Apache sends word he's posted a message on VE sent along by EA about their plans to unveil a bit more about their upcoming Quake III-engine game, Alice, tomorrow, on the occasion of Friday the 13th:

'tis Friday 13th on the date on the wall,
And light's growing dim at the end of the hall.
The clock has expired, the windows are locked.
Now Jack is undead, and he's out of his box.

http://alice.ea.com

You visited once to my world of absurd,
Come visit again if you have half a nerve.

Redwood's QuakeCon 1999 Wrap-up is up with big Red's write-up on the proceedings, along with a bunch of photos (including one where I stood on a step and tip-toes where I was sure I'd come out taller than both Red and loony, but I just barely edged loony, if that). Stomped also is home to Paul Steed's QuakeCon 1999 Wrap-up, complete with the id Software 3D artist/modeler's account of the event, which saw him serve as mac-daddy to a bevy of booth babes. Also now online is GameGirlz - Quake Con '99 Diary as well, also illustrated with photos.

Sierra just sent along word that they're offering a bounty for TeamFortress Classic levels that will be included with Gearbox' upcoming Half-Life add-on, Opposing Force. In addition to being part of a commercial release, the level authors will earn $1,000 (from my Doom level making days I think that's about .25¢ an hour, but a thousand bucks is a thousand bucks!). Here's the deal:

Bounty Offered for New Team Fortress Classic™ Levels Three User-made Levels to be Included in Half-Life: Opposing Force™

Bellevue, WA (August 12, 1999) - Sierra Studios today announced that it is now accepting new Team Fortress Classic (TFC) levels for inclusion in Half-Life: Opposing Force (Op For), the official game expansion for Valve's award-winning 3D action thriller.

To enter, users go to WON.net and then follow the directions for submitting their TFC levels at the following URL: http://www.won.net/lounge/contests/opposingforce/. Then, a panel of judges from Valve and Gearbox Software will select three winning levels for inclusion in the official game expansion. In addition to being listed in the game credits, each of the winning level editors will earn $1,000 for their work.

"The amount of high-quality content being created for Half-Life and TFC by the mod community and other amateur developers is incredible," says Gabe Newell co-founder and managing director of Valve. "We hope this effort will help spawn the creation of even more great content and give exposure to the people creating it."

"Many of the most renowned designers started out by making mods and custom levels for popular commercial games," says Randy Pitchford, director and chief designer of Gearbox Software. "We feel it's very important to give the most talented designers from the community a chance to have their creations showcased. And, we feel this is yet another great component of Half-Life: Opposing Force."

Sort of the same report of non-news, but if you were wondering about that 1.0.1.3 Half-Life patch that was originally possibly going to be released Sunday, and then around now, HalfLife Dot Org is reporting that Jenni from Valve told them "It's looking like it won't be out for a few more days yet." So that's the story on that.

The Bot Epidemic is reporting that Rich's Project Warehouse has the release of a new Quake bot called the Sigmund Bot that plays both coop and deathmatch. The source code is also available. If you are really a fan of bots in first-person shooters, or a Duke3D fan, for that matter, you may be interested in another post they made yesterday about how to activate the undocumented bots in the 'Atomic Edition' of Duke3D.

Joel Huenink from 4D Rulers sends word that he's updated the Gore Images page with a new 24-bit color OpenGL screenshot depicting the medieval past setting from their upcoming first-person shooter, Gore.

SShock2.com has posted the chat log from last night's chat with Irrational Games' Ken Levine. Irrational Games developed System Shock 2, which is now on store shelves, and sucking up my free time.

Take Two Interactive has purchased a 19.9% (let's just call it 20, okay?) stake in Bungie Software, as reflected in this press release. Bungie is best known for their Marathon series of FPS games, the Myth series of RTS games, and of course their two products currently in development, Oni and Halo. The press release goes on to say that Take Two's Jack of All Games subsidiary (a games distributor) will have exclusive rights to four upcoming games: Oni, Halo, and two more undisclosed products.

Dynamix' Rick Overman updated his .plan with a status update on the next update for their giant robot game Starsiege. Here are the details:

Starsiege Patch 1.004 left the building this afternoon for final approval. If all goes well it could be posted as early as tomorrow, but monday might be more realistic.

This will be a simultaneous US, UK patch release.Win2000 installer patch is in the final phases of testing and should also be posted sometime next week.

Strategy Planet's Battlezone 2 Center has posted this week's Battlezone 2 shot of the week, as released by Pandemic Studios. Also of note, is that Pandemic has posted a new insider report on their site, featuring Jack Davis, the guy who takes all these screenshots (not the Mad Magazine artist), talking about how he does it.

Registration is now open for Ground Zero, the CPL event taking place here in sunny NYC (thanks Redwood). As there is a limited ammount of space, all attendees must register. The event takes place from Thursday, September 9, 1999 through Sunday, September 12, and while it isn't taking place in a hotel (as opposed to many other recent LAN parties), they will be posting a list of hotels with discounted rates at some point in the next couple of days.

IMG Magazine has posted an interview with Bungie's co-founder, and code jockey behind Halo's impressive engine, Jason Jones. The interview's a good one, as Jason answers several good questions, including ones about the engine's origin (it was supposed to be the next-generation Myth terrain system), as well as this one that helps explain why it looks so damn good:

One of the reasons it looks so good is multipass texturing. Every major object in the Halo world has at least two texture maps, and many have several more. For example, the alien hover vehicle seen in the keynote trailer has four maps, a base color map, specular map for lighting effects, a "dirt" map for the scuffs, burns and pitting that objects in a real battlefield might have, and a per-pixel reflection map for varying levels of reflectivity from shiny objects.

PlanetShogo has posted a new version of the server-side cheat protector titled Servfixr. This version corrects a problem ping reporting, as well as adding a new spectator mode.

3D Action Planet has posted a preview of Raven's Soldier of Fortune, complete with new screenshots, background on the game (including info on their mercenary consultant), info on their GHOUL modelling system, and quotes from Kenn Hoekstra.

Today's edition of the New York Times contains an article titled, "Peace and Love at the Quake Tournament" (also available on line) which talks about last weekend's QuakeCon '99 gathering. The article is a good reflection of the general feel at the event, which was full of shiny happy people. It also contains quotes from John Carmack, and mentions numerous people from the community, including Rix, Kornelia, and more.

SimHQ has posted an interview with Carl Schnurr, producer on Red Storm Entertainment's Rogue Spear (thanks Rogue Spear Retreat). Carl talks largely about the changes they've implemented to the game since it's predecessor (Rainbow Six), and the piece is illustrated with screenshots galore.

Here's some console related news for you all on this slow news day...several places are reporting (here's PSX.IGN's report) that the PlayStation 2 (or whatever it winds up being called) will ship in Japan on January 23, 2000 (that's 1-23, get it?) and retail for a price of about $390. Turok: Rage Wars has been getting a great deal of press of late, with a hands on preview popping up at IGN64, and the official site having gone live. Rage Wars, you may recall, is Acclaim's Turok game that uses a gameplay format similar to that of Quake III: Arena, or Unreal Tournament. A PC version is not planned. Acclaim also announced recently that they will in fact be making a Turok 3 for release in 2000. Currently it is planned for release on the N64, with no word on a PC or Dreamcast version as of yet. Lastly, Acclaim's Shadow Man (which recently went gold for the N64 and PC) will be ported to the Dreamcast, as reflected in this Next-Generation Online story.

Following up on the "OSA" character details that were released a few days back (story), EA has sent out a press release that details the "Navy" character from the game. System Shock 2 has shipped, and is in store shelves now.

CNET Gamecenter's Drakan Order of the Flame Game Grabs has some new screenshots from Surreal and Psygnosis' third-person dragon-riding action game, due in stores next week (the 20th).

Sega Elevates Kezuka to Top Post of North American Operations is a press release saying that "Sega® of America, Inc. announced this afternoon that Toshiro Kezuka has been named vice-chairman and chief operating officer of the company, effective immediately. Kezuka succeeds Bernard Stolar. Effective Aug. 11, 1999, Bernard Stolar is no longer with Sega of America, Inc. It is Sega's policy not to comment on personnel decisions." Sega, Stolar Split reports Next-Generation Online in their story on the subject, discussing the shakeup that removes the architect of the Dreamcast launch (and the launch of the PlayStation) has been replaced less than one month before the Dreamcast's launch.

Gamecenter's GenCon '99 Wrap-Up gives their retrospective on this past weekend's gaming festivities in Milwaukee, WI. Also, the Glide Underground's GenCon report covers the event on a day-by-day basis. In the intro to the GC piece they point out that a mere 162 fans attended the first GenCon Game Fair over 30 years ago, and now it's North America's single largest gaming convention.

To celebrate their grand opening, Head Trauma, dedicated to hitting you upside the head with news and goodies related to Remedy Entertainment's upcoming Max Payne, has posted a pair of new screenshots from this upcoming John Woo-inspired third-person action thriller.

MacGamer's Ledge and World Without Borders are holding an online chat session this evening with Epic Games' Cliff Bleszinski, currently hard at work on Unreal Tournament. The chat is at 7:00 PM Pacific/10:00 PM Eastern. You must register beforehand for a free login/password and are warned to try to arrive early, since the session may completely fill up.

The Hive interviews John E. Williamson of Zombie Studios, talking with he co-producer/designer of SpecOps 2: Green Berets about progress on this sequel their seminal tactical shooter.

MGON's QuakeCon '99 coverage is up with pictures, descriptions, and accounts of the festivities at this year's Texas LAN extravaganza.

• Wired News reports Logitech announced Tuesday it will release a US$99 mouse using "FEELit," a technology to add tactile feeling to onscreen mouse movement. Thanks BaM.
• Sharky Extreme's Weekly CPU Prices have been updated. Thanks Phil Hall.
• A3D Download Drivers page has new NT vortex drivers and Vortex 2 drivers. Thanks Syncope.
• Frank's Game Gear Quake III Benchmarks show performance running Mac Quake III 1.08 with "the fastest available Mac," the B&W G3 450.

In this week's MailBag we have... last week's MailBag, which just never got posted until now in the chaos surrounding QuakeCon. In our old & new collection of epistles we find the real dirt on the fish-eye effect and HALO; scholarly analyses of an over-used cliche, an over-rated novel, and an over-hyped movie; folks terribly unimpressed by doves and third-person games, and folks terribly impressed with The Blue's News Effect and "Large & Realistic Anuses" (as I think it's safe to say any normal person would be). All that and more, if you can believe it, await in this week's MailBag.

3d Wars Diamond Viper 770 Giveaway is underway, giving away one of these TNT2-Ultra cards. You can enter once a day all week for the drawing.

• 3DHardware.nets' 3X Budget Sound Card Roundup looks at "Three very low cost, but not at all that low-performing sound cards, all for around twenty bucks."
• Planet RIVA reviews the Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor 32.

• Cached interviews FYM-Sicko talking to someone they say is one of the best Unreal players going. A few demos are included...
• SSI Beta Test Central has word getting in on the upcoming beta testing Close Combat IV. Thanks BetaNews.

The way loony talks about the System Shock 2 demo, I am worried that when the full game shows up, I might have to send him off to rehab, but as long as he steers clear of that Everquest (video crack), I guess he'll be okay. Relating to yesterday's OotB, today looks to be Ritual's third birthday, so happy anniversary to all you ritual killers, glad to see you're out of your terrible twos.

Link of the Day: Kansas Board Votes To Bar Evolution From Classroom. Thanks Damion Schubert. That sound you hear is Clarence Darrow spinning in his grave.
Bonus Link: Drowned man awakens in Alexandria morgue. More real news of the day. Thanks Drews (first of many to send this one).

3DFiles has posted a new patch for the American version of Hidden & Dangerous. This patch brings it up to version 1.1, and has a whole bunch of changes, including fixes to the sniper mode, improved latency issues, and more.

Power Gamerz has posted a Q&A with Unreal designer, Jazz Jackrabbit trainer, and guidance counselor Cliff Bleszinski, talking about the future of 3D engines, upcoming games, and of course, Britney Spears.

Arena Universe has posted a Q&A session with everyone's favorite Quake III: Arena poster boy and 3D modeller Paul Steed, talking about those things Paul loves to talk about: women, making models, and women.

Dynamix' Tinman updated his .plan with word that he's released his mod for Starsiege: TRIBES, called Hunters. It's available for download now over at TRIBESPlayers.com, and includes eight new maps to go along with it. Also released is Eric Lanz' new mod Rabbit, a server side only mod that's described as "a classic game of smear the guy with the red triangle on his head".

The Stratos Group has posted a comprehensive guide to System Shock 2 (which is on store shelves now, according to numerous reports we've received). The guide covers almost all of the weapons (still a work in progress), all of the psi powers, and a whole lot more. It's available in flat HTML format, or in Adobe Acrobat PDF format for offline reading.

SpecForce.net has posted two new screenshots from Zombie's upcoming tactical shooter Spec Ops II: Green Berets.

3DRealms' George Broussard updated his .plan this evening with word that they're looking to hire a new programmer to work on Duke Nukem Forever (that's the game, not the length of time expected for the position). Here's just a teeny bit of this massive .plan update:

We're looking to add a 3rd programmer to the team to help Chris and Nick with the workload. This will be a variety packed position, and we'll discuss the exact tasks to be done during the interview. We'll be updating the "Get Hired" section on our web site ASAP, but for now, here are the relevant details, in order of preference.

MAJOR REQUIREMENTS (In order or preference)

* Professional experience with the Unreal engine preferred. If you are working on an Unreal engine game now, contact us. I bet we can work something out. You'd be surprised how flexible we are. Even if you're happy where you are you owe it to yourself to consider the option. After all, what could look better on your resume than Duke Nukem Forever, a sure blockbuster and easily one of the most anticipated games in production.

* Professional experience on a major 3D engine, or having worked on an FPS game before.

* User Community experience, working on killer moods for Unreal, Quake, Half-Life,or other major games. The more popular the mod the better. If you're the new up and comer, give us a shout.

Stomped's official Aliens vs. Predator site has gone live, and features (in addition to one genuinely stylin' interface) all kinds of information about the game, message boards, and even a game server listing (although as of this writing there were none listed). Thanks Redwood for the tip.

NGNetwork has posted an interview with Raven's Kenn Hoekstra, talking about their Quake II engine title Soldier of Fortune (which was demonstrated at last weekend's QuakeCon). Amongst the topics covered are GHOUL (SoF's special modelling system), and the multiplayer options they're working on, including the revelation that they're going to try to ship with Capture the Flag support.

The Unreal Technology Page has undergone an update, by way of a True-Type Font Importing Tutorial by Epic's Jack Porter (thanks PlanetUnreal). Apparently Unreal mod makers can use any True Type font in their mods (although it should be pointed out that many popular fonts are not public domain, and therfore cannot be freely distributed). Here are the details:

The TTF importer allows you to convert a Windows true-type font of a particular size into an Unreal font which you can then use to draw in-game text. The Unreal engine now has support for rendering anti-aliased fonts, and the TTF importer allows you to import the anti-aliasing from a Windows font.

Unreal has had the ability to import true-type fonts for use in-game since version 224, although there was a bug in the 224 font importer code which meant all the fonts you imported ended up as MS Sans Serif. Be sure you're using Unreal 225f or later, or you may have problems.

With TRIBESCon only three days away, Datumplane::Starsiege has posted seventeen things those planning on attending should make sure they take care of before showing up. Amongst them are such notables as "back up your registry" and "bring headphones". The list is good for any LAN party, so I recommend checking it out whether you're planning on attending TRIBESCon or not.

Kingpin guide on Captured.com that tries to teach you how to make crime pay when playing Xatrix' Quake II-engine game of gangsta-living.

AGN's QuakeCon '99 Coverage is up with AGN's Josh Krane's overview, heavily illustrated with photos (including a shot of the winner (loony) and loser (Bobbi) of loony and his sister's deathmatch. Also, QuakeCon 99 Tidbits on BetaBites giving Lockup's personal impressions of the event along with several photographs. Also, The Flagship Engineering Room's QuakeCon wrap-up is online as well, with their own recap of the event scatted across the front page of their site. Finally, Team Abuse's QuakeCon impressions and photos are up as well.

Chess king Tom Hall has posted a new installment to his developer's diary over at Anachronox.com (thanks, as usual, to ION's Daily Informant). To find it, hit "Game Information" followed by "Design Diary" on the funky interface. This installment has Tom ranting about how cool the interface, cinematics, music, and well, everything about Anachronox is.

Version Mk.Ia of Roger Wilco, the real-time voice communication shareware program that works with Starsiege: TRIBES and Quake amongst other games, has been released. This version has a slew of fixes and enhancements - for specific features, check out the official Roger Wilco site.

According to FGN Online, "a member of the staff at Surreal Software" has confirmed that the level editor for Drakan will be available for download soon after it hits store shelves. The game has already gone gold, and should be popping up near you Real Soon Now.

The Pulpit has posted an interview with Ryan "Ridah" Feltrin of Xatrix, talking about the K7, various 3D chipsets and other hardware issues, and how they relate to Kingpin (thanks Billy).

Following up on their Q3Test 2 strategy guide, Quake 3 Source has posted their guide to Q3Test 1, with a slew of strategies for the first map in Q3Test.

System Shock 2 has shipped to stores, as reflected in this press release that EA has been sending out. Look for it on shelves near you within the next couple of days.

Xatrix' Ryan "Ridah" Feltrin updated his .plan with details on how the new download code that was implemented into Kingpin works. Here's what he had to say:

...what I did was break the file being sent, into "chunks" of 1024 bytes. This way the client can keep a record of which "chunks" it has recieved, giving it the ability to have multiple pending requests for data at once.Anyway, that's the basic principle. Some obstacles here were finding the right balance between sending too many requests, and not sending enough. This was handled by adjusting the maximum number of pending requests with the current RATE setting, which worked out pretty well, and didn't involve a lot of effort.

It was an interesting experiment, and one I'm happy to say was a reasonable success. I still have one issue involving duplicate chunks being recieved, which doesn't cause any harm other than wasting some bandwidth. I think it has to do with requests timing out on the client before the server has had a chance to send it. Nothing major, but something I'll no doubt make sure gets cleared up before our next game ships. :)

There are some new TRIBES Extreme screenshots on the Tribes Players site. Thanks Datumplane::Starsiege. TRIBES Extreme is an upcoming version of Starsiege TRIBES that will offer enhanced single-player capabilities.

Gamecenter's: QuakeCon 99 a Hit is a recounting by our old pal crash, now a high-falooting game journalist, and all . The story includes a detailed recounting of the event, and is illustrated with several photos. Also, QuakeCity's QuakeCon 99 Coverage offers a discussion of Curved Surfaces in Q3A based on the Workshop by Paul Jaquays.

There are six new exclusive Gothic screenshots on Glide Underground showing off gameplay from this upcoming action/RPG from Piranha-Bytes.

Here's a reminder of the two chat sessions later today: Inside Mac Games Chat is planning a live online chat session with Bungie's Brent Pease to talk about progress on Bungie's upcoming third-person fighting game, Oni. The session is tonight at 10:00 PM Eastern (7:00 Pacific). To join visit the page using a Java-capable browser. Also, with tomorrow the release date of the first-person RPG sequel, System Shock 2, Irrational Games' Ken Levine is hosting a live chat at 9:00 PM EDT on the IRC server polaris.starchat.net in #system`shock`2.

The King of the Server page has a new version 3.0 of the King of the Server mod for Quake II. KOTS is the deathmatch mod that saves your stats, inventory, ammo, armor, weapons, and health across games, maps, and servers. The point-release is anticipation of their upcoming Armory dealie, which will let you stock up on ammo, armor, weapons, heal yourself, and "buy" items from a website to be used in your next KOTS game. Stay tuned for more on that (including its debut) next week.

The CIDE page has a new version 1.4 of this teamplay mod for Unreal. New to this release is the ability to pick up corpses and use them as shields (woah!), a fire extinguisher, signal distortion device, grenades for the Marine's rifle, binoculars, AntiTank Cannon, Arm Mounted Machine Gun, Dragon Deflector Device and combination ammo boxes.

PlanetStarSiege has posted an uber-set of GameSpy tabs for Starsiege TRIBES that can now search out no less than 23 mods and mission types.

Club-i - Half Life TFC Festival '99 has word on a LAN Party across North America on August 21, 1999 that will accommodate 300 People in locations in five different cities.

• Glide Underground previews Wartorn describing it as the "first ever 3D RTS Tournament game" (like an RTS Q3A or UT). The preview features some exclusive screenshots...
• There's a Starfleet Command Chat Log on Strategy Planet...
• Exxtreme3D interviews Gabriel Knight 3's Jane Jensen...
• There are a couple more new Slave Zero screenshots on 3D Action Planet...

I was tooling through the archives and found that a year ago marks the appearance of an article called Return to Low Res that offered the theory that games might start incorporating lower-resolution textures to create a better overall effect. That article sparked no small debate at the time, and thought it would be interesting for those interested in the discussion at the time to be reminded of it, since the answer to which way this trend has gone since then is pretty clear (perhaps due to the high-resolution textures). Also certainly worthy of note, it was right around now in 1996 that a bunch of shakeups in the gaming industry occurred, including the departure of several 3D Realms employees, and the storied parting of the ways for The Romero and id Software that resulted in the formation of Ritual and ION Storm (at the time Hipnotic and Dream Design). This ends the history lesson for the day.

Link of the Day: NASA - Eclipse 99 for today's Total Solar Eclipse (just don't look directly at your monitor). Thanks Ryan.