Dynamix' Tim Gift made a big .plan update giving the status of the TRIBES 1.3 patch, which he says will be released Monday. Here's the update:

The good news is Starsiege went GOLD. This was a little overshadowed by some bad news, layoffs at Dynamix due to the re-org that was announced the other day. The TRIBES team is still here, but this hasn't been a very productive week.

OpenGL status: basically we're ready to release the beta driver except for the TNT's performance. I thought we were close to resolving our last issues here, but we've stalled. We can't get the TNT OpenGL drivers to download textures at anything approaching a reasonable rate. Unfortunately, TRIBES does a fair amount of on the fly construction of textures, mainly for the terrain. The TNT driver does not seem capable of dealing with it. (Dave Moore goes into general OpenGL issues in his latest plan.) Not having access to TNT's source code, or any form of data from the driver, it has been difficult to figure out what's going on. I hate to say "go buy a 3Dfx card", but at this point we're running out of ideas, and unless nVidia get's us more information (or fixes their driver), were probably not going to make much more progress. There is no reason to believe that the TNT cards can't handle our requirements. It's frustrating, if we knew the card couldn't handle it, we would have dropped it long ago. We believe the card can handle the load, we just can't get the TNT driver to perform. There have been some ideas on crippling the game to work around the problem, but those ideas don't appeal to me too much. Another option may be DirectX6, as those drivers may be better optimized. We'll continue to investigate.

In the mean time, we are getting tired of holding back the 1.3 release, as I'm sure most of our players are, so we are going to go ahead and release it. We'll put the build together on Monday. 1.3 will include the beta OpenGL driver, but it will be disabled by default. We'll include instructions on how to enable it if you want to try it out, but there are some serious pauses when new textures are downloaded, most of you will probably not want to play this way.

Starsiege just shipped with our OpenGL driver and does suffer the same problem, but to a lesser degree. Starsiege has it's terrain and interiors configured differently, and being a slower paced game, it downloads textures less often.

I took a look at Shogo's patch progress page (thanks Chas), http://www.shogo-mad.com/patch/fix.as, pretty cool. We'll look into to doing something similar ourselves. It should help keep you guys informed as to what we're working on.

Sharky passed along a press release from Metabyte with an announcement that confirms the scoop he posted earlier in the week about future support for using any video chipset in parallel operation, which can provide increased framerates and resolutions. Here's a couple of quotes that cover all the bases:

This technology will allow Metabyte to run graphics cards in a parallel configuration using any existing chip on the market. It will also have the capability to be applied to any future chipset that comes to market. Specifically, the application of this technology to an existing 2D/3D chip set will yield a 40+ percent increase in performance and will double megapixel per second fill rate of a dual card configuration over a single card. A white paper outlining the benefits of this technology in more detail can be found at http://www.wicked3d.com.

The implementation of this Wicked3D driver technology requires very minor modifications to existing hardware. The process of rendering images from two sources will separate the images being rendered into sections. The driver then sends the render information to the appropriate board so that rendering occurs in parallel on the two boards. Such rendering is still the biggest performance bottleneck performance with current graphics hardware especially at high resolution so this approach provides a big win.

Wicked3D is reviewing which chipsets would best be supported by this technology in the high-end consumer graphics market, and will be making announcements shortly regarding products that will be using the Wicked3D technology. The company is targeting an aggressive retail launch for this technology.

Activision's Sin page has posted the version 1.03 update for Sin. Here's a local copy (2.0 MB) with a mirror courtesy of our pals at Walnut Creek CDROM. Here's the lowdown on the new patch, which offers compatibility with the new Wages of Sin mission pack:

This patch updates your previously patched version of Sin from 1.01 to 1.03. You must have at least version 1.01 before running this patch. If you have not previously patched your Sin game, download "Sin Update 1.01" and run that first.

There is one inclusive file named sinupdate103.exe, it's a 2 meg download taking 10 minutes from a 28.8 kbs.

1. Sin 103 update rewrites your autoexec.cfg and your default.cfg. If you have changed these in any way, you may want to back them up in a different location as they will be updated to the 1.03 version.
2. Double click the file and the installation will begin.
3. Three dialog boxes will appear. Read each box carefully and then proceed.
       A. You must have previously updated you Sin version to at lease 1.01.
       B. Original Sin players are not supported to play on Wages of Sin servers.
       You must have Wages of Sin to play on Wages of Sin servers.
       C. Sin will be updated to version 1.03. Previous save games may not work.
4. Sin Update 1.03 will continue and conclude.

Experience has posted two new character sketches online from WXP's upcoming action/adventure game, Experience.

GA-Source's Daikatana Single Player Development Update snagged a quote form ION Storm's John Romero giving the state of single-player Daikatana amid talk of the release of a DM demo soon. Here's what JR had to say:

The mapping team has completed episode 1's maps while Map Lead Chris Klie is polishing E1's maps while the map team works on Episode 2. The AI is working out pretty well now that the node system is final. Custom AI code for E1 monsters is being completed right now. We're planning on releasing Daikatana in June.

Gamestream.Net 's Anachronox preview is up taking a look ahead to ION Storms Quake II-engine action/RPG.

There's a GamesCon Recap on the GamesCon page that give the rundown on all the festivities planned for this weekend's event in Toronto, including demonstrations of Unreal Tournament, Slave Zero, and Mortyr, all on a network of Pentium III computers.

The Quake III Arena Bot Board, co-operated by the cooperative bot-oriented Metropolis and Bot Epidemic, offers some posts by John "Hellrot" Cash, the Dr. Frankenstein behind the bots in id's upcoming Quake III Arena. In one post Hellrot discusses the interface between the server and the bots, and in another, he gives the latest on the state-of-the-bots, which I'll quote here (John tells me he's since learned that Polos are mints, not cigarettes -- I would have guessed condoms):

>1:How well are the bots going? I haven't see or heard anything about them, since, well.. a long time ago. Any chance we'll see them in Q3test?

That's two questions BTW ;-)

1a) They are coming along nicely. It's quite a different task to develop the bots for a game that is still under development itself. Features come, features go, features saty on the "to do" list. Every time we add a new mode of movement (like the bouncy pads), I have to rework the navigation system to handle it. You haven't heard anything because I've been doing a lot of R&D and nobody else knew anything much to say. The best status I can give you is to say that the bots are winning games now :-)

1b) We've not made a firm decision about having a bot/bots in the test yet.

>2: I haven't heard much talk about the "other game modes" lately.. It just seems like you guys will do ffa\1on1\team and possibly CTF. Is this the case? And more importantly, you guys are still planning on doing bot support for ALL game modes, right?

My opinion is that we should only have the bots play in game modes where they can play effectively. IOW, I'd rather have them not play CTF at all than play it stupidly. Of course that means I just need to work hard to have them play well.

>Oh, and any chance we can get an engine license for Cube's £5 & 25p (plus a packet of Polos)? No?

I don't smoke and the vendors here don't seem to accept £, so ummm... No! :-)

>I always have wondered about the ladder idea. We are still going to be able to just fire up a random map and spawn a few bots for some good 'ol DM action, right?

Of course!

A big update to Mat 'The Lurker' Bettinson's .plan file talking of this PC Gaming World editor's recent trip to id to look at Quake III Arena. The update offers some photos and talks about the interviews they conducted for the magazine piece, in what turns out to be quite an extensive and detailed preview. Thanks Slim.

A press release from ION Storm on the Cyberathlete Professional League site announces that the first worldwide Daikatana LAN tournament will be held at the Extreme Annihilation CPL event, March 12-14 in Dallas, TX.

The inevitable Planet Kingpin has opened its doors, dedicated to the upcoming Quake II gangsta game from Xatrix Entertainment. To celebrate the grand opening, they've posted some new screenshots.

As he promised, Raven's Eric Beissman has added a development update for Soldier of Fortune in his .plan with a discussion of where this game began, with a single idea.

The latest eisode of the The Bitchslap on 3DGN offers a piece authored by Ritual's Levelord discussing what he calls a "rash of game- and gamer-bashing in the past year."

Gamelinks interviews Scott Rice lead artist on Soldier of Fortune talking about Raven's upcoming Quake II-engine game in a piece that caps off their Soldier of Fortune week.

Drakan.Net has posted three new screenshots from Surreal's upcoming Drakan: Order of the Flame showing off one of the exciting sounding aspects of this project: airborne combat on dragonback! Thanks Voodoo Extreme.

3D Action Week on GameSpot UK kicks off today with a Babylon 5 preview with festivities planned for all next week including a daily poll about 3D action games.

There's a new Interstate 82 Preview on GameSpot UK I missed earlier this week offering a look ahead at the sequel to I'76 offering a bunch of new screenshots.

Arcadia interviews Brandon Reinhart, talking to Epic Games' own GreenMarine about life, games, and Unreal Tournament.

Diamond Multimedia Monster 3D Drivers page has new version 4.10.01.1600 Windows 95/98 drivers for Diamond's Voodoo 1 based accelerators. Thanks Tim at 3DFiles.

The movie showing off gameplay from Bungie's upcoming Oni that was posted here earlier has been pulled at the request of Bungie. It turns out this was not intended for distribution, and is not representative of the game's current gameplay.

3DNews.Net's Industry Interview concludes with some final questions for their panel of industry experts, asking today about online only games, bugs, and 2D.

A follow-up on my mini-review of the new PMS mousepads earlier (story), the 3M Computer Workstations Solutions page has pricing and online ordering. Thanks Tony Fabris. Turns out the big ones run $36.78, and the small ones $11.11.

The newly opened PXO.NET is a free Internet gaming service from Parallax Online. Word there is "FreeSpace users who experience difficulty following the announcement should download the following file, pxo.cfg and place it in their FreeSpace/Data folder. Tim at 3DFiles.Com.

FCC rings in with controversial ISP ruling is a News.Com article putting a decision yesterday by the FCC in perspective for US Internet users talking of the possible impact of the ruling in ISP charges, including the danger it poses to flat-rate 'net access, called Flat-rate Net access still alive for now saying "Are the days of flat-rate local calls to ISPs drawing to an end? The answer appears to be no, despite a decision that reclassifies ISP calls as long distance." Thanks CiKoTiC. Also addressing this situation are two articles on the AVault: FCC Adopts Order Addressing Dial-Up Internet Traffic and FCC Ruling Does Not Translate Into Higher ISP Charges.

There's an interview With Zak Belica on redchurch.com. This conversation between Ritual's sound engineer and this audio website concentrates, as you would imagine, on sound, music, and all things audio.

Following up on a couple of updates from yesterday, id Software's Brian Hook made another update to his .plan with a discussion of how id selects the independent hardware vendors they work with, going into the several factors involved. It's a lengthy post so I'll excerpt the summary (the whole update) also offers Brian's awards for 1998 for Best Clothing, Best Box that a Card Arrived In, and Best Misc Crap. Here's the excerpt:

So there are basically "chips we have to support", "chips we like to support", "chips that aren't terribly relevant but we'd like to support anyway", and "chips that we could give a damn about". Chips we HAVE to support include the Voodoo, Voodoo2, and Rage Pro because they are out there in HUGE numbers. Chips we like to support are NVidia RivaTNT and ATI Rage128. Chips that aren't terribly relevant but that we'd like to support well include Rendition V2x00, Savage S3, and Permedia2. And chips we could give a damn about are things like TriTech Pyramid3D, Virge, and Number Nine Ticket To Ride.

We can't comment on Permedia3 or Voodoo3 since we are not in possession of any of these devices. And for those of you still with PowerVR PCX2, you're probably out of luck since I don't believe NEC/VL/PowerVR are actively updating those drivers (although the hardware itself should work fine with our vertex lighting model).

On a somewhat related note, several Matrox G200 users have asked me about the support for that board. The G200 is a very good accelerator with good performance and great image quality, however they haven't gotten on the ball with the OpenGL thing. When they have a high quality, high performance OpenGL driver then I'll be able to recommend their hardware enthusiastically. Their reliance on the D3D wrapper for so long did not endear them to us.

I received a couple of new variations on one of my favorite gaming peripherals, the 3M Precise Mousing Surface (PMS), the mouse pad that does such a good job of giving your mouse consistent traction. The first model is a variation on the original PMS, maintaining the odd smallish shape, but it's now thicker (if not exactly "thick," it's still fairly slim) and less likely to curl, and offers a new set of even funkier colors (in case your eyes were getting used to the old ones). The other is a real breakthrough for gamers that addresses the small size of the pads mentioned above by offering a version that's a full 12"x16" (though this one is the same thickness, or thin-ness, as the original). Here's a gratuitous photo of two of the pads (I got a new digital camera and am dying for excuses to play with it) showing the funkiest of the small ones atop the giant one, with a mouse thrown in for reference. No word yet on pricing or availability of the new models.

Daikatana Nation interviews Bobby "Xcalibur" Pavlock of ION Storm talking about his work as a level designer on Daikatana.

Based on a reply from id's Brian Hook to a question from ALive that says "We do not support 3d sound at this time. We will evaluate support for it later," there is a Quake III Petition on 3DsoundSurge that is collecting names to present to id requesting various forms of 3D sound support. As the page points out a petition seems a preferable alternative to lots of folks emailing id about this individually.

There are new release candidate 1 Voodoo Banshee AGP/PCI Boards Windows 98 Reference Drivers and Voodoo Banshee AGP/PCI Windows 95 Reference Drivers on the 3Dfx Interactive homepage.

• PlanetQuake reviews Turok2: Seeds of Evil.
• Pentium III vs K6-III - The Battle of the Next Generation is a review/article/editorial on The Brotherhood of The CPU.

• HEAT Collegiate Internet Gaming League is a free collegiate league that's now accepting registration for their Spring Slaughter tournament that offers $10,000 in prizes ranging from a Pentium III system to free pizzas.
• WarZone's EuroQuake coverage is also online covering this weekend's festivities.
• The Irish National Quake Team page has accounts of their recent international battle with France (no word on the attendance of Beldar and Prymaat), with demos of the matches up on their FTP site.
• Tweak3D is giving away a half-dozen Card Coolers.

• The Apogee/3D Realms Site has a history of the games in the Duke Nukem Series, which, when counting the Duke games currently in production, now number 15!...
• The Cyberathlete Professional League News page announces the Sega Dreamcast will be making an appearance at next month's Extreme Annihilation event in Dallas. Thanks mwadaibe[ls]...
• The Aegis Simulation Technologies News page has word on a new BFRIS mailing list...
• Intel has posted new Pentium III Processor manuals online for programmers to acquaint themselves with their newest hardware. Thanks Billy at Voodoo Extreme...

My remark about browser interoperability, and Opera's browserability prompted a little re-exploration of some HTML (thanks Wade and loonyboi in particular) which fixes the search box spacing under Opera by making the whole contents frame a form. Since my understanding is that Opera is truly HTML compliant, so the answer to my question of whether Netscape or MSIE had it right, is neither did.

Here's a little separated at birth, cooked up by Jack "morbid" Mathews:

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).