NVIDIA is throwing a $10,000 contest and all you have to do is fill out this form. Well, you also have to win the drawing, but at least there's no physical labor involved. In other NVIDIA news, the GeForce 256 bidding on eBay has skyrocketed to $20,100. So I'd suggest entering the contest before making a bid (the bidding on the Excite and Yahoo auctions are still within a reasonable range, however).

GameSpot has posted a preview of Odium, a third person, turn based RPG currently in development by Metropolis (and set to be published this October by Monolith). The preview features seven new screenshots that give a good feel for the game's interface.

ClanFHA has posted a preview of TeamFortress 2, based on the author's recent trip to Valve's offices (thanks VE). The preview contains a Q&As with Robin Walker and Gabe Newell, as well as a downloadable movie of game footage and an exclusive screenshot.

Tactical Planet has posted the version 1.2 patch for Hidden and Dangerous. Here's the scoop on this 3.7MB patch:

• Full configurable controllers. Status: included full configuration of mouse and joystick. Support for first joystick attached to computer.
• Crashes when leaving static guns. Status: FIXED.
• Mouse lag. Status: A new checkbox 'Vertical sync' added to hardware configuration utility. If you encounter problems with mouse response, please check this.
• Quick game load. Status: a new menu item appears in the in-game menu (after pressing ESC).
• Boats - death of on-board soldiers. Status: FIXED.
• Static guns: possibility to use in crawl mode. Status: OK
• When walking or running, auto-centering disallows aiming up or down. Status: Auto-centering is now a bit smarter.

The Adrenaline Vault Downloads Patch page has a new version 1.8 of the patch for the full German version of X-Beyond the Frontier (not the English version of the demo as I originally wrote). No word on what the patch addresses.

CNET Gamecenter's System Shock 2 guide promises to help you Show Up SHODAN. Of course in a game like SS2, the whole point is to figure out stuff for yourself, but it sure beats giving up on the game if you're stuck (I avoid spoilers my self, but Billy peeked and says it's a good concise guide).

The Microsoft Age of Empires II Age of Kings page has posted the AoE II box art though you have to work for it, by solving a "Microsoft's Pandora's Box" puzzle, described as the next generation puzzle game by Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov. There are also some new Dark Reign 2 screenshots on Gamer's Alliance Strategy. There are also some exclusive Metal Fatigue screenshots on Planet RIVA.

BetaNews has word of new ASUS P2B BIOS' on the ASUS German FTP site. There seems to be a new beta BIOS there to work on any P2B board.

Also on BetaNews is word that yet another new ICQ beta is available, as ICQ v3.19 Build 2569 is on the ICQ website.

Mail has been rolling in to the Blue Tower trying to figure out what's going on with the Master Servers over at id Software. Hearing the call, id Software Designer Graeme "Zaphod" Devine updated his .plan with word that the Master Server hasn't blown a master cylinder, but there is a problem seeing empty servers (which of course makes it hard for them to stop being that way to show up). This is going to be addressed in the next release. Here's the update, which also includes word of some new id servers, and the story of the mad mapper:

Some of you have commented on the master server being a bit odd right now. It's actually running just fine, it's just responding to queries for protocol 41, which is not entirely compatible with protocol 40. Only servers with people on there will actually show up. You can force showing the empty servers with the keyword "empty", but this isn't so useful since in 1.08 you can't combine that with game types (e.g. you can't say "empty tourney"). For completeness's sake, you can also say "full". But heck, if you type in "nude reptiles", you can scan that too and get exactly zip.

All of this is of course fixed in the new test and browsing gametypes, keywords, and so forth is easier than ever. You'll swoon. Trust me.

For those of you, and there's a bunch of you, who believe that our previous efforts had better network support than 1.08, we've set up servers here for you to get side to side experiences. Go try them and let me know.

Q3test 1.05 - 192.246.40.68:27961
Q3test 1.08 - 192.246.40.68:27960
Quake 2 version 3.20 - 192.246.40.68
QuakeWorld version 2.30 - 192.246.40.68
Quake version 1.09 - 192.246.40.68

We're pretty confident you'll be seeing things our way pdq.

Eric, our in house live human, bet Tim that he couldn't make a fun map in under an hour. Tim, being Tim, took him up (the exact nature of what was bet remains somewhat fuzzy, but it may have involved lunch). Forty-five minutes later we had "fun", which has remained interestingly addictive throughout the last week to the entire company (of course, listening to Tim tell this story, it's down to thirty-five minutes while he had no power, and the mouse was disconnected from his machine).

The lesson from all this is either that Tim really values something fuzzy to do with lunch, or that Quake 3 is so darn cool you can toss together maps in less than an hour. Okay, maybe knowing what Tim knows helps, so we're going to dissect his brain for science and get him working as our own personal AI (John swears it's possible) churning out 24 levels a day 24/7 until some odd Y2K bug causes him to make every telephone in the world ring at once. Oh wait, that was Lawnmower Man.

Dynamix' Mitch Shaw updated his .plan with an update on TRIBES Extreme. Here's what he had to say:

I'm hip-deep in mission scripting for TRIBES Extreme now. Jesse Russell did the scripting for two of the training missions before moving on to campaign scripting, and I'm doing the others. I think it's going pretty well so far, I have about 80% of them in a good "first pass" state, and Scott "Cap'n America" Rudi is providing feedback and tweaking the text. The training missions for Extreme look like they're going to be much more comprehensive and "event-based" than the original TRIBES ones -- Greg had very little time to put those missions together, and I think he did an amazing job with them when you consider just how little time he had.

As a consequence of the head-down, full-on assault on the training mission scripting, Freeze has been put on hold for now. There are still several problems with it, and I would dearly love to get it finished and released, but it's strictly a "free time" project. Hopefully I'll be able to get back to it before too long. My apologies to anyone who's been waiting for a Freeze release (if there is anyone).

I would like to encourage everyone who hasn't done so recently to visit the TRIBES Extreme area of the website (http://www.tribesplayers.com/tribesplayers/extreme-index.html) and give a look at what we've been working at so hard lately. There's information about the game, screenshots, witty bon mots, and more stuff on the way. It's more fun than you can shake a barrel of monkeys at, or something like that.

Happy Puppy has posted a preview of Sierra's SWAT 3 (thanks Frans). It's a hands-off preview, but it does feature what would appear to be two new screenshots (although admittedly I can't be 100% sure) from this Rainbow Six style tactical game.

According to Darkstone News, the English version of the Darkstone demo released earlier today (story) will be an exclusive download from PC.IGN, and will be released at 9:30 Pacific Time (thanks VE).

With this morning's announcement that TEN has been renamed to Pogo.com (story), and dropped much of the gaming content they were originally known for, and the coincidental fact that currently the official PGL site is currently offline, coupled with the fact that their next season has been cancelled, many people have been leaping to the conclusion that the PGL is closing down. I spoke with a PGL representative who assured me that this is not the case. The PGL will have to find a new online partner to host the online portion of each season (since it used to be hosted by TEN) but this shouldn't affect their future. In fact, the StarCraft division was hosted by Battle.net last season - not TEN. Rest assured that we'll keep you up to date as new information is released.

GAStrategy has posted a brief Q&A with 10six producer Al Rivera, as well as three new screenshots from SegaSoft's morbidly massively multiplayer strategy game that's currently entering its beta testing phase.

Raven's Rick Johnson updated his .plan with a clarification of a misprint in the current issue of PCGamer:

There's an article in the October 1999 issue of PC Gamer about SoF with a very bad typo: "Vertex compression allows us to use more animations and model variety and still run on a machine with 32MB of RAM. Also, since the compression is high quality, there's 'swimming' visible on the models, even when very close."

That should read "Also, since the compression is high quality, there's NO 'swimming' visible on the models, even when very close."

IMG Magazine has posted a preview of Bungie's third person game of anime action, Oni, which is based on the author's experience with an early Alpha build of the game. They've also posted an interview with Alex Okita and Chris Hughes (two artists on the game) as well as Brent Pease, Oni's project leader at Bungie West.

Since only one of the shots they posted yesterday was actually new (story), GASource has posted two new screenshots from Half-Life: Opposing Force, Gearbox Software's official add-on for Half-Life.

Team Abuse's Q3Tourney guide gives maps specific strategies to the third level in Q3Test, Q3Tourney. Thanks Matthew Rorie and Redwood.

• MSNBC reports Intel ships samples of Merced calling it "a major milestone in the development of its next generation processor." Thanks Phil "Cain" Hall.
• Sharky Extreme's GeForce 256 Steps Out in Style article offers an interesting unconfirmed deduction about the clock speed on the newly-announced GeForce 256, saying "it's easy to do the maths- simply divide the 480Mpixels by four and you get the general picture- 120MHz." Maths? Hey Sharky, you're in America now, learn to speak the language.
• Coppermine To Come Sooner, Run Faster describes 700 MHz PIIIs this fall. Thanks Redwood (someone also sent me a ZDNet link to this, but I had trouble with the URL).
• SystemLogic's Building A Dual Celeron System Part 1 is online.
• Part one of Ars Technica's NT Pagefile optimization is online.
• From USB Workshop: Iomega offers a new ultra-slim USB Zip 250MB drive with dual USB-PCMCIA interface.

There's a Quake III Bus Tour Feature on Extreme Hardware with another perspective on the tour that's currently winding its way around the Southwest US showing off the game to eager sun-baked masses. More on the tour can be found on id's official Quake 3 Arena Road Tour Page, our Quake Arena Road Tour message board, and in loony's Quake III Tour Diaries.

Borderfield productions has posted a new version of their Q3A - Total Control utility for Q3Test, which they describe as "the ultimate Q3A tool." It contains a FunName editor, a Key Binder, a Dialup Optimizer (they say it "can reduce lag with up to 30%"), a Server launcher, and a Config Editor that you can use to tweak your graphics, RailGun settings, HUD and much more. This is an updated version to a release that was not mentioned here because it violated the EULA, since the original version had a pak explorer, which was removed when they learned it was a problem.

RedStorm need 50 beta testers for their upcoming strategy/RPG game ShadowWatch. Interested? Here are the details (thanks BetaBites):

In Red Storm's new strategy RPG, Shadow Watch, you will lead a crack team of operatives to uncover a nefarious plot to stop humanity's advancement to the stars. Use your operatives to launch covert missions to rescue hostages, plant surveillance devices, raze buildings, and assault enemy strongholds. You'll have to use your wits on and off the battlefield to win. This isn't a battle to save the world; it's a battle to save every world.

Sign up for the Beta Test is Sept. 3. 1999 starting at 12:00pm EDT. NOTE: Any duplicate names and incomplete information will automatically be disqualified.

Shadow Watch Beta Testing will begin on Sept. 22, 1999 through Oct. 18, 1999. Minimum Requirements to become a Beta Tester are:

- Windows 95 or 98 Operating System
- 166 MHz Pentium
- 32 MB RAM
- 16 bit Color SVGA video
- 2 MB Video Ram
- Sound Blaster 16 or compatible
- 600 MB free (required)

If Selected a Beta Tester must:

* Sign and submit a NDA (non-disclosure agreement) to Red Storm Entertainment Inc. before receiving Beta CD.
* NDA must be received at Red Storm Entertainment by Sept. 15, 1999
* Complete Each of the 18 Mission Maps and send results for each via E-mail.
* Submit comments and bugs via E-mail using Solo bug
* After completion of all of the above the tester will receive a copy of the game.

Selected Beta testers will be notified by email on Sept. 7, 1999. If you are interested in registering to be a Shadow Watch Beta Tester, sign up at http://obiwan.redstorm.com/cgi-bin/betatest/application.cgi on Friday, September 3. (The page will not be live until Friday!)

Here's an interesting story: according to this story on ZDNet, GT Interactive (publishers of Doom 2, Quake, and Unreal, amongst other games) is being sued by developer StarPlay of publishing their game Alley 19 Bowling under a different name via their German publisher GT Value (thanks to everyone who sent this in). GT had no publishing agreement at all for Alley 19, and therefore the term "piracy" is applicable. StarPlay is asking for $110,000 in direct damages and an extra $5 million in punitive damages.

Wantree Games World has released a patch for the popular recamed version of Quake Done Quick 2 by Zarathustra Studios that fixes a bug where the VWEP doesn't work. The patch is available in both Linux and Windows versions.

It's a Wednesday, which means it's time for this week's Mail Bag (no really, this time we're sticking with the schedule). In this week's incredibly exciting edition: beating on LPBs, that Ottawa Sun article, cute furry animals, Jolt, and of course, a whole bunch more. Head over and take a read.

The Adrenaline Vault Downloads has a new demo for Delphine's Diablo-esque action/fantasy game DarkStone. The demo is a 26 MB download, and is apparently in French.

The Iron Strategy Demo on The Adrenaline Vault is a non-playable demo of the giant robot combo action and strategy game announced the yesterday (story), where you can be either a general or a pilot. The download is about 23 MB. Interestingly, there's no word of the demo available on the Iron Strategy site other than it's available by special request. The demo is also available on 3DFiles.Com.

Matrox Graphics Millennium G400 Latest Windows 9x Drivers page has new version 5.21 Millennium G400 Windows 9x display driver. From the notes, word is this driver can not be used with the Rainbow Runner G-series, you should uninstall any previous Matrox drivers using this procedure before installing the 5.21 drivers, and come time to uninstall the 5.21 drivers you will need their uninstaller utility. Finally, the 5.21 drivers are 32-bit, QuickTime 16 will not work properly with these drivers without this work-around.

A new version of GLSetup, the program that detects your hardware and automatically installs the OpenGL drivers you need has been released. This version (Public Beta v1.0.0.107) is dated August 31st (although curiously it's dated August 30th in the readme file) and is available as an ActiveSetup download (which only downloads the drivers you need) or a monolithic 43MB version that contains every single driver (this is great for networks, by the way). Thanks Kurt Hoffmann.

Ritual's Robert Atkins sent along two more images from Heavy Metal: FAKK 2. These shots show off really nicely the cool special effects they can do thanks to their custom FX engine, which they've dubbed Ghost (not to be confused with Ghoul, Raven's modelling system on Soldier of Fortune). Enjoy!

   

In a strange turn of events, the online service formerly known as TEN has become - Pogo.com (thanks AGN3D). This new site focuses entirely on the more mainstream games that TEN offered, including card games, and "classic arcade games". It would appear that games that are available at retail with TEN's software are no longer supported. I attempted to find Miz Beaver, Porky Pine, Howland Owl, Churchy La Femme and of course Pogo on the site, but it would appear that they too, are no longer welcome.

The Intel Developers Forum is currently underway, and there are a number of products being shown, as laid out in this ZDNet article (thanks OmegaFoRCe). At the top of the list is news that the first sample Merced processors have been handed off to PC manufacturers, and were demonstrated running 64 bit versions of both Linux and Windows. Also demonstrated was Intel's 800MHz Coppermine processor, as well as something being called the "Ottoman PC". A computer shaped like an Ottoman, complete with a leopard skin cusion.

GT Interactive sends word that the Eurocom developed Duke Nukem: Zero Hour for the N64 has shipped to stores and should be available right now. Zero Hour is an original game (not a port from the PSX or PC titles), and is played from a third person perspective.

id Software Lead Programmer John Carmack updated his .plan discussing memory usage in Q3A, his forays into PERL, and a new worklog. Here are a couple of excerpts, in the first he mulls the possibility of implementing a skeletal animation system at this late stage of game development:

Loading a large map with full resolution, 32 bit textures and mipmaps consumes almost 40 megs of texture space. The default of picmip 1 and 16 bit textures reduces that to six or seven (not all images observe picmip) in theory, but some OpenGL implementations keep a 32 bit version of the texture around even if the card only uses 16 bit (I consider this inapropriate), so it may still be twelve or more megs just for the images.

I have been able to save a couple megs off of the true capacity requirements by not rolling through some larger buffers when not needed (not smp and not dedicated server), and several megs more of one-time data mostly by moving a lot of static tables to dynamic allocation.

I can probably save another meg of true capacity and I think three or four megs of initialization data. The big thing that I might be forced to do is go to a skeletal animation system. I would hate to do that at this late a point in the project, but it would save about two megs per player model in the game.

In the process of chasing down the static memory hogs, I finally got around to starting something I have needed to do for years: learn perl.

The update goes on to describe John's experiments with PERL, and give his latest worklog mentioning tweaks to lightning damage and machine gun ammo in teamplay. Here's the worklog:

* save 2.5 megs by reworking shader allocation
* save 1 meg by not double buffering backend if not smp
* convert all tr. arrays into pointers
* don't allocate as many snapshotentities when non dedicated
* new shader option: deformvertex move
* stackable deformvertex
* reduced lightning damage by 10%
* light emit from two sided surfaces
* reduced starting machinegun ammo in teamplay to 50 from 100

Busy Frans at 3D Action Gamers sends word that an updated version of the Mortyr Internet Demo has been quietly slipped into circulation. The original is on the very poor connection that made the first demo so hard to nab, but Frans has it mirrored on this page on 3D Action Gamers. The new demo is a bit smaller than the original, and is version 1.06 as opposed to the original 1.02, the new release addresses some bugs. Frans also mentions that the new demo will not break your old saved games.

There's a TRIBES2 screenshot on Penny Arcade Cartoons. Not a goof or a drawing, a real screenshot of a landscape described as the never-before-seen Swamp World in Dynamix' upcoming sequel to Starsiege TRIBES.

• There's a Chat log of last night's GeForce 256-inspired IRC session on Tweak3d.net which includes the participation of NVIDIA's Nick Triantos, Christopher Donahue, and Kenneth Hurley and the WXP gang.
• Sharky Extreme's NVIDIA GeForce 256 Steps Out in Style.
• Computer Games Online previews the Savage 2000.
• CPU Review's Athlon/Pentium3 Price Comparison v4.
• 3d Wars' Gary Peterson Interview talks with the author of the "infamous" Voodoo2 and Voodoo3 overclocking utilities who now works for 3dfx.

Saw a note on MacGamer's Ledge revealing that the clamor for the Quake III Arena hats and mousepads that are being handed out on the Bus Tour has been heard, and these items will soon be for sale. Here's the scoop from the id Quake 3 Arena page:

A bit of cheerie news for all of you who have been e-mailing about the Quake III Arena t-shirts, hats and mousepads. Your voices have been heard. I've received news that we will soon be making them available for purchase via 1-800-id-games. I'll make an update on these items once they become available.

Frans at 3D Action Gamers sends word that Activision has posted a movie showing their updated Space Invaders in AVI format (about 3.6 MB).

A thread called Software mode on the 3D Realms Bulletin Board has a post from 3DRealms' George Broussard (thanks Brian) talking about the hassles of software rendering in a world where hardware acceleration is becoming the standard, saying that software mode might just end up not being included in Duke Nukem Forever when it's released.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Software go away in DNF. It's a real hassle to add things that look cool in hardware then have to deal with the software version ramifications of that. We had decided to go hardware only way back in the early days with Prey, so it woulnd't be outside the realm of possibility that we go hardware with Duke.

The bottom line is that is software looks "ok" and won't cost us weeks of extra development time to keep it current with the hardware version, it can stay. But as of right now, we've all but abandonned software mode and have the attitude that hardware is the priority.

The reality is that no system ships now without a 3D accelerator. Added to that will be a flood of Voodoo 2 level cards on the market as new hardware ships. And once everyone can have 3D acceleration for under $100, it becomes the same issue as a sound card. Just go buy one.

George Broussard

I saw on RainbowSix.Net that R6 Trigger Happy has posted a mod for Rainbow Six that attempts to duplicate the planned weapons in Rogue Spear, the upcoming sequel to Rainbow Six, if you have an itchy trigger finger (sorry, couldn't resist).

A post on Tweak3D.net (thanks Game Forces) clarifies the deal with those auctions mentioned yesterday (story), and it seems my skepticism was unfounded, and that this eBay auction, this Yahoo auction, and this Excite Auction (as of this writing, neither of the last two seem to be active yet) are all legit. Apparently the GeForce cards are being auctioned for charity by NVIDIA, and the cards being auctioned will actually be autographed of all things.

As usual, thanks Frans at 3D Action Gamers for the assist with these:

• Beyond Tron reviews Hidden and Dangerous.
• Thresh's FiringSquad reviews C&C: Tiberian Sun.
• GameRush reviews C&C: Tiberian Sun.
• Gamecenter reviews Shadow Man, written by one-time Prey designer Paul Schuytema.
• Happy Puppy's Pawprint Press reviews System Shock 2. Woof.
• Thresh's FiringSquad reviews Hidden & Dangerous.
• GameSpot UK's X Beyond The Frontier Review.

In the initial post about the 10SIX beta sign-ups yesterday (story) we referred to the requirement that applicants be HEAT.net "Premiere" members, which I'd say implies paying, but it turns out that you must, in fact, be a "Perimeter" member, which is a free membership. Sorry for the confusion, thanks Al Rivera the producer of 10SIX for the clarification.

• A pair of free Half-Life projects are playing show-and-tell, as The Skynet Project has posted some new screenshots of their Terminator-inspired modification, while the Redemption for Half-Life project, an upcoming free project that's a collaboration between Maverick Developments and PC Zone magazine...
• The HotMail beach has cooled, but Swede Says Microsoft Took 10 Hours To Repair E-Mail Breach. Thanks Robert Kee...
• A new Diablo II Screenshot of the Week is up. Thanks Voodoo Extreme...
• This Enter the Game IRC update is basically a plea to stop hacking their network, as they are in danger of being bounced by their ISP...

Yesterday was not the first time we've seen some event or another brown out our little gaming corner of the Internet, but it was the first such time I remember when the cause was a hardware announcement, rather than a demo/shareware/software release of some sort. NVIDIA certainly did a fine job of creating a fuss... I don't know if it changed the world, but it certainly almost broke the 'net, with the announcement bringing a few hardware sites, including NVIDIA's, down or to their figurative knees for a good part of the day. It is certainly the first time I can recall needing to mirror a press release because so many people were having a hard time accessing it.

Link of the Day: Crack Aficionado Online. Thanks the Pon+iff. Please skip if you don't like crack jokes, but damn did that "crack" me up, even if they do mock my beloved, if eminently mockable, LT.

The Wheel of Time page has been updated describing how the single player game is rounding into shape, saying they "can see the light at the end of the Single-Player tunnel," and about how there are builds of the game now being evaluated by select publications. The piece is also accented by a few new screenshots. Saw that on sCary's.

I-Play-Games' Kingpin Mapping Guide - Part 3 is now online with another installment in their ongoing guide to creating levels for Xatrix' Kingpin: Life of Crime. Today's lesson is on how to make the most complex sort of door, the swinging door, saying "If you can learn how to make a swinging door you will find all other doors simple."

Saw on Datumplane::Starsiege that Dynamix' Scott Rudi, TRIBES Extreme lead designer, has broken in his .plan file with his debut update, offering some information about both himself and progress on TRIBES Extreme:

Well, this is my first .plan file - let's see if I can mess it up.

First a little about my self: I started working here at Dynamix in '94 while finishing up my English degree (previously I knew only crude gestures and animalistic grunts - thank goodness the U of Oregon has fairly lenient entrance requirements). Over the years, I've clawed my way to the designer position here on Tribes Extreme.

I started playing Tribes early in Beta and haven't really ever stopped (in fact, I'm playing right now - BOOM! another Sofa King down!). What really drew me in was the teamwork required and the freedom of movement the jetpack allows. Plus, the fact that I can log in quickly and play for a few minutes at a time without a big hassle. It also helps that Tribes is ALT+TAB friendly, thus allowing me unlimited goof-off time. Muahahaha!

Games I play besides Tribes (in order of obsessiveness):
Warbirds (yes, I am a flight-sim junkie and I'm proud of it)
EverQuest (Dwarven Pride! 17th lvl Dwarven warrior "Rubble")
Civilization 2 (the greatest strat game ever created - "By God, we beat penecillin!")
Rainbow 6 (despite the online latency)
MAX
Hidden and Dangerous

I'm working on mission building and scripting on Tribes Extreme (TX) now that the overall design is done. Lincoln is doing some great AI work for the single-player stuff, and it should be a lot of fun for newbies and vets alike.

I'm also going through a lot of Open Call map and skin submissions. Everything's looking great! I'm excited to get our community involved with our product. We're considering implementing some things that will REALLY get the users into making Tribes their own game...

As for ScottY (i.e. Cornboy) leaving, as a co-worker I'm bummed and as a friend I'm really bummed. We'll all miss him around here and I hope he does great. The only thing I'm concerned about is that he'll become a Giants fan instead of a true A's believer...

GeForce 256 Experience Screenshots on GA-Source give one more look at the upcoming DMZG GeForce 256 demo from WXP than the pair we posted earlier (story).

• ATI confirms Dell deal is lost follows-up on the report earlier that this may be the case (story). Thanks Jamie Fullerton.
• This press release from Matrox details their new add-on with digital flat panel support for any G400 card.
• We're getting a lot of reports of GeForce 256 cards showing up on auction houses like eBay. It seems wise to advise against taking a shot at one of those, it just doesn't seem very likely, now, does it?

CNET Gamecenters' Sneak Peeks at Rainbow Six Rogue Spear offers a preview of Red Storm Entertainment's upcoming tactical shooter that's a sequel to Rainbow Six, based on the Tom Clancy book of the same name. The article examines both solo and multiplayer play, and there are also screenshots showing off both modes as well. Thanks Frans at 3D Action Gamers.

WXP's Patrick Moynihan sent along a pair of screenshots showing off the GeForce 256 Demo mentioned earlier that they are working on for NVIDIA. Get a load of the eye candy on these:

   

Here's a bit on the project:

It is important to note that, while DMZG runs under the Experience engine, it is NOT Experience. One of the nice side-effects of working with NVIDIA on this project has been that we were able to implement a lot of new features into the Experience engine while creating DMZG, and these features WILL roll over into Experience. Some of the new additions to the engine are:

GPU accelerated geometry transformation GPU accelerated vertex lighting GPU accelerated cubic environment maps GPU accelerated character skinning Fading detail maps

Each of these GPU features offloads work from the CPU to the GPU, which frees up the CPU for better physics, AI, and game code. By implementing these optimizations we have been able to push the DMZG poly counts from 10,000 polys per frame to over 80,000 on the same CPU. The level of detail this affords is astonishing.

There have been some DMZG screenshots floating around the web, but we believe that these were actually taken running on a TNT2 card, due to the fact that some of the graphical effects are not visible in the shots (for example, cubic environment mapping is disabled on TNT2 cards).

As a result, we have decided to fire up our NV10 dev system and snap some GENUINE GeForce256 screenshots from the Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens demo.

GamesMania Sneak Peeks interviews Josh Resnick talking with president of Pandemic Studios about their upcoming 3D RTS Dark Reign 2 (thanks Frans at 3D Action Gamers) . The Thandor-Movies page on Krawall offers gameplay from THANDOR - Die Invasion, an upcoming German RTS.

You didn't think we were through yet, did you?

• Patrick Moynihan's Experience Developer's Diary on VE has word on an upcoming GeForce 256-speciific demo WXP has been working on with NVIDIA.
• Riva Extreme sends word that there's a GeForce 256 chat on IRC tonight in efnet #riva at 6:00 PM PDT.
• Thresh's FiringSquads' NVIDIA GeForce 256 at IDF even offers screenshots of the new tech in action.
• Jack Mathews on Megatexels offers a little glossary if all the high tech in these press releases has you a bit confused.

Nihilistic's Ray "MoonGod" Gresko updated his .plan with word that they had found the "special individual needed to fill this role" that they recently advertised (not the Cabana Boy position, that is still open), welcoming one-time member of the Jedi Knight level design team Jacob Stephens aboard as the 12th member of Nihilistic Software. All is not lost for those in the hunt for an industry job, however (even for those unqualified to be a Cabana Boy), as Rogue Entertainment's now-ancient Rich Fleider (he just turned 30) updated his .plan with word that they have extended the deadline in their hunt for a 2D artist, so if you got them paper and pen skillz, hurry up and check out what's required for submission, because they'll be interviewing soon, and need submissions by this Friday. Word is they are also still taking demo tapes and submissions for the 3D animator/modeler position for about another week.

Tall as a tree Redwood sends word that he's posted some new screenshots on Stomped showing off action from Soldier of Fortune, Raven Software's upcoming first-person game of mercenary action. As red describes them: "Screenshot 1 depicts the main character about to fill some baddies full of lead next to some cows and mountains in the background. MoOoO! Screenshot 2 shows the flamethower doing some damage and a nice looking palm tree." He provided no palm tree sound effect, you'll have to work out your own. MoOoO!

The Xyla Screenshots page has some news screenshots showing off acxtion and scenery from their upcoming Disfigured, which looks to be an action fighting game type-dealie. The shots are from a demo that is currently in pre-alpha testing and is entitled "Disfigured Arcade." The pics are all from a TNT2 Ultra at 800x600 16- bit color.

Though their update page hasn't mentioned them yet, there are new Delta Force rev. 5 (formerly rev. D for the US and rev. C for the others) patches now available on NovaLogic's FTP. Frans at 3D Action Gamers sends word of this, and he has mirrored the files here. No word on what's changed yet, when we get it, I'll add it here.

Word on the ION Storm Daily Informant is that this Friday will be the latest edition of the monthly chat with birthday boy Tom Hall and the rest of the developers of Anachronox, ION's upcoming Quake II-engine console-style RPG. The event, descriptively dubbed the AnachroChat (you know you do interesting work when words like that don't trip your spell checker), and will be held at 8:00 PM Central Time (9:00 PM EDT) this Friday, September 3. To join, just enter the ION Chat Lobby by clicking the Online on their website, or connect via IRC to www.ionstorm.com, room #ion.

3D Rage's Nocturne Preview offers a hands-on look at this upcoming 3D Lovecraftian horror adventure based on some face time with a recent beta build of the game.

Intrigued by the comments earlier on Datumplane::Starsiege about Transform & Lighting support in TRIBES2 (story), PlanetStarSiege fired off another couple of questions to Dynamix Programmer Mark Frohnmayer about T&L support in other cards, and whether such technology might find its way into the more imminent TRIBES Extreme, which prompted the following response:

Since Tribes Extreme uses OpenGL as a rasterization layer only, it will see much less of a performance boost from hardware T&L.

It's in the cards.. the video cards:

• VIDEOLOGIC NEON 250 NOW SHIPPING screams this VideoLogic press release, that the PVRSG technology is finally available for the PC, albeit only in the UK for now.
• 3dfx Announces Support for Apple's New Power Mac G4 is good news for Mac users looking for video card choices.

A patch for Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 that fixes the particularly nasty bug that popped up a few days back (story) has been released by Microsoft, and is available for download on their FTP site (thanks Blood, who says it should be available on Windows Update as of September 7th).

There are three Half-Life Op For Screenshots on GA-Source, though only one, the middle shot with the muzzle flash, is new, as both the crowbar pics previously appeared in PC Gamer Online (thanks Dave Johnston). Opposing Force is Gearbox Software's upcoming official add-on for Half-Life where your role in the disaster in the Black Mesa facility is containment, rather than cause, as you play an elite special forces soldier sent in to track down scientists and write graffiti on the walls.

Descent4.net has posted an interview with Scott Blinn, the lead level designer on Descent 4 (and previously a level designer on Irrational Games and Looking Glass' System Shock 2). As it's still fairly early on in Descent 4's production schedule he can't comment on much, but he does drop some hints about the new engine's features.

Datumplane:: Starsiege has posted a Q&A with Dynamix' Mark Frohnmayer, who confirms that the GeForce's transform and lighting features (T&L) will be supported in TRIBES 2. Here's what he had to say:

Yes, T&L will be supported in Tribes 2 (we're using OpenGL's transform pipeline, so it'll just work) Since we don't have a sample board, I can't comment on performance, but I expect it will be very good. Tribes 2 with the details cranked WAY down should play on pretty much any card with a good OpenGL driver... that said, expect play on low end cards to be suboptimal.

PC Zone's Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force Preview is online, giving one of their thorough looks ahead, this time focusing on Raven Software's upcoming Quake III-engine shooter, Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. In addition to a rundown on what to expect from the game when available, they have also posted some Q&A with the developers, and some exclusive new screenshots.

It would appear that the announcement hinted at for Seybold (story on Yahoo) is in fact the new Apple G4 line of computers (thanks Miguel Gonzalez). The new computers feature a 22-inch (diagonal) flat screen monitor (available exclusively with the G4), a silver look, Air Port compatibility (for wireless networking) and an ATI Rage 128 with 16 meg of RAM using AGP 2x, and even a DVD-RAM drive in some models, with processor speeds ranging from 400 to 500 MHz.

Microsoft sends along this press release announcing their redesigned Microsoft Gaming Zone, which they say makes it, "easier and more exciting for visitors" via their new Quick Join and Quick Host features, which allows gamers to hop into a multiplayer game in seconds.

And hey ! They're not even all NVIDIA related!

• ATI Trade Halted Amid Talk Of Lost Dell Deal is the name of a newswire story on Yahoo that's reporting ATI may be losing an important OEM deal (which it's speculated went to NVIDIA instead). Thanks vitriol.
• USBWorkshop is reporting that Hewlett Packard has announced a new USB CD-RW drive.
• Also at USBWorkshop is the news that the new USB 2.0 speed looks to be 360-480 Mb/s, a full 30 to 40 times faster than USB 1.1.
• PCRave has posted their GeForce 256 preview, based on the author's recent trip to NVIDIA.
• CTNews has posted their GeForce 256 writeup, and they even compare its specs to those of the Glaze3D and Savage 2000. Press release benchmarks are likely forthcoming. :)
• PlanetRiva has posted their GeForce 256 writeup as well.
• ELSA has announced their ERAZOR X, a new board based on the GeForce 256 chipset that features compatibility with their 3D Revelator glasses (thanks GASource).

Psygnosis has released a demo for their 3D update of Lemmings, titled Lemmings Revolution (thanks AVault). In other demo news, Take2 has announced on their browser-intense site that a demo version of Grand Theft Auto 2 will be available on September 22nd, with the game available in stores one month later (thanks Frans).

GamePen has posted an interview with Hal Barwood, project leader on Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, a new third person action/adventure title that's coming soon. Hal discusses the design decisions in working with such a recognizable movie character, as well as some of the game's features, including why they decided on a third person camera, the NPCs in the game, and more.

Since most of you just want to know the features of the GeForce 256, here's a list of its features:

• 15M triangles/sec - sustained DMA, transform/clip/light, setup, rasterize and render rate.
• 4 Pixels per clock (4 pixel pipelines).
• 480M pixels/sec fill rate - 32 texture samples per clock, full speed 8-tap anisotropic filtering.
• 8 hardware lights.
• 350 MHz RAMDAC.
• Most feature complete for DX7 and OGL - Transform & Lighting, Cube environment mapping, projective textures, and texture compression.
• Will utilize 4x AGP performance with Fast Writes , which enables the CPU to send data directly to the GPU (1 GB/sec transfer rate), increasing overall performance and freeing the system memory bus for other functions.
• 256 bit rendering engine.
• Highest quality HDTV (High Definition Television) video playback.
• High Precision HDTV video overlay.
• 5 horizontal, 3 vertical taps.
• 8:1 up/down scaling.
• Independent hue, saturation and brightness controls in hardware.
• High bandwidth HDTV class video I/O.
• 16 bit video port.
• Full host port.
• Dedicated DMA video.
• Powerful HDTV motion compensation.
• Full frame rate DVD to 1080i resolution.
• Full precision subpixel accuracy to 1/16 pixel.

Since NVIDIA's site is totally swamped, and it's not up on newswire sites yet, here's a local copy of the GeForce 256 OEM press release, announcing their OEM partners for the new chipset (thanks James Massa), and here's a local copy of the original GeForce announcement.

Well, it's 7:00 AM Pacific, and here come the GeForce 256 stories. A roundup:

• NVIDIA's page is swamped (good luck getting through), but they've updated with their official GeForce 256 page.
• 3DGpu.com has posted a GeForce FAQ, the chip specs, a list of supported games, as well as some test demo screenshots.
• RivaExtreme has posted an article on the GeForce 256.
• Blake M. sends word that there were apparently some anxious NVIDIA fans holding up "worlds first GPU" signs outside the Today Show on NBC this morning. Strange stuff.
• Riva3D has launched a GeForce 256 site, featuring loads of images and a technical white paper.
• Tweak3D has posted their preview of the GeForce 256 (thanks VE for those last two).

Black & White Wire has posted two new screenshots from Black & White, Lionhead's oddball 3D god-game currently in development. One shot is particularly impressive, showing off a clash between two characters, complete with spattering blood.

Ritual's Robert Atkins sends along these two new screenshots from their Quake III: Engine game Heavy Metal: FAKK 2. Enjoy!

   

Creative to Launch Exciting Fall Product Line Using the New GeForce 256 Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) From NVIDIA is a press release from Creative Labs announced it plans to support NVIDIA's GeForce 256 technology in products this fall. Thanks MajestY at the Shugashack. The press release says "Creative will be the leading supplier for boards based on the GeForce 256 chipset," and also refers to Creative's "patent-pending real-time volumetric shadows" (first time I saw anything about a patent there). Here's a bit more on the GeForce 256 technology:

The GeForce 256 is an innovative new graphics processor that moves the entire 3D rendering pipeline to the graphics card, creating a whole new category: the Graphics Processing Unit, or GPU. By offloading these computationally intense tasks from the CPU, the GeForce 256 enables game developers to create games with significantly more detailed geometry, enhanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and higher fidelity physics, resulting in more exciting, more immersive gameplay.

The GeForce 256 is actually a yet-unannounced product, but it's a pretty safe bet that this will only be for another half-hour. The release is stamped 7:00 AM EDT, and the NDA is up today at 10:00 AM EDT (7:00 AM PDT), so it's possible there was some confusion about that. We already experienced this here earlier, having gotten a story about the NVIDIA announcement that said it was to be posted at 7:00 AM EDT, which it turns out was not the case. Anyway, there's much more on this to come, so hold on to your pocket-protector...

Ingava's System Shock 2 Psionic Abilities Guide is now online offering a complete how-to on using your mental powers in Irrational Games' new science fiction first-person RPG. Of course if they were really masters of psionic powers they wouldn't write this up, they'd just mentally beam it out to you, but maybe it's just that you aren't receptive enough (and then there are those psychic phone lines)... um, where was I? Oh yeah, you can check out Ingava's System Shock 2 Psi Guide here.

The Official Hunters Website has a new version 1.2 of Dynamix' Tinman's server-only modification for Starsiege TRIBES, based on the classic HeadHunters Quake. The new release offers a significant bug-fix (prior to the fix each time the mission was changed by vote, hunters would stop working), and several new modes, including GREED mode and HORDE mode.

A Rogue Spear Preview on Well Rounded Entertainment is online, offering a lengthy look ahead at the sequel to Red Storm Entertainment's tactical shooter based on the Tom Clancy book. The piece includes 16 exclusive screenshots, and will conclude tomorrow with a second installment.

The OnTheWay Quake 2 server utility page has posted a beta version of this server control utility to allow the same easy setup of a Q3Test server as the original version allows for Quake II. The first release is not feature complete, but already should be useful in helping simplify server setup. Thanks Redwood.

There's an Unreal Multiplayer Tweak Guide on Unreal Universe.

Sharky Extreme has posted a follow-up on the recent stories of Hercules shutting down with some commentary from the former CEO of Hercules Graphics, Peggy Fong, who resigned from the company on August 16.

Billy has posted some screenshots Voodoo Extreme showing off gameplay in 10six, the upcoming massive persistant online action/strategy game that ambitiously looks to support a million players. There's also word there that the 10six registration page is starting to "really" accept applications to beta test the game, the catch being you must be a HEAT.net Perimeter (free) member to join (I'm guessing they won't really be able to test the million player part that way).

3DApp Home has a new release of a utility called Q3A Setup that offers control over loads of obscure console commands to allow easy tweaking and customization of Q3Test. Thanks Billy.

• The Adrenaline Vault previews Silver, looking at this console-style RPG...
• Computer Games Online's Orcs: Revenge of the Ancient interview (Part I) talks with Designer John Race about Sierra's upcoming RPG/strategy hybrid...

The official Iron Strategy website has launched, the homepage for a newly announced game that offers combat in giant mechanized robots. Here's word on the game from the site (there's also word there that a "Playable demo is available by special request," but I bet that's for ECTS, and not a general invitation):

Iron Strategy gives players control - as either pilots or generals - of huge fighting robots (called Warbots). The game is the perfect mix of a warbot simulator and a real time strategy game. Reality is the key word. Differing terrain, alterations of day and night, fog, rain, snow and even thunder will challenge the player's mind and reflexes. A gamer can play in a pure action mode or direct a platoon of warbots in battle, while a strategist can issue precise orders to his army from his well-protected bunker. There are tons of gameplays, a complete campaign of 12 missions on 4 different planets, two instant action missions and several multiplayer missions - everything a gamer or strategist could hope for.

Speaking of official sites, UBI Soft's Shadow Company Site is online offering an official home-base for info about this game of real-time squad-based tactical operations. Thanks to the tactfully tactical folks over at TacticalPlanet.

Computer Games Online's Battlezone II: Combat Commander Designer Diary #2 is up, gives an update on progress on the upcoming sequel to the action/RTS hybrid game. The diary is written by George Collins, director of Pandemic Studios.

Huckleberry Finn sends word of a post by Epic's Mark Rein to the Epic GT NVIDIA Forum that gives a feel for NVIDIA's announcement later today (as well as the fact that Mark probably hasn't signed an NDA). Here's a portion:

Nvidia is definitely going to change the world of graphics.

Nvidia is going to announce the GeForce256 which is the product name for the NV10 their new "GPU" chip which supports hardware accelerated transform and lighting. Tim Sweeney and I saw it running behind closed doors at Siggraph and we were totally blown away. We saw some incredible demos with previously unimaginable numbers of polygons in real time, fully-lit, game-quality framerates and resolutions.

Nvidia is going to ship it this September and from a practical standpoint it's approaching the power of Sony's next generation Playstation's graphics hardware.

What's really interesting is that this is just the start of some pretty amazing hardware to come from them. They released TNT2 only 5 months ago and here they are today with GeForce256 less than a month away. Just think what kind of chip they'll be shipping when Sony's next generation Playstation actually does arrive.

Here's the cool part. Looking forward to Fall 2000 you'll probably be able to buy a Celeron 600 or AMD Athlon 600, 128Mb of RAM, a DVD-ROM, a 15+ Gb hard drive, a monitor and a GeForce256 in the $1,200 range from name-brand companies like Dell. Wow!

You can read the whole update here. Thanks Huck!

There's a new version 2.0.1014 of Webdog, on the heels of the new version 2.0 released Sunday. The new version of this website monitoring utility can be downloaded from the site, or updated through the program's automated updater.

Word on Drakan.Net is that beta testing has begun on a new patch for Surreal Software's new dragon-riding action game Drakan: Order of the Flame. They also have word that Surreal's Tech Page has a list of what's going to be addressed by the upcoming patch when it is available, including the following multiplayer changes:

Multiplayer Changes
The DirectPlay-based networking code has been replaced with Winsock TCP/IP.
Dedicated server now works under Windows NT 4.0 (SP3).
More reduction of network bandwidth. Removed DirectPlay packet overhead.
Better packet aggregation. This feature reduces bandwidth by combining multiple packets into larger, single packets which have less overhead.
Smarter modem support. The server adaptively avoids bottlenecks by keeping packet flow to a minimum though tight connections like modems.
Dragon (air) Teamplay now sets all the players on one team to have the same dragon skin (defined by the server admin).
Added server commands for viewing in-game chat and talking to the players.
Added server commands for changing the timelimit and kills limit in-game.
Added server commands for changing to a different group of levels (maps) in-game.
Fixed long delay in the join-game screen if your computer's DNS settings were not correct. The system was hung while it was looking up the Drakan master server address.
When joining a team, the scoreboard is now displayed so you can see what players are on each team (and how many). new
More layers of mush to prevent cheating (remaining critical holes moved server-side).
Fixed a few minor gameplay bugs.

GameFan has posted some new Imperium Galatica II screenshots showing off this upcoming space opera from GT Interactive.

PC.IGN. Com previews Tomb Raider 4 looking at the upcoming next installment in Eidos' franchise, talking about what's new, what's the same, and of course, the obligatory academic analysis of Lara's breast size.

Thanks Frans at 3D Action Gamers for these:

• GameSpot reviews Drakan: Order of the Flame.
• 3Dnow.Net reviews Drakan: Order of the Flame.
• GamePen reviews Shadow Man.
• AGN reviews Shadow Man.
• Gamesmania reviews Braveheart.

• Gamershome.com Server Monitoring page has info on how any website can easily have a server monitoring page via a simple plug-in...
• CNN - Status of Hotmail privacy unclear reports that your free anonymous mail still may not be free of others anonymously reading it. Thanks Bodi Freeman...
• The Pulse on Quake's Smoking Gun interview talks with Andrew Smith about his GameSpy Industries editorial, reprinting it along the way...

Yesterday marks the third anniversary of the appearance in stores of the Quake CD with the full version of the game on it in encrypted form that you could call and unlock after paying the registration fee. Recalling this reminded me that the first release of the registered Quake was actually via mail order! That old-school distribution method makes that seem longer ago than three years, though I guess the changes to this site since then reinforces that impression. In fact it was the flurry of activity at this point at that time that lead to older news being archived in weekly chunks instead of monthly ones to avoid being too large a download (down to two days now). Okay, enough of that, if I wax any more nostalgic, I'll turn into a candle.

Link of the Day: Gobler Toys reminiscing about the fun "we can't remember," taking a look at toys that never were from a bygone era. Thanks MrCoffee.