If it were still April 1, I'd suspect this wasn't serious, but the CNET News.com sent along by Maverick titled Microsoft to charge for Windows 98 bug fixes is dated today. The piece announces a plan called StepUp that they say will offer enhancements to Windows 98 to current users at a cost. Here's a quote:

Current users, however, will have to pay for the privilege to clear out their bugs with StepUp. Microsoft is going to offer the upgrade package for an estimated retail price of $89, according to a spokeswoman from Waggoner Edstrom, Microsoft's PR firm. Microsoft will sell the StepUp CD on its Web site, but not post the bug fixes and other technologies for free downloads, she said.

The original release about the Half-Life Software Developers Kit was a bit confusing (story), making it sound like it was now available. I wrote Jenni at Valve who explained the SDK would be available tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM Pacific time, along with the TFC Client mentioned in this story. Jenni says the SDK page is being updated with the appropriate info.

There's an interview with Robin Walker of Valve/TeamFortress Software on ModZone talking about TeamFortress Classic, which is slated for release tomorrow morning (story).

There's an interview with Steve "Gateway" Tietze on Ravages of Radiant talking to the Nihilistic designer (who also happens to coincidentally work at Nihilistic Software) about level editing in Nihilistic's upcoming Vampire game and more.

Intel seen cutting prices ahead of new chips is a CNN article describing expectations that "Intel is expected to cut prices from 10 to 20 percent for most of its products next week, including its newest Pentium III chips, ahead of launching some faster processors later in the month." Thanks Jamie Fullerton.

The PSP (Primary Server Program) portion of Valve's TeamFortress Classic release is available on this page from GameCenter. The 75 MB download is available after filling out a form for high-bandwidth users who plan on running servers. This is so servers can already be in place and online tomorrow, when the plan is to release the customer client for download bright and early at 9:00 AM Pacific time. The client download will be a still healthy 19 MB or so. In the announcement of all this, Valve also mentions the Linux Half-Life server is in the final stage of development and will go into testing later this week.

Whole boatload of big hardware announcements today...first off, is ATI, who announced their RAGE 128 Pro line, including separate boards for high end PCs/workstations, and consumers. Look for those in July...second, we've got Matrox touting their G400 MAX as, "the world’s fastest 3D and 2D acceleration." Here's a bit from their press release:

The Matrox G400 MAX benefits from an increase in raw speed of more than 30% over the Matrox G400 and can achieve peak 3D fill rates in excess of 333 Mtexels/second. On industry standard benchmarks, the new Matrox G400 MAX comes close to maxing out Ziff Davis’ 3D WinBench 99 test with a score of 1080 at 1024 x 768 resolution. The Matrox G400 MAX graphics chip also includes an industry-leading 360Mhz UltraSharp RAMDAC capable of driving high-end monitors at resolutions up to 2048 x 1536, 32-bpp at 85Hz.

Not to be outdone, NVIDIA announced today that the TNT-based Viper 550 from Diamond Multimedia has been chosen as an option in Hewlett Packard's Pavilion line of PCs...and if you're not totally sick of hardware by this point, GuruTech has an interview with S3's Paul Crossley regarding their S4 chipset (thanks Billy "Ambien" Wilson).

Valve sends word that the Half-Life Software Development Kit is now available on this page for mod authors eager to try their hand at writing modifications for Half-Life (though as of this writing there don't seem to be any download links there). There's info on the page with what seem like very liberal restrictions on commercial exploitation of your work, and here's word on the two versions of the SDK they are making available:

There are two versions of the source release: the Standard SDK, and the Professional SDK. The Standard SDK is what we're releasing on the web for anyone to download. This is the traditional kind of source code release people are used to. It will contain everything you need to make a mod. You can make new weapons, new gameplay rules, bots, new entities, whatever you want. You will not, however, be able to rebuild the hl.dll file.

We're also releasing the Professional SDK to folks who explicitly ask for it. Most mods I've heard of won't need it, but for those folks who want to modify rather than replace hl.dll, you will benefit from the Professional SDK, with the complete DLL source code.

It's probably helpful to give an example. If you want to create a bot (the most often requested mod by my count), you will not need the Professional SDK. This is assuming that your design for bots would not use the existing monster AI code.

The Standard SDK will be available on-line and is 775Kb of zipped source code.

The Professional SDK is about 600 MB, and will be available by CD once you have signed the enclosed Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). The NDA says you won't turn around and give the contents of the CD away, and you won't make a commercial product without talking to us about it.

Jamie at Activision sent over three new screenshots from id's upcoming Quake III Arena. Here's a page with the thumbnails, to protect tender eyes from sights they don't want to see until they play the game.

id's Anna Kang sent along word of two new MessageBoards online at the Shugashack, the Official QuakeCon99 Message Forum, and the Official QuakeCon99 Get A Ride, Need A Ride Forum. Registration for QC99 will begin this Friday at the QuakeCon 99 website.

The Adrenaline Vault News is reporting that Duke Nukem Forever will use an advanced modeling technology from Sven Technologies to enhance animations:

Multi-Resolution Geometry, and it offers something called continuous level of detail. What this does, in layman’s terms, is increase framerates and enhance the visual quality of real-time 3D scenes by drawing polygons only where needed and smoothly increasing and decreasing the resolution of polygonal objects one vertex at a time. How impressive is the technology? Impressive enough for 3D Realms to license and integrate the technology into its upcoming 3D action title Duke Nukem Forever.

Another new engine for you freeware fans...CrystalSpace version 0.13r006 beta is available for download. This version is not suggested for the casual user, as it needs to be compiled before you can use it. Lay folk can download the official release, version 0.12 from the same site. CrystalSpace takes the cake for most platforms supported, as it has compiled versions of 0.12 available for almost every platform, from BeOS, to DOS, to Rhapsody and back again. Also, to update my earlier post, Anthony "madcow" Cowley tells me that I'm in the minority, and that Heroin was tested on over 30 machines before it was released, with no problems.

Aureal has announced their latest audio chip, the Vortex AU8810 (full press release care of PR Newswire). The new processor is described as a "low-cost audio solution" and features compatibility with Motorola's Soft Modem system for telephony functionality. Like its predecessors, the Vortex AU8810 uses DirectSound 3D and A3D for positional audio support.

Over at the Gathering of Developers site, there's been a couple of updates to their oracle section, featuring two questions about 3D engines and new technology, answered by some of g.o.d.'s developers.

PlanetUnreal has word of two new screenshots showing off Epic's upcoming Unreal Tournament that were posted to UnrealTournament.net featuring the new ASMD Shockrifle. Thanks Voodoo Extreme.

Proving that it doesn't take a billion dollars to make your own game comes two new home-brew engines. The Fly3D page has version 0.62 of this free 3D engine (licensing only necessary for commercial projects). Contained within the 1.2 meg download (making it fit nicely on a floppy disk) are a Quake 2 map converter, 3D Studio import tools, a Visual C++ plugin and a bunch of game demos (including a Descent/Forsaken clone with multiplayer). Also, the Substance Abuse site (is it just me, or does that sound strange?) has the first demo version of their Heroin engine, the latest engine from Anthony "madcow" Cowley, of Madcow Engine fame. Heroin, unlike the Madcow engine, is being designed for a specific game, whose working title is "Extreme BMX." Be warned, Heroin has lots of features, but stability doesn't appear to be one of them. Of course, for an engine that was "brought to you in 2 weeks development time by 2 complete idiots" it's pretty impressive.

The Starsiege TRIBES Scripting Documentation Index has been updated with three more chapters in the scripting documentation for Starsiege TRIBES. In addition to the Callback functions detailed in the first offering, now available is the documentation on Client, Client Only, and Command functions, with the remainder still listed as "coming soon." Thanks Prodigy.

A chat with Matt is a conversation with Raven Level Designer Matt Pinkston discussing MageSlayer, Heretic II, the Heretic II EP, and Raven's upcoming Soldier of Fortune game, which is based on the magazine of the same name, and will use the Quake II engine.

There's an interview with Chris Roberts on Games on Line talking with the chairman of Digital Anvil about the game business, the Wing Commander games, and of course, the WC movie (what I really want to do is direct...). The site is in Italian, but the interview is in English (there's an Italian version too, but I assume it is the translation, and the English one is the original).

Gamers Central's MechWarrior 3 preview is now online, offering a look at MechWarrior 3, Zipper Interactive's upcoming Mech combat game. The piece offers a bunch of new screenshots.

There are seven new Homeworld screenshots on Ultimate Games showing off this upcoming cross-genre space game.

Electronic Arts is informing people that the upcoming first person adventure game System Shock 2 has been pushed back to fall from its original spring release date (thanks to The Vault Network by way of Through the Looking Glass). In other SS2 news, the Irrational Games (developers of System Shock 2) site was given a neato redesign over the weekend.

Glen Dahlgren has made his weekly update to the Wheel of Time page, with the latest status on the Unreal engine RPG, apologies for missing April Fool's Day, and a note that you can catch .08 seconds of WoT in those cool 3DFX commercials.

I haven't seen this mentioned elsewhere: The Magic Lantern Playware page has a release on the news page that describes Paul Schuytema (who left 3D Realms not too long ago as the designer on Prey) as president of the company, and their staff page (the WetWare page) calls Paul Magic Lantern's executive producer, designer, and biz-guy. Another name among the many staff listed on the page is Rich "Zdim" Carlson, recently of ION Storm's Daikatana team. Thanks Brainiac 4. There's no description of the two projects they have planned, just the titles: Wildworld, and Heavy Machines on Mars.

The MADHUD Home Page has version 1.0 of the MADHUD enhanced heads-up display for Starsiege TRIBES that offers such useful functions as a kill and death display, kill per minute ratio, Flag event notifications with Flag icons, inventory item count, automatic thanking of teammates for repairs, and much more. I played with this tonight, and it was great (though I felt a little like a weenie announcing to my team every time I made a repair, which is another feature). Highly recommended.

The HLFE page has the new version 1.2 of the Half-Life Front End, which, to clarify, serves as a front-end for Valve's Half-Life. The new release contains only a few minor changes/fixes, and word is this may be the last version of HLFE released.

3DGN Interview Thingy talks with Dave Perry, an acolyte for Shiny's upcoming Messiah about a lot of off-the-wall stuff, in true interview thingy fashion.

A new beta version of Roger Wilco, the program that allows real-time voice communication in multiplayer games over the Internet, even for modem users, has been released. The new beta extends the free demo period "to at least May 5th, 1999." Thanks Look.

A few more previews of Fox Interactive's upcoming Aliens versus Predator, word courtesy of The Aliens vs Predator Network: GameOver's AvP preview, PC Gamer Online's preview, and Games Domain's preview.

3D Gaming.Net's Heavy Gear II Preview is up offering the opportunity to see Heavy Gear II through the eyes of their report after playing with a beta of the upcoming game of giant Gear combat from Activision. The preview also offers several new screenshots.

In discussing the new Tread editor yesterday (story), I commented that the Thred editor was "long-abandoned," which turns out to be true, but only in a technical sense. GerryK and Haremking both wrote in to help clarify that a descendant of the Thred code is now a portion of the Genesis SDK, and was also used in development of some of the indoor areas in Starsiege TRIBES. Also, I had a post up about some Daikatana screenshots for a short time yesterday, that it turns out were quite old, so if you went looking at those, they didn't represent the game.

Mission Control Command Center has word on their 256 player Quake II tournament in Ontario Canada, May 21-24, 1999. According to the page, they are giving away 30 loaded PIII computers to visitors on the Internet who correctly predict the tourney winners. There are also Half-Life, Unreal, Heretic II, Quake, and even South Park tournaments planned, and they claim to be offering a total of over $100,000 in cash and prizes(!?!).

• Sharky Extreme's 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 Review.
• FullOn3D Games' Redline Review.
• GoneGold's Quick Take on Requiem: Avenging Angel.

• EH Online on Extreme Hardware is the relocated version of Hardware Therapy, the column that collects the collective wisdom and ravings of the hardcore USENET hardware crowd and condenses them into one concentrated periodical...
• QuakeFiles.Com is a new site that offers a unique approach to offering game files and patches for download using a QuakeKey, "a dynamically generated unique file identifier which is used by our proprietary search engine to catalog and track Quake, Quake2, QuakeWorld, and Q3:Arena Downloads all across the World Wide Web"...
• Developer's Corner- The Learning Forum, a non-profit central learning forum created and run by game developers, has added a "Team Profiles" section, for those lesser known, underdog and newer teams to get some exposure and keep people informed of their progress...

We had a bit of downtime yesterday, it was a hardware difficulty, nothing wrong with the server, just a full disk drive (I believe this is the cause of the couple of recent munged .plan updates), I'm having it looked at today, since it seemed to be unnaturally full (it was pretty funny, a couple of readers wrote in saying "loony broke the server"). Speaking of the loonster, he cooked up the smiley icon that will show up in your URL bar and favorites list for this site under IE5, earning him another duty as "guy who figures out cool stuff."

Image of the Day: Here's a shot of a space station in X-Wing Alliance that may just be inspired by some other game (it's on the tip of my tongue). Thanks Mister Beefy, who sent that along a while ago.

Link of the Day: Company creates vending machine pizza. LAN parties may never be the same (or the Blue Tower for that matter). Thanks Steve. That's definitely the LoD, 'cause the The Furby Hooker Network that loony dug up while looking for Barney porn is too frightening.