The Good Old Days of Quake is an interview on Andrew Smith's the beauty of madness. Here's Andrew's concise rundown on what the hefty (100 KB of text and 2.5 MB of images) piece covers:

I've posted a new interview on my web site. It's a double one this time with Matt Sefton and Bill "crash" McClendon, taking a look back at the "good old days" of Quake level editing, discussing their thoughts on the old community, the way it has changed over the years, and what the future may hold.

They discuss loads of stuff, including their most memorable levels, Bill's unreleased editing efforts, rivalry between fans of different games and their thoughts on id Software and PlanetQuake.

There's also a competition where you can win yourself a copy of the "Complete Quake" collection of classic levels and conversions, as given away by PC Zone magazine in December of 1997.

Anyware passes along a warning about the updated Diamond drivers released this week (story). It turns out the drivers for the V550 that were originally posted had a Word macro virus (W97M.Class) in the included .doc file. The V550 drivers currently there are no longer infected, but it seems wise to pass this along in case it's not too late to save someone from a problem if they've downloaded the drivers but haven't installed them yet. I only have a copy of the original V550 drivers, and can't say whether or not the Voodoo2 and Banshee drivers posted at the same time were infected, but caution is probably a good idea with copies of those files downloaded shortly after they were posted (I was able to detect the virus with Norton Antivirus and the latest definitions).

The Wanted homepage has the demo of the Wanted add-on for Quake II available for download. The .zip is 65 MB (expands to 125 MB), and requires registered Quake II and a 3D accelerator. Here's what's included in the demo:

• All Weapons, All Pick-Ups, All Textures, All Sounds (not Music),
• 5 active models in the Single Player maps.
• 2 Single Player levels (not in the final commercial version), 5 Deathmatch Levels....DM mode is fully functional and superb fun.
• Q2 3-20 upgrade file.
• Demo Story, Full Version story, Manual text.
• Wanted Poster, Sample of Music, Pictures of all Models, Windows Background BMP, Web Site Banner.

GA-Source interviews conceptual artist Jim Daly, formerly of ION Storm, talking about his work on Daikatana, and the reasons behind his recent departure (which involve none of the negativity of some other recent ION departures).

Understanding the K7: Slot A, RAM, and Cache is an article on Ace's Hardware that discusses some of the workings of AMD's upcoming K7 CPU, including what kind of RAM will be required to operate at the K7's reported bus speed of 200 MHz.

PlanetFortress has posted the release of Team Fortress Classic that will work at LAN parties (I'll be honest that the TFC release schedule has me confused, I thought this was not a public release). This is for LAN parties, not the version that will work over the Internet, which is still slated for release next Friday.

Billy sends along an email from Voodoo Magazine explaining that the specs reported yesterday (story) from their recent article, were speculative at best. Here's the lowdown from Voodoo Magazine editor Cris Krameron what turns out to be a session at the guess the features dartboard, rather than actual hot scoop:

Okay, let me clear this up for you. These specs were printed in a sidebar to Michael Flemming's Voodoo 3 piece that appears in the Spring issue of Voodoo (on sale now at finer newsstands near you). Michael basically thunked up what he thought would be the most likely progression for 3dfx's next level of technology. Several times in his sidebar, Michael included disclaimers like, "I will have to resort to a mixture of conjecture and deduction..." and "Please bear in mind that all of this is conjecture and does not represent any kind of official statement or release from 3dfx Interactive."

3dfx is hard at work on the imminent release of Voodoo 3 and certainly doesn't need any (more) headaches caused by me. Can you please whack something up on the site that indicates that these specs were nothing more than blue-sky ideals by one of Voodoo's freelancers? Before Greg Ballard or Michael Howse find out and put a hit out on me? Feel free to quote this email in part or in full. Thanks, man.

Xatrix CEO Drew Markham made a post to the Gangland.org forums talking about the player models in Kingpin, announcing that there will only be one additional model in the final game, and that plans for an extra female model have been scrapped.

Sharky Extreme has posted some benchmarks running Kingpin on a TNT2 experimenting with the performance fall-off when switching between 16-bit and 32-bit color (which was insignificant).

GameCenter's sneak peek at Sanity is up looking at Monolith's upcoming LithTech-powered action/RPG.

Version 1.38 of Quake 2 Battleground, a teamplay/tourney mod for Quake II, is now available fixing an item spawning bug and a number of smaller bugs.

A new version 2.5 R1 of the Assimilation mod for Quake II is available. The server-only release offers random weapon spawning.

The RIVA 3D TNT2 Review is up offering some benchmarks.

• The Online Gaming League has had a glitch and lost all their ladder rankings, so if you were in a ladder there you must contact them. Thanks [BC]darkstar. The OGL leagues are unaffected by the problem. Also, they are now running a TRIBES ladder over there.
• The Professional 3 on 3 Half-Life League is full, and matches will get underway Mid-April.
• This Heretic II Skinning Contest offers a grand prize that features (drumroll) Heretic II!!

Yesterday I referred to Loki's Minions CTF as a modification of Quake II CTF, when, in fact, LMCTF is actually all-original code, released prior to Q2CTF (apologies to Loki and all his minions). Thanks Anil Madhavapeddy. Also, I posted a link to a negative article about Everquest, which I was told by one reader represented a look at the older game, and sure enough in contrast, today here's a really positive Everquest review from PCBlitZ.

• A change in plans from Digital Paint has them planning on releasing a final version of PaintBall for Quake II and then moving on to another project, rather than perusing Q3A PaintBall, as they had recently announced was their plan...
• If you've been having trouble getting your hands on the recently released Square Bot files, the downloading problem should be fixed now...
• Gamer's Alliance Strategy has posted a trailer showing off gameplay from Activision's upcoming Dark Reign II...

Furn is back in his digs in the UK, so we will either wipe out some of the Blammo bugs that have been buzzing about over the past week or more, or wipe out the database trying. My guess that the headlines atop the page would work again after I started working around the problem proved correct (whee!), so that's (sorta) fixed already. Once we get the database stabilized, I hope to get a handle on a timeframe for getting the departments that are to be overhauled with programming (though given long-standing superstition about these things, will probably only vaguely share them). Real quickly, here are a couple of follow-ups on misquoted follow-up quotes from yesterday: "It's a chopper baby," (thanks larry), and apparently the "Zed's dead" in Pulp Fiction is actually an homage to Easy Rider (thanks Warren) which is one of those weird "you mean you haven't seen that?" movies for me.

Tommy at PCBlitZ sends along a pair of news tidbits about 3dfx. First, that their second TV commercial is online at their website, and second, that the newest issue of Voodoo magazine has some speculation about 3dfx's next generation chip that seems to be worthy of posting, given the source (the official 3dfx magazine): Here's what Tommy sent along:

Also, the newest issue of Voodoo The official 3dfx magazine has an interesting part about the next generation 3dfx chip coming second quarter of 1999.

Possible Specs For 3dfx's Next-generation part

Highly Likely to Near Certain:

- Massive fill rates (around 900+ MTexels/s)
- 32-bit color rendering with no speed penalty
- Full-screen antialiasing with no speed penalty
- Much bigger textures (2048x2048 or larger)
- Texture compression
- Support for 64 MB or more local, on-board memory
- Multiple, independent pixel pipelines
- Quad+ multitexturing per pass (2+ textures/pipeline/cycle)
- 24 or 32-bit floating point Z buffer
- 4+x AGP and full AGP texturing (for bullet pointing)
- New blending modes: may be extremely flexible
- Glide compatibility
- 8-bit stencil buffer
- 2D/3D
- True single-cycle trilinear filtering
- Extensible architecture (a variety of configurations possible)

Probable

- Real-time shadows and lighting with no speed penalty
- single chip design
- Some kind of specular lighting
- Scalable parallel architecture (2+ Rampages can work in tandem)

Reasonably Possible:

- High tap anisotropic filtering with little or no speed penalty
- Geometry acceleration
- true bump-mapping with no speed penalty
- MPEG/MPEG-2 texturing
- Surface tesselation
- Particle effects (for fire, hair, weather, smoke, etc.)

Ritual Programmer Mark Dochtermann updated his .plan with word that SinCTF beta 3 is now available, also mentioning that if no problems arise, a version 1.04 of the Sin executable will be released soon. Here's the update:

SinCTF Beta 3 is out!

All the crash bugs have been fixed as far as we know, so Beta 3 includes the gamex86.dll. If there are no major problems encountered in the next few days we will release version 1.04.

Here's the link:

ftp://ftp.ritual.com/Sin/CTF/sinctfb3.exe

The two servers you all know and love are still at:

debugctf.ritual.com and sinctf.ritual.com

The debugctf is running under a debugger, so it may be a little choppy. Please send any bugs to sinctf@ritual.com. If you are easily frustrated by beta software, then don't download this yet.

Word from Phil Co at 3DO is that Requiem: Avenging Angel has gone gold (for real this time, we've already had a false alarm on this one), so this first-person shooter that pits you as a heaven-sent combatant against the forces of evil should be on store shelves soon. Also, to celebrate the completion of the game Fred Selker has compiled a gallery of Requiem Art.

IBM enters 3D graphics market is a CNET News.com article with the announcement that "IBM is getting into the 3D graphics business with a chip that it says allows PC makers to build $3,000 computers with technology found last year in $6,000 systems, a product push that further underscores an emerging strategy to become a dominant power in the components." Also, 740 has dug up an announcement of an Apollo 7520 card that uses the Intel752 chipset. The announcement has semi-detailed specs on the 752 chipset which they have posted.

Thanks Billy for word that the MechWarrior 3 Demo is up on GameCenter offering a playable demo of this upcoming giant mech combat game. Here's the skinny on the 34 MB demo, which is available via one of those Gigex dealies:

This demo features just one of the Instant Action modes, termed "Battle Progressive." The player will face 10 waves of enemy mechs, each wave stronger than the next either because of the number of mechs involved, or because of their size. The player can have up to 3 lancemates with him, as well as his Mobile Field Base, which can make armor repairs and provide more ammunition. The player also has options for invincibility, unlimited ammo, and no heat management (although this is "dishonorable"). The player is allowed to play as one of three mechs (MadCat, Orion, Bushwacker) and can encounter about 10 different types of mechs in this demo. Although all of MechWarrior 3's weapons and equipment are not available in this demo, there is a nice mix that allows the player to configure the mech in dozens of different ways.

The Kali Page has released the code for their popular Kali Stats Quake2 modification, a mod that tracks player statistics updated with every kill/death and gives a rating like the USCF (US Chess Federation) does along with the tools to publish them on a webpage. The Quake2 Deathmatch Stats page gives an example of the output from the Kali servers (clients connecting to kstats Quake2 servers must be registered Kali users and join the server from the Kali TCP Game Browser). The current kstats.dll has only been tested with the lithium mod, although it might work with regular deathmatch.

Clan MaX Homepage is home to the Tribes Advanced Weapon Analysis, or TAWA, a strategy guide in the use of the various armaments available in TRIBES.

The Adrenaline Vault News has a report up following up on the rumor reported yesterday about a possible James Bond game using the Quake III engine (story). Here's a bit from the AVault update clarifying the official position on this:

Id Software president Todd Hollenshead told the Adrenaline Vault, “To correct a rumor, Electronic Arts does not have a license for the Quake III engine.” He stated id does not discuss who they may or may not be in negotiations with since that is confidential information. However, his comment does not rule out the possibility that id and EA are negotiating a licensing agreement. EA declined to comment.

EA has a James Bond license that extends across all gaming platforms -- except online -- through the year 2003. The only announced title to date is the 3D action-adventure Tomorrow Never Dies, which is being developed for the PlayStation and PC, and is slated to be released this fall. EA said that although Tomorrow Never Dies for the PlayStation will be demonstrated at E3, no other Bond titles will be announced.

There's a hands-on preview of Requiem on GameSpot UK, as well as a new gallery of images, and Billy has posted several Requiem screenshots on Voodoo Extreme.

Extreme Audio Reality has posted version 1.4c of their Interactive Surround Sound patch for BattleZone up on their BattleZone in IAS page. The new version adds EAX support to this patch that adds enhanced 3D sound support to the game.

The official Motorhead site has a new version 3.0 patch for Sharky's favorite racing game, Motorhead. The large 14 MB update adds a few new cars and MPlayer support among other enhancements. Thanks Agorn - DICE.

I.am-KingPin (yes this is from the same I that was I AM HALF-LIFE) has posted a pretty comprehensive list of Kingpin console commands and variables along with their descriptions to their Console help page. Sure to help you out when your binds have you in a bind.

There is now an Experience FAQ up at the recently relocated Experience offering answers to some Frequently Asked Questions about this upcoming first-person shooter from The Whole Experience.

The Q2PMP has posted Optimizing 3D Art: Less is Best, an HTML version of the notes id's Paul Steed used for his lecture at this past Game Developer's Conference that discusses low polygon count modeling. The last three pages of the article are images showing off some Quake III Arena models with varying levels of detail to show the principles involved.

The Genesis 3D Engine page has posted release candidate 3 of the Genesis3D SDK for their free state-of-the-art 3D engine. Genesis 3D is now Open Source, so an updated license agreement has been posted as well. Thanks Dan Smith.

There's an interview with David Kirk on Hot Hardware talking to the Chief Scientist at NVIDIA talking about the TNT2.

Version 2.02 of Conference Kill is now available offering an update to this Quake II teamplay proxy that allows you to send private text messages and sounds to your teammates.

A version 5.2 upgrade to Loki's Minions Capture the Flag is out as a server-only update to this extensive Quake II CTF modification.

The Coven page has the patches from yesterday's Disposable Heroes patch release party. There's also word there on a few LAN events the witches and warlocks from the Coven will be attending over the coming weeks to show off their goods.

The Lair has posted the new version of Rave, Team Wolfen's Quake II mod. This is the mod that was formerly named S][N, renamed to presumably end confusion about what game the mod is designed for.

A new version 1.1 of the Quake Launcher front-end for classic Quake is now available. If no problems emerge, this will likely be the last version of Quake Launcher. Also, the Infos & Downloads zu Q-Start & Q2Start page has version 1.41 of the Q2Start front-end for Quake II, offering several enhancements, including support for DMFlags on the server menu.

Tweak3D has posted some tweaks to brighten up how dark the Kingpin demo can appear on some systems with TNT cards.

The Asheron's Call page has details on participating websites where you can sign up for a shot at being one of the 200 participants selected to participate in the beta testing of the upcoming massive 3D RPG Asheron's Call.

• AvP: Computer Games Online reviews Aliens versus Predator (previews?).
• WoS: GameCenter reviews Wages of Sin, the Sin add-on from 2015, giving it four of five X's.

In anticipation of next week's planned release of TeamFortress Classic, the Stronger Than All Team Fortress Classic league is already accepting sign-ups, with plans to get the competition underway on April 2.

• More Source: The source code for The LavaBall mod for Quake has been released. LavaBall is a mod loosely based on RollerBall. Word on the page is that progress continues slowly towards a release of LavaBall2...
• EQ Beta Bitching: How's that Everquest beta test going? According to 3DGN's The Bitchslap it's suffering from some of the same technical woes that plagued Ultima Online at start-up...
• MDK2 News: Word on www.mdk2.com is that MDK2 will debut on the DreamCast, with the PC version to follow shortly after...
• Site Seeing: The AquaQuake Vault is up at a new location, devoted to watery Quake doings...
• Off Topic: Internet Explorer 5.0 128-bit security is now available (for US and Canadian residents only). Thanks PhewL...

When it rains it pours, more pop culture yesterday from Bill Murray who crooned the Star Wars theme on the old SNL with his own unique lyrics. Thanks Vate Powell for the cool photo and Chris Colon for the return quote "That Darth Vader guy, did he scare you as much as he scared me?" Also, the "ZED's Dead" headline is from Pulp Fiction ("It's a chopper honey" dishpandan), but Nels already stole the glory for that in his update that inspired the story, so it doesn't really count (talk about the all time set-up, though).

I finally got to meet Furn, my transatlantic database programmer, who is in the New York area with his family (lovely folks). We discussed the bugs that are currently bugging the page, which include the time-stamp and headlines up top, and the semi-busted search (not to mention the new counter that only records half the visitors). Furn reassured me with several comments like "I don't know what could be causing that," but hopefully this stuff can be fixed shortly after he's back online this weekend. Furn did tell me what is causing the headlines to glitch, so they'll work today now that I know how to work around the problem.

Link of the Day: The HampStore. From pop culture phenomenon to marketing machine in a shorter time than it took for even South Park to make the same transition. Thanks James at Datumplane::Starsiege.