An update by Tim "Slacker" Gift to the Starsiege TRIBES players page about the TRIBES patch in the next story makes it clear this is really geared towards the TRIBES Server Corps, and is not recomended for end users. Thanks JeKill. Here's the update:

This is a beta version of TRIBES. We don't recommend that you install this version unless it specifically addresses problems you are encountering, or you wish to help us test the game.

This version is geared towards server operators and mission builders, though it also includes that latest OpenGL driver.

Only a 1.3 to 1.3.12 patch is provided. As this is a beta release, there may not be a 1.3.12 to 1.4 patch when version 1.4 is released.

Client & Server Changes:
- Banning problems introduced in version 1.3 have been fixed.
- A server side crash related to players dropping items then quitting has been fixed.
- The remoteBuyItem() function now properly checks for team item limits.
- Performance improvements for nVidia TNT cards.
- OpenGL & 32 bit desktops. If your graphics card supports 32 bit rendering, then the TRIBES will now run 32 bit accelerated, otherwise the software OpenGL driver is run, which is extremely slow.
- A crash bug related to having shadows turned on while using the Glide drivers has been fixed. This was a bug introduced in version 1.3.
- Staying connected to IRC while playing the game could cause the client to crash.
- OpenGL is now enabled by default, you no longer have to set the $OpenGL::Enabled variable.
- If a client is missing custom files (or missions) loaded by the server, a "missing file" error message now appears during the loading process.
- Clients now get a "connecting to modified server" notice when connecting to servers which have mods loaded. Mod or server operators may set an optional string ($MODInfo) that is appended to the notice.

Mission Editor Changes:
- New mission wizard for creating new missions
- Ability to scene light the current mission from within the editor
- Ability to move and edit mission static lights
- Random terrain generation from within the editor
- User configurable terrain, mission and world types for use in the mission wizard
- Script based landscape generation
- Ability to choose and place terrain textures
- Auto regeneration of command map after leaving editor
- Hotkey support for terrain editor
- Ability to add custom volumes from within the editor
- Ability to create new terrain types through scripts
- Can create a mission or enter the mission editor from the command line

The PlanetStarSiege Download Center has a new version 1.3.12 patch for Starsiege TRIBES. The new patch is unsupported by Sierra but adds a list of new features, including a new mission editor wizard, a fix for banning problems, and OpenGL fixes.

I received word from Phil Co, lead designer on Requiem: Avenging Angel, that a new playable demo for the game should be available tomorrow. From the description, this demo sounds like it will be a bit more substantial than the first one:

The Second Requiem Playable Demo should be up by tomorrow.
Here's the breakdown:

4 "JAM's" (or sub-levels) that make up the one level
Setting in the Power Plant of New Damascus
Tons of soldiers, Demon Rats, Demon Dogs, and Flying Kynthra
Tons of Angelic Powers including Resurrect, Possess, To Salt, Bloodboil, and Warp Time

Mission Objectives:
Meet with Rebel Soldier, Elijah
Find Cathcart, a Power Plant Exec Sympathetic to the Rebellion
Blow up the Back Up Reactor to set up a diversion

The demo is playable on:

Minimum:
P166
32 Megs of RAM

Software
D3D
3DFX

The LoneGunmen's page has been updated with 10 new demos showing off different techniques including cool turret destruction lessons and a guide to the mysterious writing on Broadside. There are also seven new crosshairs for download, and a set of guidelines for proper "care and feeding of your turrets" is in their general tips section.

GameCenter's RIVA TNT Tweaker's Guide is online, offering tips for improving visual quality and performance.

A post to the Deus Ex messageboard by Bob White offers a progress report on ION Storm's upcoming Action/RPG. Thanks Gollywog at StormTroopers. Here's the quote:

Well...We have an internal deadline to reach by April 1 of a playable first section of the game (a couple of missions). Also we have set a high goal for ourselves of also having all geometry for everty mission complete. This team is strong and driven to get their tasks completed. I am proud to say that this team will reach the goal and on time.

These first two sections of the game, based in the burrows of NYC, will also comprise the demo, since they could be stand alone and provide an excellent set-up or the rest of the missions. You will get to see these at E3 if you are one of the lucky ones to get a glimpse of the game.

The programmers have been sailing along and a good deal of the functionality is in place. The first two missions scripts are in the game and voice overs are also in place.

Hopefully more screen shots and additional game information will soon start trickling out to help whet your appetites.

The D0gz Pack has (haz?) posted the version 1.2 general release of their TRIBES statistical utility, TRIBEStats, which now includes "Strategic Initiatives" where you get points for destroying enemy turrets and generators. Also, Team Killing stats have been included, where collecting a literal frag will earn you points for the "Hall of Shame."

Microsoft Splits Into Five Groups In Reorganization announces the long expected re-org in Redmond that splits the software (and hardware) giant into separate groups: A Consumer and Commerce group, a Business Enterprise division, a Consumer Windows division, a Business Productivity group, and a Developer group. Calling this "the reinvention of Microsoft," the company has "also created a separate home and retail products division to focus on consumer-targeted retail products such as games, input devices and reference products." Thanks Jacek Fedoryñski.

The official MechWarrior 3 site is online, dedicated to the next installment in the giant Mech series, offering info, screenshots, and of course, downloads of the recently released demo.

HardwareCentral's Permedia3 Preview looks at the upcoming 3D accelerator from 3D Labs.

The Prince Of Persia 3D Screenshot Gallery on GameSpot UK has been updated with 14 new screenshots from Prince of Persia 3D, the upcoming 3D sequel to the pair of classic side-scrollers.

PCGamePro.Com previews Giants: Citizen Kabuto, the upcoming game of living large from Planet Moon Software and Interplay in a preview that offers a bunch of new screenshots.

Word of a couple tweaky bits of news come from the tweaks at Tweak3D: The TweakAll Download Page has a new version of this program that allows control over a bunch of settings for your machine like VCACHE and some 3Dfx settings, and Tweak3D's own Windows Shell Tweak Guide is up with info on how the power-hungry can replace their Windows 98 shell with the "faster Windows 95 shell," tweak either the Windows 95 or 98 shell, or even replace your Windows 95/98 shell with a custom shell of your choice.

Tonight's GameTime will offer a chat with Epic's Cliff Bleszinski discussing Epic's upcoming Unreal Tournament. The show begins live at 6:00 PM EST, RealPlayer required to watch the show, and you can join the simultaneous chat using an IRC client and server chat1.pseudo.com, channel #allgames, or by using the iChat plugin.

It's just for laughs, but I can't resist posting this .plan update from Scott Miller that reproduces what has to be the spam of the week (if not more):

Got this via email. If anyone needs game ideas, we now have a source!!!

----------

Hello,

My name is [name withheld] and I own a game ideas development company. I would like to co-operate with you. If you don't understand what we do here, I will explain. What we do here in Creative Gamers is create Game Ideas. We create the game idea and then sell the rights to Game DEVELOPMENT company's. We sell 2 things in our company:
1) A game idea with some specific details - Low Price.
2) Create a full draft of a game, charachters, background, story and everything - Price varies according to length of the game.
We want to work with you. We produce ANY KIND of game in a very short time, the longest time it took us to create a full draft for a game was 3 weeks and that was a 2 cd game.

Thank you very much.

P.S. Please reply if you want more information like full price list or just a specific type of game, or just a Yes or No.

Kraemer's Q3Arena preview is up on Dimension 128 and sCary's own article on Q3ATest (click here to read the next two words) are both online, like Redwood's, each based on their recent foray to id to play the latest build of the test.

There is a speculative article on Thresh's FiringSquad that offers some conjecture about 3dfx' upcoming plans based on history, common sense, some reading between the lines, and perhaps a session with the crystal ball.

There's a feature on Gathering of Developers on GameSpot TV offering video interview with big Mike Wilson talking about this unusual game publishing company in RealPlayer format. Thanks i am jilted.

The Adrenaline Vault previews Requiem: Avenging Angel looking at this shooter from 3DO/Cyclone Studios that just went gold. Here's a bit from the preview on what Requiem is about:

Borrowing heavily from these words and others like it, 3DO and Cyclone Studios are almost ready to bring Heaven and Hell to your computer screen like you've never seen or heard before. Requiem: Avenging Angel relies heavily on non-player character interaction to develop its multi-layered storyline much the same way Half-Life does. The game is a three dimensional action shooter with fiction that combines the prophecies of ancient religious texts and includes a script right out of the movie Spawn. Requiem is truly a religion all its own.

GameSlice has posted five screenshots for Acclaim's upcoming third-person adventure-shooter, Shadow Man.

The Half-Life Editing Resource Center has posted an overview of the Half-Life teamplay entities included in the 1.0.0.9 Half-Life executable included with the TeamFortress Classic LAN release as well as the Worldcraft game data files with the entities from the new release. This is a whole new set of teamplay entities separate from the TeamFortress Classic stuff. They are of a much simpler nature than TFC entities, and are less powerful as a result, but they do allow mappers to add enhanced teamplay aspects to deathmatch maps. Of course, some of the information is subject to change for the final release of TeamFortress Classic (currently planned for April 2).

The BattleCruiser Online site has a new version 2.06 patch for BattleCruiser 3000AD, you can read about what's new in the version control file. The new release also includes version 2.06 of the BC Game Control System, which allows you to create modifications for the game.

The new loonygames is here, the new loonygames is here! "This is the kind of spontaneous publicity, your name in print, that makes people!"

loonygames laughs at issue thirty-one! Thirty one issues? Yowza... Baffling you this week:

• Mike Wilson and the Glory of G.O.D.: We chat with the founder of the Gathering of Developers about DWANGO, id Software, ION Storm, the publishing biz, and...Howard Stern? [Monday]
• Thinking Outside the Box: It took thirty-one issues, but at long last...we've got nudity! Yeah, baby! Oh yeah...and there's some kind of 3D modelling tutorial in here somewhere, too. [Tuesday]
• Painting on Polygons: Rick Grossenbacher's 2D art tutorial series continues with this piece on creating Anime style art using Adobe Illustrator. [Wednesday]
• User Friendly: All this week, it's the ever popular Star Wars parody! [DAILY!]
• PLUS: Not one, but two new Penny Arcades [Wednesday, Friday], we check out South Park [Thursday], a new Pixel Obscura [Tuesday], critiquing game reviews in Pad Happy [Thursday] and more! And then some more, because we do it to spite you.

The Xtreme Gaming Network is offering an interesting-sounding new service for TRIBES server operators that will create a custom TRIBES map for their server. If you run a dedicated server and you would like a custom map please contact optimizer@xtremegaming.net for more information.

The Grassy Knoll has posted a config file for the newly released TeamFortress Classic LAN editions (and presumably subsequent TFC releases, as well) that lets the player cycle through nine class specific configs, and sets up several useful aliases. Functions include a one-button sentry build/detonate toggle and an instant color change for the spy class.

Jason's Rage 128 FAQ offers answers to frequently asked questions about ATI's newest chipset.

• I Play Games reviews Carmageddon 2.
• CPU Review reviews the AMD K6-400.
• Tweak3D reviews the 3dfx Voodoo3 3000.
• Sharky Extreme reviews the 3dfx Voodoo3 2000.
• HardwareCentral's Elite P6BXT-A+ Review looks at ECS' latest Mobo.

• Word on Challenge-au is that Reload, one of Australia's top-ranked Quake players, has landed a sponsorship deal with Intel...
• A new Sin messageboard has been added to the Bot Board Forums discussing the AI in Sin. There are currently seven boards active, including Quake, Quake2, Quake3 Arena, Half-Life & TF2, Unreal & Unreal Tournament, Sin, and "Other Games"...
• The Good Old Days of Quake article posted the other day (story) is now back online if you tried to read it before (the server went down shortly after the link was posted)...
• The Ars Technica Interview with an Ultima Online addict talks with the woman who paid $2,025 for a UO account on eBay...

Doh! One more bug (at least) still does remain from our recent spate of database bugs here at the old Blue Tower, I find in browsing back through the news archives, some stories will not be displayed once you go back a couple of days (Thursday to be exact). The stories not displayed are the same stories whose headlines were not displaying last week (and it is the workaround that is making the headlines show now that is making the stories since Thursday work), but fortunately, any story that matches your search criteria still seems to work when you search. The last thing I ever expected to ramble about in my Out of the Blue ramblings is bug reports, and needless to say, this episode has caused a couple of policies to be quickly enacted to make sure future software updates here go more smoothly. I guess in the meantime we're waiting for the Blammo point release .

Redwood's Q3Atest Preview is online, offering some hands-on feedback about playing a very recent build of the test release. The write-up offers the news that id will be putting out revisions of the test. According to Red, "The first version won't have any bots but by ship time it will likely have bots and be more like a demo than a test." Here's another quote that talks about what weapons and levels are likely to be included in the test release:

Some of the items that will definitely be in the test are the chainsaw, machine gun, shotgun, plasma gun, and rocket launcher. There is a possibility of a railgun getting in there if one of the levels they are considering goes into the test. The one being looked at is a fun level that is a newer play style than most are used to. I don't want to spoil it so that's all I'll say. They said there will be more than one level in the test. I'm guessing that means two but a max of 3 could happen. I am really happy about their being more than one level since I imagine we'd get sick of that one level by ship time. :) The machine gun and plasma gun are perfect and I don't think any of us would change anything about them. The plasma gun had changed slightly since I was last there. Even though I had a blast playing and there were quite a few things that were perfect, doesn't mean we didn't have quite a number of suggestions. We are picky types though. :)

There's an interview with id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead on gamers.de - die Computerspieleszene in Deutschland (Gamer's Alliance Germany) in both an English version and a German version. The conversation discussed the upcoming Quake III Arena, as well as the famed German "index."

The CTF Survival Guide is now offering strategy tips for Starsiege TRIBES among their CTF tips with map specific strategies for Raindance, Rollercoaster, Desert of Death, and Dangerous Crossing, with guides for the remaining maps to be posted next week sometime.

An update to the Starsiege TRIBES-Status Update Page adds the news that the version 1.3.11 patch is moving along, with 98% of the development, and 80% of the testing on the project complete. Thanks Timm at Metropolis.

Part two of the Planet Kingpin Walkthrough of the Kingpin demo is online, as is i.am.Kingpin's walkthrough.

The Coven's Disposable Heroes Downloads page has a demo release of the ArmourBack Quake II mod from their Disposable Heroes pack for Quake II. The demo features two of the six battle suits from the full version of the mod.

Logitech Mouse Software Downloads page has new version 8.32 drivers of the Logitech mouse drivers. These drivers work with any Logitech pointing device(s) operating under Windows 95/98, and Windows 3.1x. Under Windows NT 4.0, only PS/2 and Serial pointing devices are supported. Windows 98 is required for USB mice. Thanks SailorScout, who points out : "This release resolves some issues with Win98 and conflicting serial devices. In any case, the drivers seem 'smoother' and more stable."

id Software's Graeme Devine updated his .plan with news on the plans for releasing the test version of Quake III Arena, which will still not be for a few weeks:

I know a lot of you are looking at the end of the month as a fixed date for q3test, but we're probably looking to be within a few weeks of that date rather than exactly on it. We're working on it; I just want to keep expectations in line with reality.

This is a test of Quake 3:Arena, not the demo. With this test we're looking to see how well the brand new networking and graphics code works, and while we've run this through a QA process here and at Activision, this is not code that is of release quality in speed or gameplay. Please do not look upon this as the "demo" of Q3A.

Thanks. I now return you to your regular programming.

Planet Half-Life has posted a couple of tips on how to play the TeamFortress Classic LAN release over the Internet. I've also received the tip from a couple of sources that point out that TFC works fine out of the box with Kali, since Kali's original function is to allow IPX games to be played over the Internet. Here's the lowdown on the other workarounds from PH-L for those too eager to wait for this Friday's release of the full 'net version (though if you try this, I would suggest it's only fair to hold off judgement about Internet playability, considering the nature of this tip):

It appears that you can play the LAN Team Fortress Classic version over the 'net. Doom writes in and reports: First off we launched the dedicated server with "hl -game tfc -console" then pulled down the console and typed "connect ipaddress:27015."

He's another way as sent in by xp3rt:

I got it to work, but I do this: e:\sierra\half-life\hl.exe -console -toconsole +connect (ip adress)

I've been playin quite a while. And for a dedicated server, I've used this:

e:\sierra\half-life\hlds.exe -game tfc +map 2fort -port 27016

I know for a fact that works, cuz I've been playing w/ several other people.

A new version 1.1 of the HLFE Half-Life Front-end is out on Atomic Half-Life offering a MOD Dir option (for Half-Life v1.0.0.9 and above). There's also a partial fix for the "Dir not found!" error that a few people get, and a few other minor changes.

The Entech page has a new version of their PowerStrip monitor/video card control utility that offers support for the Rage 128 from ATI. Thanks Voodoo Extreme, where I also see that a new version 4.0.2a of BGR Software's TweakIt software for tweaking 3Dfx accelerators is now out.

The Qtracker Homepage has a new version 2.3 public beta 1 of the Qtracker server browser program. The new release adds the ability to play X-Wing Alliance without using the Zone, and also can find streaming audio content on the Internet.

Ion Brew is a set of features on ION Storm posted on GameSpot UK offering a Daikatana Hands On preview, as well as a Deus Ex Preview and an Anachronox Preview.

SWAT3.com has posted three exclusive new screenshots from Sierra's upcoming SWAT 3.

A new beta 4 of Terror Quake II is now available adding the Beretta handgun and a silenced MP/5 and killing a few bugs. There is also a new Terror Q2 map there for download.

Gimpy from the AMD Zone points out that a set of updated AMD-K6(R) Technical Documentation has been posted by AMD as well as an updated list of AMD-K6®-2 with 3DNow!(TM) Optimized Products.

A Tribute To Zdim on StormTroopers offers a farewell to Rich "Zdim" Carlson, who has left his post as a level designer at ION Storm. As the title says, the article is a tribute to Zdim, but does not go into the reasons behind his departure.

There are new Quake III Arena inspired wallpapers posted on d-TOP - Desktop Wallpapers and The artist currently known as Chris Connelly's page.

Locke's Domain is holding sign-ups for a TRIBES competition called the TRIBES Special Olympics that will have bracketed competitions between 32 TRIBES tribes, or even 64 if that many apply.

• Silent Serpent Decoupler Review on GameWire looking at this unusual device that promises to improve performance by reducing CPU noise.
• There's a Team Fortress Classic Review on 3DGaming.Net.

• There is a map poll on the Rocket Arena site to determine the most popular non-pickup arenas in each RA2 map (with pictures to help decide). The results of the poll will be used in an upcoming "secret project"...
• I missed it when it came out a couple of weeks ago, but a beta 3 version 1.60 of SoftFSB, the front-side bus overclocking utility is now available. Thanks Jonathan...
• There's now a French translation of the Weapons Factory Handbook...
• Mitnick admits guilt, cuts a deal is a ZDNN article with more on the Mitnick settlement. Thanks Tahldain...

Okay, I think the search engine is back on track now, which was the most problematic bug from the recent Blammo glitches, so everything is pretty well back on track again. The vague word I promised on the return of the overhauled LAN Parties and Want Ads section is that it sounds like there's good reason to be optimistic that it will be pretty darn soon, but you never know about these things, so I'll post an update about that as I know more.