Next-Generation Online has posted a Q&A with Wes Eckhart, Nova Logic's producer on Delta Force 2. The questions are of a general nature, but Wes does talk about the competition a little, and there's some interesting talk about the gameplay as well. Here's an excerpt I got a kick out of, since it was something I certainly wanted in the first game:

"Another feature that's going into the game by popular demand is bullet penetration. Some Delta Force players wanted to be able to shoot enemies hiding in tents, for instance, so in DF2 bullets will go through certain structures where it makes sense. A layer of waterproofed canvas will no longer provide cover against the M4 carbine, much less a hail of slugs from the SAW."

Black & White Wire has posted the log from their chat with Lionhead's Jamie Durrant, talking about their really strange but still totally cool game Black & White. The chat touches on a number of B&W related topics, including a number of details about the multiplayer component of the game, which looks to be massive, to say the least.

Unrealism has posted a brief, hands-on preview of Hasbro Interactive's oddball Unreal engine title, Nerf Arena Blast, complete with three screenshots.

The Rogue Spear Retreat has posted an interview with Red Storm Entertainment's Greg Stelmack, talking about the measures being taken to prevent cheating in Rogue Spear, the sequel to Rainbow Six. Here's an excerpt:

"Game developers walk a fine line between letting people tweak the game and preventing cheating. The constants file caused a lot of cheating issues, so we've completely removed it for Rogue Spear. All those constants are now rolled into the executable. We've caught lots of other configuration files and made sure that the server sends them across so that everyone has the same values. I'm sure there are still some server side cheats (e.g. the server customizing one particular gun), but if you can't trust your server in a multiplayer game, you can't trust anyone. We can't eliminate those without preventing people from editing weapons or making other mods."

In their continuing coverage of games that aren't Quake, Quake2000.net has posted an interview with Jarrod Showers, animator on Raven Software's Soldier of Fortune. The interview covers Jarrod's background in the industry, GHOUL (Raven's animation system for SoF), and the status of the game, which he says is in an alpha state, and will ship in late fall (of course, these things are always subject to change).

GA-RPG has posted an interview with Christopher White of Big Rock Entertainment, the developers of N'Evaria: Keligem's Legacy, a role-playing game in development that utilizes Monolith's LithTech 2 engine.

Today is the day for completing strategy game production, on the heels of the announcements earlier today that C&C Tiberian Sun and StarFleet Command are gold, comes word on Gone Gold (where they live for this sort of news) that the US version of Braveheart, the turn-based strategy game where you fight for FREEDOM(!) has gone gold as well.

AVault is reporting (by way of a telephone interview) that John Romero has returned to designing single player maps. Up until now, Romero's role was simply as the game's designer, overseeing the production of the game, but not making any levels himself. Here's what John had to say:

“I am now involved in designing single-player maps,” Romero told us in a telephone interview this afternoon. “I get to the office around 10:00 a.m. and stay until 1:00 in the morning most days. Last night, I was here until 4:30 a.m.” Additionally, he is still involved with his supervisory role, something else that no doubt contributes to the long days during the current crunch mode.

GA-Source's Spec Ops 2 Green Berets interview is online talking with Zombie Designer John E. Williamson about gameplay in this upcoming game of squad-based tactical operations. The piece includes a new shot of the Green Berets in their desert camouflage.

The Wheel of Time™ page has been updated with the weekly Tuesday (formerly Monday) update about from Legend's upcoming Unreal-engine action title. The update talks of progress on the game, describes some recent web-based coverage of the game, and offers up no less than 20 new screenshots. Thanks Infiniti.

RSONE.COM has been updated with 15 new screenshots from Rogue Spear, Red Storm Entertainment's upcoming sequel to the Tom Clancy-inspired action & tactics title, Rainbow Six.

PC Arena's Messiah preview is up looking ahead at Shiny's upcoming third-person 3D action title, offering a bunch of screenshots.

PC Gamer Online's Prince of Persia 3D preview is up looking ahead at the third installment in the formerly side-scrolling adventures of the baggy-pantsed prince, now fleshed out into three dimensions.

You know 'em you love 'em you can't live without 'em, it's time for the the Diablo II screenshot of the week, this week intriguingly titled Act One - No. 126.

On the heels of the C&C news comes word on another RTS game (for those that like that sort of thing) going gold, as the Star Trek Starfleet Command page has word of the game going gold, saying: "Make sure to get your pre-order in so you can play the full version next week!!" Thanks Warren Schultz. While I'm here I'll mention a StarFleet Command update on PC Arena with three new shots of ships from the game.

The fine folks at Pair believe we had a hardware problem that caused the outages on the server earlier today, so the most recent interruption was for the installation of a new motherboard, so we'll see if this settles things down. Our apologies for the interruptions.

PlanetShogo has posted a fix for a server-side cheat in Monolith's Shogo: Mobile Armor Division. Rather than kick cheaters, the mod detects them and instantly kills them.

SpecForce has posted a few new screenshots from the upcoming Green Beret action and tactics game, Spec Ops II. A couple of the shots show of a little recon look at an enemy base.

Sorry, server has bounced up and down a few time this afternoon, there are currently folks busily throwing rocks at it to settle it down in the time-honored manner.

The Adrenaline Vault interviews Surreal Software's Alan Patmore talking about Surreal's upcoming dragon-riding third-person epic, Drakan: Order of the Flame, discussing the rapidly-approaching completion of work on the game.

PC Zone's Ultima Ascension Preview is up with their usual complete treatment of analysis, screenshots, and conversation, this time around offering a look back at the Ultima series, as well as some pearls straight from the bearded lips of Richard "Lord British" Garriott.

The Adrenaline Vault News has posted four new screenshots from Verant Interactive's upcoming persistent real-time strategy title Sovereign.

Dynamix' own Oz resident, Tinman, updated his .plan with more details on his new TRIBES mission type, the HeadHunters-inspired Flag Hunters. The update describes programming changes and a key-binding that can feed players more game-state information, as well as a couple of gameplay balancing tweaks he's added, including a change that makes it harder to hoard flags.

ZorWolf sends along a set of GameSpy3D Q3Test 1.08 Filter Tabs for users of the new Q3Test release and GameSpy3D, offering a separate tab for the new version, one to find free-for-all games, one for teamplay, and one to find servers running tourney mode. Also, George sends along a a PingTool Q3Test 1.08 Filter Tab for PingTool users to help zero in on servers running the latest version. As in the past, these already miniscule files are zipped to avoid upsetting your browser's delicate digestive tract, rather than for size considerations.

Saw on Doomworld that the wHeretic homepage has a new version 0.4a build 2 of this Win32 port of Raven's Doom-engine game, Heretic. The update fixes a problem with 3D sound that causes sounds to fade when using hardware sound acceleration.

A Venom Demo Update on GA-Source gives a response from the developers of the just-released playable compatibility test demo of Venom (story), an upcoming first-person shooter that uses the Vital Engine LZ. Word from the update is to set "always run" to on in the demo, to toggle the CAPS lock. They also offer commands to make the player four times stronger, and another that makes all the monsters speak Russian.

Voodoo Extreme has posted a Q&A with Irrational Games' Ken Levine, talking about System Shock 2, which recently went gold and should be showing up in stores Real Soon Now.

With my own copy of the new Q3Test 1.08 releases (story) in hand, I can pass along the notes from the what's new file. First, the file stresses "You MUST delete all previous versions of Q3TEST for the game to run properly" (with no less than six exclamation points). Here's the full scoop:

You MUST delete all previous versions of Q3TEST for the game to run properly!!!!!!

• fixed marks fading properly in fog volumes
• show weapon in fov >90, adjusting position down as needed
• update scoreboard info while at intermission
• print "waiting to play" for tourney spectators
• fixed tied rank with 0 score and spectators
• return to roaming spectator when a followed client quits or spectates
• release windows cursor when running windowed and the console is down
• log all client transitions, item pickups, and kills
• changed joystick axis to act just like arrow keys so they can be bound in the controls menu for strafing. Yes, this does remove slow walking from joystick movement, but it makes everything a lot cleaner.
• fix up PantherXL trackball support
• tournament queuing of spectators to enter the game
• track wins and losses as long as you stay on a tourney server
• spectators are now in fly mode instead of noclip, and use teleporters
• pass serverTime instead of msec for command timing, prevents timescale cheating
• fixed rcon

id Software Designer Graeme Devine updated his .plan with a mention of the new Q3Test releases (below), and word on the included consolation prize: a Sarge model you can access through the console (a console-ation prize, perhaps?):

Q3Test 1.08!!! Go bring down your favorite Internet site.

Because it's once again a full download, we've included a new model (Sarge) with this version of the test as a consolation prize. You need to select him from the console using the "model sarge" command.

As promised below, here are local copies of the new Q3Test 1.08 release. Here's the Win32 version, along with a list of mirrors, and the Mac version, again, with additional mirrors as they come in. Each file is a bit over 33 MB.

Win32 & Mac Q3Test version 1.08 are out on ftp.idsoftware.com. I'll get local copies, a list of mirrors, as well as what's new posted ASAP.

IPlayGames Interviews Greg Zeschuk talking with the president and joint CEO of BioWare in another Q&A about progress on MDK2, their upcoming sequel to the third-person game of the same name, minus the "2." MDK, of course, stands for Mildly Distinguished Kellogg.

Apache sends word of a couple of messageboard posts he's summarized on Unreal Universe that have Epic's Jack "Mek" Porter and Pancho Eekels talking about Unreal Tournament network performance.

After some recent false alarms in a couple of places, the Westwood Studios page has been updated with word that Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun is gold, and the latest edition of their RTS franchise should be in stores soon. Thanks Tom Evans.

You thought that said screenshots for a second, didn't you? ActionXtreme.com interview Matt Powers, the guy with the perfect Astronaut's name (and also the producer on Slave Zero), about Accolade's upcoming giant robot combat game.

The sixth installment in RadPipe's The Road To QuakeCon '99 is up on the QuakeCon '99 Site talks with id Software's Anna Kang (that is in the parts RadPipe didn't just make up) about QuakeCon, giving away here Doom chess set, and stuff like that.

AGN3D has posted a slimmed-down G2 RealPlayer version of the Prince of Persia 3D movie released yesterday (story) that now weighs in at a mere 2.4 MB.

Fahrenheit not so hot anymore, and new Wicked3D drivers among this morning's offerings:

• SGI cutting back key projects reports job cuts at SGI in advanced graphics division engineers, and a backing away from the once much-hyped Fahrenheit technology. Thanks Jawed Karim.
• The Wicked3D Drivers page has new a new uber-driver setup for Wicked3D Voodoo2, Wicked3D Vengeance and Wicked3D eyeSCREAM setups. Thanks Voodoo Extreme.
• Sharky Extreme's Memory Guide Part 5 is up, discussing System Timings.
• The Shrine 3d Website has new screenshots of Shrine 3d, a project to "create an engine that strays from conventional methods of rasterization and organization." Word from Joe "Platinum" Bertolami, the author, is that "this project primarily for educational purposes, and I do not expect it to reach any commercial level for at least 6 months."
• Abtons Shed has a new TweakAll 1.2 Public Beta. Thanks GameDev.net.

Amid all the optimistic reports out of the recent MacWorld Expo comes a naysayer report from GameSpot's Macworld Exposé which declares: "Problems with engineering, retail distribution and divisiveness within Apple continue to keep the company at the back of the pack for gaming. And despite words to the contrary, it seems to be getting worse."

The results of Playground 99 have been posted along with photos of the event, which attracted more than 4000 attendees (word is that Tyler, the winner of the Descent 3 competition, is heading to Vegas for the $50,000 Descent 3 Championships). The folks at Teamplay.Net point out that they hosted the entire final round of the Playground '99 TRIBES tournament, making use of their "Tournament Management Engine" (TME) to generate the tournament bracket for the 9 teams participating in the final event, and that the entire Playground '99 final TRIBES final event, all the way down to the championship match, was broadcast live with full statistics tracking.

The results of last week's boffo Test Your Game Knowledge are online, and we've reloaded the chambers in our three-round trivia revolver with three id Software inspired questions in the special QuakeCon edition of the Test Your Game Knowledge game. The new schedule for the trivia and the answers is Tuesday morning, but next week's results will go up on Wednesday in the aftermath of QuakeCon.

• CTNews reviews the Unreal Mission Pack 1, Return to Na Pali.
• 3D Alpha Hardware Station reviews DoomGL 0.8.
• A Better Mouse Surface is a BX boards review of the everglide, which does the same thing I try to do with all mouse pads: fit them onto my oddball mouse arena.

• SiN Post has posted a five map pack of Sin deathmatch maps that have been seeing a lot of action lately...
• A later update by Dynamix' Tinman to his .plan makes it clear the TRIBES mission he was working on mentioned earlier (story) called Flag Hunters is based on HeadHunters for Quake...
• UnrealEngine.com's Community Q&A: Zen Tao Interactive talks with the developers of the unusual Unreal-engine project, Extreme Wing Chun VR, "the world's first interactive "encyclopedia style" application designed to teach the fundamentals of Wing Chun Kung Fu..."
• Greedo does Half-Life in an odd development side-note in Gearbox' Randy Pitchford's .plan...

As I mentioned when loony's trouble getting properly connected to the Internet, when his connection was straightened out (as it is now), I would try to get to updating the site for the first time of each day closer to midnight, to allow for more continual posting of news through the night. Now that loony's ISDN is in, I'm trying to keep to the new schedule, we'll see how well I keep it (my apologies if out of the Blue seems more (or less even!) coherent, now that it's not being written in the middle of the night).

To follow-up on something previously reported in this space: movies.IGN.com reports the Matrix to be sold on VHS after all, starting November 26 (thanks Ant). Woah!

Link of the Day: Furniture Porn!! Thanks rufees. Nice legs on that chair, huh? Don't forget to wear your slip-cover for protection!
eBay Item of the Day: Rare Louisiana Voodoo Soil. Thanks Jonathan Cole. Work your mojo! "Its dark dark brown, and has a slight 'earthy' smell to it."