An email from the observant (and lemony-fresh) Toilet Duck, points out an interesting quote in the John Carmack interview posted earlier, a reference to 3Dfx's plans to announce a part that supports 32-bit color. Here's how T.D. put it:

In the Mat interview, it's very interesting bit in the second file (about 8 minutes in), where Carmack is talking about 32 bit color. He says that "When they finally announced that they would have this 32 part, Tiwirly was like, 'And this should make John Happy', but I feel that the 3dfx situation is really unfortunate."

The name of the 3dfx guy isn't clear (It sounds like too-early), but you might want to check out the interview at timestamp 8:10.

AFAIK, 3dfx hasn't announced ANY 32 bit parts (external, 3d, etc.), so this would be new, non-public tech.

Action Xtreme interviews Wesley Davis, Project Leader and Designer for Digital Platoon, eliciting some details about their upcoming Unreal-engine Project V1. Included in the interview are three exclusive screenshots with three more to be posted tomorrow with part two of the interview.

The Enternet Global Network site has a new alpha 593 version of the EGN2 server-browser/chat software. Thanks BetaNews.

PCGamer's Interactive Interview with Marc Laidlaw is online offering the answers to reader-submitted questions for the man who wrote the story for Half-Life. Thanks Voodoo Extreme.

Rust, the game editing design site, offers an interview with Ward Six's Dawn of Darkness team talking about this upcoming Dawn of Darkness Quake II add-on, and tossing in a half-dozen screenshots along the way.

The Qizmo page has a new version of the Qizmo QuakeWorld proxy that fixes a bug in 2.60 that was causing random exits under Windows '95. Thanks X-M4N. Qizmo is a full-featured proxy program for QuakeWorld.

The Rendition software download page has posted version: 3.0 beta3a reference drivers for their v2x00 series of accelerators (they're dated February 16). Thanks ]kaMpFsaU[. These drivers are Windows 98 native and support DirectX 6, but are still Windows 95 compatible, and offer built in OpenGL ICD support. A note on the page specifically mentions that "these drivers are NOT supported by Rendition. Use at your own risk."

A follow-up on the id interview stuff posted yesterday in Mat 'The Lurker' Bettinson's cunning .plan comes today in the form of a two part audio interview with John Carmack in .mp3 format. Here's part one of the John Carmack Interview (5.6 MB) and part two of the John Carmack Interview (10.3 MB), local copies, as always, thanks to Walnut Creek CDROM. Part one is a half-hour conversation about Quake III Arena in general, and part two is about an hour, and is more technical in nature, talking about graphics cards and networking, etc. Thanks Midiguy. Word is that transcribed versions will appear in a Gamespot UK article next week.

Version 1.01 of the Official Duke Nukem Forever FAQ is online at Dukeworld with new Q&A on the chances of a parental lock, the likelihood of a simultaneous Mac release, supported sound and video APIs, and more. Also, while digging on Dukiness, Duke Nukem's Ascent to World Domination is a new article at D.W. that, in the vein of the recent posting of all the games in the Duke series on the 3D Realms website, looks at the series from Duke 1 to Duke 3D, and ahead to Duke Nukem Forever and the rest of the upcoming Duke line, as well as the products spawned by series.

Threshold, Behavior pact for vidgame pix is an article on Variety that describes a pact between Threshold Entertainment and Behaviour Worldwide to finance and distribute eight movies based on computer games including Duke Nukem, and Zork. Thanks Spacklebeast. The article describes the Duke project as being on the fast track, and the Zork movie "a darker and more romantic pic..."

Layoffs Continue at Sierra is a GameCenter article that describes a layoff of 30 employees at Dynamix, something to which Tim Gift's .plan alluded. Thanks Lorien at GA-Source. Earlier this week Dynamix' parent Sierra announced that it was closing four development studios (here's another GameCenter article on that), including Yosemite Entertainment. According to the article on the new round of cuts, the 30 employees represent about 15 percent of Dynamix's staff.

FiringSquad's "Stepsister" SLI Preview gives a hands-on look at this new hardware setup from Metabyte that allows parallel use of any graphics chipset. The article even delves into the origination of the products icky name (no offense to any stepsisters out there).

The Zero Division page has posted a bunch of screenshots from Tank Fury, currently in beta. As the name implies this is a tank combat game, and they describe it as a blend of Quake-style deathmatch in Animé-style assault tanks with realistic racing physics and some pretty powerful weapons.

Making it in the game industry is a CNN article that talks with Interactive Digital Software Assn. President Douglas Lowenstein about the "unprecedented growth in the video game industry" and how it presents difficult challenges for developers and hardware manufacturers. Thanks dethkultur.

Word on Sniper.Net is Saturday March 13 they will be holding a Teamplay Boot Camp in Vancouver for Starsiege TRIBES and (if available) TeamFortress Classic.

• Here's an FCC ISP FAQ with a string of TLAs on the new ruling that should ease your mind. Thanks broken...
• The final release of the UKPAK level pack is out, offering eight four-on-four teamplay maps for Quake (1) done by a group of UK mappers...
• A new version 1.04 of the Powertweak program that promises to optimize your processor and chipset to work together is out. Thanks Tweak3D...

Off to GamesCon in Toronto mid-morning, just spending these last few hours alternating between filling the BlueJet and myself with anti-freeze (just kidding, you shouldn't drink and fly). I should be able to check in and update in the early afternoon. I was channel flipping yesterday and saw the portion of E.R. where they play Doom against another hospital ("shoot him with the BFG-9000!") pretty wild stuff.

Sad news, Culture News from Wired News reports the end of MST3K. Thanks Randy Perry. "If you're wondering how he eats and breathes and other science facts (la-la-la), Just repeat to yourself, 'It's just a show, I should really just relax...' for Mystery Science Theater 3000!"

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: