Archived News:
Datumplane::Starsiege is helping keep the recent
string of Q&A's with members of the TRIBES development team going by posting a short
Q&A with Mark Frohnmayer, lead programmer on Tribes and TRIBES 2 with more detail
on changes to TRIBES OpenGL support.
VideoLogic announces Neon 250
pricing and shipping date is the announcement about the long awaited PowerVRSG
technology, giving an estimated street price of £106 (excluding VAT. UK) / $175 (US), and
gives this word on availability: "Customers worldwide will be able to purchase Neon
250 from retailers and mail order companies as well as direct from VideoLogic online at www.videologic.com from mid–August 1999. Thanks
Beyond 3D.
GA-Source's
MDK2 Screenshots is a collection of no less than nine new shots from Bioware's
upcoming MDK2.
New Hercules TNT/TNT2 drivers among this evening's offerings:
There's a Ken Levine Interview on
Through the Looking Glass briefly talking to the lead designer on System Shock 2 about
the game, mostly eliciting "no-comment" type answers.
The Ninja Quake site has a new release of this TC
that adds ninja combat to classic Quake called the Ninja Quake Special Edition. what's so
special? A new special fire for the shuriken, a change to the the quad, some new levels,
new sounds, and more.
Dynamix' Nels Bruckner updated his .plan with more on TRIBES OpenGL support, talking about OGL performance improvements and solutions for some recently discovered exploits that will go into an upcoming version 1.6:
Yes, as many of you already know we have decided to take the plunge and do some
significant work on our OpenGL code for Tribes 1. Waiting for driver writers to support
our needs was getting pretty rediculous so for the last few weeks we've been doing things
the hard way and writing around the limitations of the current drivers. It is definetly
not the optimal way to approach the problem... but we are seeing some nice performance
increases. Hopefully we will shortly have a version 1.6 of Tribes that (finally) runs
acceptably in OpenGL on most cards We will also be addressing a couple of recently
revealed exploits.
Beyond3D has posted
four screenshots of Quake 3 running at 1152x864 with all the trimmings on the
PowerVR250 based Neon 250 board. The massive screenshots are also available
in their original TGA file format for people with nice Internet connections
that want the full experience.
SShock2.com has posted a ton of new info
about System Shock 2 that comes to them by way of team members' posts to their
forums. Topics include the lack of a Mac OS port, the way mouselook functions,
captioning, co-op play, and lots more.
GameSpot
has posted a news story where they are reporting that Alienware has no plans
to import and sell the Canopus Spectra 5400 TNT 2 card (thanks Redwood).
They cite costs, saying that, "Canopus is simply asking too much for the
5400. To break even, we'd have to sell the cards for around US$330."
GASource
has posted a Q&A with Victor DeLeon, the project lead on the Virtual Reality
Notre Dame Project, an attempt to make a fully accurate 3D model of the Notre
Dame Cathedral using the Unreal engine. Here's a better description from the
article, which also has two new screenshots: The VRND project is an experiential, educational tool unlike
any other to date. It's a piece of real-time art that people can aimlessly wander
within while absorbing information in a very subconscious, inspirational kind
of way- very much like what the original architects of the cathedral tried to
invoke. It's so realistic- you can really get a feel of the place after you've
been walking around in it a few minutes. Initially, the VRND Project was conceived
to generate cultural awareness and promote historical preservation of the 900+
year-old French cathedral. Since it's original concept last year, it has evolved
to become so much more.
Just a day after their announcement that they're in the process of being acquired (by S3), Diamond Multimedia has announced that they are spinning off their music division into a wholly owned-subsidiary. According to Wired News, this new company will develop a new version of the Rio MP3 player, and directly tie their RioPort website into an Internet music hub for legally downloadable music.
PlanetStarSiege has posted part two of their interview
with Tim "Slacker" Gift from Dynamix. This segment of their Q&A focuses on
OpenGL issues, video-game violence, and other general topics. They're not done with this
one yet, as they promise even more with Tim in a final installment next month (not
tomorrow, as I originally wrote).
Here's an announcement from Valve about the release of the new dedicated Half-Life server
(I ganked this from Stomped since I can't find my
copy--my Eudora has been relentlessly eating mail again lately):
We've completed our testing of the latest version of our Win32 server and it is
now posted on WON.net.
This new server is backward-compatible with the existing Half-Life client codebase, so
players will be able to connect and play on your server immediately after you upgrade.
In this new version:
- All known cheats/exploits are fixed.
- Running hlds + from the command line will heartbeat to the WON master server.
There are two files on the WON server:
1) Hlserver.exe (~80 MB) -- This is the full download of the latest version of the Win32
server. This includes all the files necessary to run a Team Fortress Classic or Half-Life
server.
http://www.won.net/scripts/download.pl?url=http://ftp.won.net/pub/half-life/hlserver.EXE
2) Hlserver10101012.exe (~500k) -- This is the update to the Primary Server Package that
will upgrade you from the previous update from WON (hlserver10011002.exe).
http://www.won.net/scripts/download.pl?url=http://ftp.won.net/pub/half-life/hlserver10101012.EXE
Broadband gets
closer to the home reports ZDNet on the approval of the G-Lite modem standard, which
they say could slice DSL deployment times by a third (which could mean loony's DSL line
could be in before the turn of the century).
Gamecenter's Star Trek Deep
Space Nine The Fallen sneak peek is up showing off this upcoming action/adventure in
the Star Trek universe that uses the Unreal engine with a bunch of "game grabs"
(screenshots here on earth). Thanks Apache.
A
report on Maximum PC from PC Expo talks of a showing of Quake III Arena running on a
BeOS system on the show floor on Tuesday using a dual Pentium III box with a Voodoo3.
Thanks Salty_Dawg. According to the report, "BeOS officials weren't sure when the
port would be released but believed it would be released soon after the other versions are
released. Quake III is due out the second half of this year." Additionally,
the article reports that plans are in the works for Be ports of SimCity 3000, Quake
II, and Civilization. The report describes "visual artifacts" as still present on the BeQ3 demo, and offers a photo of the monitor running the game, but that just shows the main menu.
The bleem! website has a new demo version of this
PlayStation emulator for the PC. The new demo, which is based on the latest bleem beta,
fixes the bug that caused GT to stop at NOTICE screen on Win95, adds speed limiter
adjustments, and Final Fantasy 8 Compatibility. The demo still includes Colored MDEC but
not Memory Cards, Sound, or Direct3D Acceleration. Thanks Billy "Bleem" Wilson.
There are three new shots showing off Venom, an upcoming first-person shooter on Killjoy's. Also, Billy has two more screenshots from The Whole Experience's upcoming
shooter, Experience, on Voodoo Extreme.
The newly opened 3DGameGeek interviews
Billy Zelsnack, talking to the one-time 3D Realms and Rebel Boat Rocker programmer about what he's up to since the dissolution of RBR, since he is one of the few ex-RBR members to not make the transition to Gearbox software (currently working on the Half-Life OpFor add-on). It's an interesting read, which talks frankly about Billy's feelings about what Gearbox is currently up to. Here's a small quote with a bit on what caused EA to pull the plug on Prax War, the project RBR was working on when the end came:
So when quake3 became available, they had an engine for their internal projects
and cut their losses with praxwar. The lack of mainstream press made it easy for them to
cancel quietly, in fact Praxwar never even was on the ea page. Something I always found
odd considering that the game seemed to have had quite a large community presence.
The BattleCruiser website has a new Version 2.08
Beta 6 Win32 binary for BattleCruiser 3000 AD. The patch requires the DOS BC3K v2.08 Beta
6, and while the beta runs in windowed mode (said to be easier to debug) the final version
will be full screen. Word on the page is that Derek plans on releasing the BC3KAD source
code "sometime in the future." Also new on the site is an open letter responding to a recent
negative review on CGO ( story).
As George Carlin used to say "check his calendar," I managed to mess up a pretty
simple thing, the calendar, in commenting on the Athlon Press Release yesterday ( story) saying that the promised third quarter availability of systems
meant they wouldn't be available right away, when Conan Ford writes in quite correctly
pointing out that Q3 begins at the beginning of July, less than a week away (I was
carelessly thinking of seasons, and how far off Fall is). Sorry about any
confusion that caused.
- The I-War - Independence War demo
downloads page offers an opportunity to win a Voodoo3 accelerator (you don't even need
to download the demo). Thanks GA-Source.
- Gauging the early returns, loony says this week's
game trivia contest is shaping up as our toughest yet, which means correct answers are
that much more likely to win the grand prize (so why don't you head on over and take a
crack at it when the chance arises).
More follow-up on that MetaSpy dealie mentioned the other day, I've received a few similar
links, one of the few that it's easy to verify is legit is the Excite Search Voyeur, which requires Java, and
provides a scrolling ticker showing search queries entered into Excite (eXcite?)
more-or-less in real time. Thanks Cadred. Sure enough, it turns out that the real entries
are just as frightening than the made up ones, if not more so.
Link of the Day: Denteco Tongue
Cleaner. As Cuban, who sent the link along, points out, "You can't make this
stuff up."
The tech news just keeps on rollin' in, don't it?
AMD - News Release #9980 gives the
official announcement of the eagerly anticipated shipments of their Athlon processor (the
CPU formerly known as the K7), calling it the WORLD'S FASTEST x86
MICROPROCESSOR. Thanks Superfly. Additionally, an Athlon Frequently Asked Questions page
is online with all the K7 skinny. Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
SUNNYVALE, CA--JUNE 23, 1999--AMD today announced that it has commenced
shipments of its new seventh-generation microprocessor, the AMD Athlon™ processor, to
computer manufacturers. Formerly code-named the AMD-K7 processor, the AMD Athlon processor
is initially available in speed grades of 600, 550, and 500 MHz.
"For the first time in the history of the computer industry, AMD leads the
competition in delivering an entirely new generation of processors that offers not just
higher clock speeds, but higher performance and processing capabilities clock-for-clock
based on a more advanced architectural design," said W.J. Sanders III, chairman and
chief executive officer of AMD. "This announcement is truly a watershed for AMD and
the entire industry because it heralds new choices based on superior processor technology
for system platforms in the enterprise space."
The announcement goes on to describe pricing and availablity:
AMD Athlon™ Processor Pricing and Availability
The 600-MHz AMD Athlon processor is priced at $699, the 550-MHz AMD Athlon is priced at
$479, and the 500-MHz AMD Athlon is priced at $324, each in 1,000-unit quantities.
End-user systems based on the AMD Athlon processor are planned to be available in Q3.
PC Gamer Online previews Half-Life:
Opposing Force looking at Gearbox Software's official add-on for Half-Life, currently
under construction. The article gives a good rundown on what to expect from OpFor, and
offers up some new screenshots, as well.
The ION Storm website has word of a new Designer
Diary from Tom Hall up on Anachronox.com, giving
the madman at the helm of the game a chance to talk about progress on this upcoming Quake
II-engine RPG.
Gamers Central's
Reborn First Look gives an early impression of this upcoming first-person shooter from
Nerve Lab Software in a preview featuring a handful of screenshots.
PCGamer Online has posted
a preview of Red Storm's sequel to Rainbow Six, Rogue Spear, complete with a
number of screenshots of people getting shot.
GameSpot has
previewed Sinistar Unleashed, the 3D remake of the old arcade shooter, with a handful of new screenshots to boot (thanks Billy " archaic"
Wilson).
AVault
has contacted Aureal's Bob Safir to comment on the S3/Diamond Multimedia merger,
and the company says that things are "business as usual." He also
hinted at something else by saying, "while we hope the merger with S3 does
well for Diamond, it does not affect plans already in motion to provide Vortex2
to new outlets."AVault is taking this (and other comments) to suggest a
possible retail move for Aureal, similar to what 3dfx did with their acquisition
of STB.
Oh boy! It's time for this week's Mail
Bag. In this week's roundup: my stupidity, more on antidisestablishmentarianism,
KDE, wacky Mac dealers, id's secretary, and of course...more. So hop
over and check it out.
GA-Source's
System Shock 2 Contest Winner Screenshot shows how the winning entry in Looking Glass Studios' recent "Get Killed by Shodan" contest is portrayed. The winner, Brian
Norris of St. Louis, MO, gets to help advance the plot in Looking Glass' upcoming System Shock 2 as his name and likeness will represent a dead crewman (a.k.a. Ensign
Redshirt).
The Adrenaline
Vault News has posted "The Day After: S3 Incorporated Interview" with more
post-mortem about S3's announced acquisition of Diamond Multimedia ( story).
AVault
has interviewed Paul Crossley, PR manager at S3 about their recent acquisition
of Diamond Multimedia ( story). Amongst the questions answered is this key one that has
been on everyone's mind since the announcement: Will this purchase
affect Diamond's current line of graphics accelerators? Specifically, will Diamond
continue to sell and support cards based on other companies' chipsets, such
as NVIDIA?
This will not affect Diamond's current line of graphics accelerators as
we look to sustain an ongoing relationship with suppliers such as NVIDIA. If
you analyze at Diamond's selection of graphics products, they chose NVIDIA for
the high-end mainstream and S3 for the volume mainstream. Currently, both lines
are doing quite well in their respective segments.
- Part one of the Ars
Technica Report from PC Expo '99 is online.
- I've gotten enough emails saying these Diamond Multimedia
Viper V770 drivers are new, in spite of being dated 6/3/99 to believe they in fact,
are. Thanks RyanF, and all the others who've clued me in on this.
- P3D has posted some links for the latest and
greatest version v3.02.02 Canopus Spectra series drivers from the Canopus Japanese site if
you're feeling cutting edge.
- Entech Taiwan has posted a new version 2.51 of the PowerStrip uber-video card/monitor control
utility. Thanks GameDev.net.
- Also new from Entech Taiwan is an EnergySaver
for Windows NT. Thanks again GameDev.net.
- RIVA Station has a couple of
different posts up with information to help you tell the difference between TNT2 and a
TNT2-Ultra based accelerators (besides the box label, of course).
- Speedy 3D's texture
resolution article talks about its impact on visual quality, saying "Texture
resolution in my opinion is a far more noticeable feature, then say 32bit color is over
16bit color."
- HardOCP has posted a review of an air-cooled (no
water needed) Peltier cooler for CPU refrigeration.
The "first"
Screenshots From OverDrive on GA-Source give a look at OverDrive (working title), an
auto combat game that they say is best "described as Carmageddon meets Quake with a
touch of the Godfather."
Gamers'
Crypt interviews John Heinecke of Nihilistic Software talking about Nihilistic's
upcoming action/role-playing game, Vampire: The Masquerade, based on the pen-and-paper
horror RPG from White Wolf.
The inevitable follow-up SWAT 3 Screenshot
is up on GA-Source, on the heels of GA-Source's
SWAT 3 interview from the other day (which has a bunch of screenshots as well),
talking with Producer Rod Fung and AI Programmer John Anderson about this upcoming
tactical simulation.
A test demo of Longbow Digital Arts' 3D tank deathmatch game Tread Marks has been released, and is available for download over on 3DFiles.
This is just a test demo, so bear in mind that everything is subject to change.
There are four new
Starlancer screenshots on Before It's Done showing off action from Microsoft/Digital
Anvil's upcoming space shooter.
The official Amen The Awakening FAQ has been updated, the only change is the release date has been added ("early 2000, or when it's done"). Also, a few Qs and their corresponding As have been added to the official Activision Heavy Gear II FAQ. Finally, rounding out all this FAQing fun, the unofficial Requiem FAQ has been updated as well, jumping all the way from version 0.666 to version 0.779. Thanks Frans at 3D Action Gamers for all of those.
Despite the fact that it's still without a publisher, the soon-to-be-released
(hopefully) title Mortyr apparently has a few follow-up projects in the works.
Mortyr.net is reporting that
work is being started on Mortyr++ (an expansion pack), Mortyr 2 (which reportedly
will have curved surfaces, bump mapping and other technological feats), and
yes...even Mortyr for the GameBoy Color.
Yep, it's yet another Starsiege: TRIBES Q&A. This time it's on PlanetStarsiege,
and it's with Tim "Slacker" Gift. Part one of the Q&A (part two
will be posted tomorrow) talks about their E3 reception, and some cool stuff
about TRIBES 2. Here's an excerpt: No, didn't see anything that made
me re-think the direction we're taking with our engine (our new interior code
may include what might be considered portals, but it won't be a "Portal"
engine). I think we already have a lot of interesting technology, which we'll
continue to develop, what we don't have is an ear catching name for it :) We
will also be including the basic stuff to keep up with hardware, so there will
be 32 bit color, higher poly counts, environment & bump mapping, higher
res textures, etc.
PC.IGN.COM interviews Scott
"CornBoy!" Youngblood talking about progress on Starsiege TRIBES 2. The
following question and answer give a feel for what improvements are planned for those
times when you haven't got multiple players available for multiplayer:
IGNPC: Are you going to be adding any more single player features to the
sequel?
SY: We will be providing more robust single player training missions with the release of
Tribes 2. In addition we are putting extensive work into 'bot' AI to allow players to
experience the 'team' aspect of Tribes offline. Our goal with the AI is to allow a player
to play with a team AI players against an entire team of opposing Ai players. We have two
full time programmers who are focusing solely on the AI aspect of the game. It is coming
along quite nicely.
A
Rick Overman .plan update gives word from the Director and Lead Programmer of Starsiege
about progress on OpenGL support for both Starsiege TRIBES and Starsiege, as well as a
mention of a little known telnet feature in both games: Thanks Datumplane::Starsiege. Here's the poop:
As a secondary project we have been working on additional OpenGL engine changes
for Starsiege and Tribes. The rendering pipeline is fairly optimal as of Starsiege patch
v1.002 but we are still not seeing the FPS we should be because of poorly written drivers.
The only option remaining to us is to take as much texture management responsibilities
from the driver as possible. This is a good and bad thing. The good is that it looks like
we'll get a generous FPS boost by micro-managing textures. The bad is there is no reason
we should have to do this. Most the hardware available today can handle many times over
the textures we typically download but the drivers just cannot keep up. It's sad, there is
a lot of great silicon out there that will never live up to it's potential. So
micro-managing textures will compensate for driver inadequacies but will eliminate the
possibility of ever really being able to push the cards to their limit.
So why all this rambling about drivers all of a sudden? Because I'm thinking of holding
onto patch v1.004 for another week or so and rolling in the OpenGL engine changes now
rather than doing yet another patch. v1.003 seems very solid and adding the OpenGL changes
to v1.004 will make it a nice package for everyone to look forward to.
Starsiege Telnet! So there is a little undocumented feature in Starsiege (and Tribes) that
many of you may be very interested in. Starsiege supports remote telnet sessions. To
enable telnet just add the following lines to your autoexec.cs it's that simple.
$telnetPort = 15000; // port number
$telnetPassword = mypass; // password
You can use this for a variety of things: Remote Administration, write your own ladder
monitoring tools or even extend Starsiege in ways I've never considered. Have fun if you
come up with a unique application send me some mail and let me know.
More Linux and Windows drivers from Creative Labs and more follow-up on S3 & Diamond
kick off this morning's tech bits:
Thresh's FiringSquad previews
System Shock 2 looking at the sequel to this classic sci-fi RP, describing what to
expect from the gameplay and environments, and touching on multiplayer, which will be
included, albeit cooperative (though I've never seen a co-op game yet that we couldn't
turn into a deathmatch ![=]](/miscimages/smiley4.gif) ).
Next-Generation Online's
Masquerade Multiplay talks with Nihilistic's Ray Gresko about how multiplayer play
will be handled in Vampire: the Masquerade - Redemption, quoting Ray as saying:
"Since we are introducing an entirely new way of playing multiplayer RPGs, we spend a
lot of time making sure this mode of play has all the functionality and expandability that
it needs." Word in the article is that the game is 60% complete.
Speaking of RPG's GamePen
previews Darkstone looking ahead at this action/RPG saying "Darkstone is a game
that is obviously influenced by Diablo and that is not a bad thing." Thanks Frans at 3D Action Gamers.
The
Adrenaline Vault Previews Shadow Man looking at this Voodoo-inspired third-person
action game in the works from Acclaim Entertainment based on the comic of the same name.
The RealCTF page has build 50 of
RealCTF 1.0, the capture the flag mod for Unreal. The new release offers new player
prediction tweaks for the Tractor Beam (Grapple) and various other fixes.
The talk about The Pirates of Silicon Valley inspired quite a few readers (as
well as loony) to bring up the Triumph
of the Nerds The Transcripts which provide the words from a PBS documentary on the
same subject (the early days of PC development) that offered a more realistic portrayal of
those events. The transcripts can provide an interesting insight into which portions of
the TNT movie were rooted in reality, which parts were exaggerations or adaptations of
actual events, as well as more about the other characters involved. BTW, PC Magazine's Pirates of Silicon
Valley write-up is by John C. Dvorak (thanks Brett) with some interesting theories
about the motivation behind this movie.
Holy cow! Bawls Bottle Road Trip is a
tour of the world's largest Bawls bottle, at 22 feet long (of course, a 12 oz. bottle
would also qualify as world's biggest, since the normal 10 oz Bawls bottles look like they should
be served on airlines). Thanks Jeff. Next stop is right here in the Big Apple! Whee!
Link of the Day: Things that
geeks should know about the Real World.
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