it so the ID number can be switched off.

The Heretic for the Macintosh page has a new release of Heretic for the Macintosh. The port is made from the source code recently released publically by Raven, and is said to be the equivalent of DOS Heretic verison 1.3. It requires a PowerMac and has been tested on System 7.5.5, 7.6.1 and 8.5.1., and it should work fine on System 7.1.2 and up. If you want to hear music, you need QuickTime 2.5 or later, and the optional MIDI files.

Drakan.Net has posted an exclusive movie with 15 seconds of gameplay from Surreal Software's upcoming third-person action title, Drakan: Order of the Flame. The 2 MB movie is in AVI format, and showcases the Fire Ring effect (very cool). Here's a local copy of the movie (2.1 MB), used with Drakan.Net's kind permission, mirror courtesy of Walnut Creek CDROM.

Version 1.09 of the Fast Card TNT/3Dfx overclocking utility is now out. Thanks Voodoo Extreme. It's possible the next version of this utility will include Rage 128 support.

More news about the rumor that may yet be a movie, Doom, the motion picture, comes from a post on the Coming Attractions Doom movie page. Thanks Violator. Here's the poop, which, even if it's nothing, is still fun, discussing casting suggestions:

Doom producer Moe Lospinoso has asked Coming Attractions readers to offer their suggestions as to who they would cast in a Doom movie, as well as what director they think would be perfect for the job. With development stepping up a notch now that Todd McFarlane Productions is involved with the project, Lospinoso is interested to hear what the fans out there have to say.

You can email your comments under the subject heading 'Doom' using Coming Attractions scoop feedback request. We'll then in turn forward them on to Moe Lospinoso to read. He asks that no one send in any story ideas whatsoever; just observations and suggestions (and reasons!) why you think your favorite actors and directors should be in Doom.

Action Arena previews Kingpin: Life of Crime giving a good rundown of the game's planned features as well as a ton of screenshots and some new images showing off the game's cover art.

This press release on the Whole Experience site gives word that their upcoming actin game Experience will use that RTIME technology to connect offer the Internet. The release also announces: "NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA), a leading manufacturer of 3D graphics processors, has also selected “Experience” to showcase their next-generation of graphic capabilities of their award-winning 3D RIVA family of graphics processors," and The Whole Experiences Patrick Moynihan (no relation to the NY Senator as far as I know) sends along this intriguing comment that this is not TNT2, but something actually "far cooler":

One thing I will clarify -- the "Future nVidia" technology mentioned is not TNT2 -- It's far cooler than that. Wish I could tell you more...

Both The Adrenaline Vault's Interview David Grenewetzki and GA-Source's Dave Grenewetzki interview talk with the President of Sierra about the recent closing of the offices and planned relocation of Sierra subsidiary Yosemite Entertainment (whose site ironically still touts the company's location as a strength). The Q&As discuss the status of Yosemite's games in progress such as Babylon 5, and talks of it as a positive move. In contrast, the Black Monday page is a forum for former Yosemite employees and anyone else to voice their feelings, email addresses or job leads. Thanks GA-Source. Finally, I received word from someone who works over there (who did not request anonymity, but I'll provide it anyway) who says that at this point the Unreal-engine Navy SEALs project is "on hold as of now."

Speaking of B5, PC.IGN.COM previews Babylon 5 showing some screenshots of this upcoming game based on the TV series.

The STARSIEGE Players Website has word that Starsiege, the upcoming prequel to TRIBES will offer OpenGL support out of the box, but not for all cards. Also, Gerald Harrison updated his .plan with word on how you can download extra pilot pictures for Starsiege that won't be on the game CD when it's available (along with a hint about finding Easter Eggs).

The RetroGear mod for TRIBES is out, offering new weapons, or rather old weapons, as it replaces the game's futuristic armaments with weapons and armor based on present day weaponry. Thanks tANG at PlanetStarSiege.

Speaking of TRIBES mods, Elmer Fudd's TRIBES Server Resources page has maps and mods for TRIBES server ops in a convenient mall of mayhem. No word on a wabbit hunting mod.

The Terror Quake2 page has a patch for the Q2 Terror Quake beta that fixes several bugs.

QuakeStarter's Official HomePage has a new version of this Quake and Quake II front-end that fixes a bug that caused a file not found error, and adds support for a couple of new mods.

I received word from Take-Two Interactive subsidiary Rock Star Games that they will be offering a DreamCast version of Max Payne sometime after November of this year, and they will also be doing a new Duke Nukem game, a third person action shooter on "a yet to be specified next generation platform."

Word is that the highly-anticipated upcoming online RPG EverQuest has gone gold. Final release of the game is planned for mid-March. Thanks GA-Source. Also there's a new Red Baron 2 patch on 3DFiles.Com.

There's a "New CPUs from AMD and Intel" article on Tom's Hardware Guide talking about the latest from AMD and Intel. Thanks ruiner at AMD Zone. Also, SE vs 3DNow is an AnandTech discussion of the Pentium III that offers a comparison of the new Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) to AMD's 3DNow! extensions.

3D Spotlight interviews Paul Crossley from S3 talking about the Savage4 accelerator.

The Rage 128 Windows 9x Drivers page has new Win95/98 drivers for ATi's latest. Thanks Voodoo Extreme. Also, the 3Dlabs Permedia Driver Download Page has new Win95/98 Permedia2 reference drivers. Thanks Mr. John Gotti from ClanWorld.

• GameCenter reviews Turok 2: Seeds of Evil.
• GA-Source reviews the Yamaha Waveforce 192 Digital soundcard.

• Bored with talk of Windows 2000 yet? John Dvorak serves up Microsoft's Secret OS Plan that is already gearing up for Windows 2001. Thanks Brett. Of course that's a tentative name, it will be Windows 1901 if the Y2K patch fails...
• Games.Net's The Mod Files Volume IV is up offering a look ahead at a crop of upcoming mods for Unreal, Sin, and Half-life. Thanks Online Gaming News...
• Those who create their own levels may be interested in Tribe One's "How do I make a 5 Star map?" which explains the criteria by which they judge maps they review. Related reading is an article there called Inspiring Awe in 3D Environments...
• There's an interview with sCary on FPS Spectator talking with sCary about being 'leet and stuff...
• There's a hands-off Quake 3 Arena Preview on 3DGaming.Net...
• Webdog has ceased active development, the update on the site describing a lost enthusiasm for the project. The Webdog .plan and news trackers will continue to operate for the foreseeable future. Another project that's called it quits is litestep.net home of the Windows shell replacement (the program which continues on, just not the site)...

I added the search text box (or actually, the "Search!" text box, at the exclamation point obsessed loonyboi's suggestion) to the menu bar at the left, it seems like a good spot for it (I have no idea why the search box has an extra line below it under MSIE). From yesterday: My apologies to both Purdue University and Perdue Chickens for using the chicken spelling in place of the college version. I asked if folks have objections to thumbnails of screenshots on the newspage, and was surprised that so far no one (at all) seems to mind the idea enough to comment on it, and I was further surprised at exactly how much enthusiasm some expressed for screenshots in general. I have never actually requested screenshots from game companies, a policy this response has me re-thinking.