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Archived News:
Following up on S3's Savage 2000 chipset (see below) comes Sharky
Extreme's full look at the Savage 2000 and its beefier older brother the
Savage 2000+. They've also got an S3 roadmap that outlines their plans for releasing
the Savage 2K, complete with hints dropped to "Project X" S3's chipset
following the Savage 2K (or a really bad Matthew Broderick movie...your call).
Savage Daily News has posted a press release
from S3 announcing the Savage 2000, as well as news that Diamond Multimedia
will be making the first card to utilize it, which will be priced at under $250.
The next-generation chipset has a fillrate of 700 Mega Texels per second, which
dwarfs the Voodoo 3 3500 (and Voodoo 2 SLI) by over 300. It's not actually going to be
announced until tomorrow here in the US, but SDN is on UK time, where it's already
tomorrow. Here's a list of the chip's features, shamelessly yoinked from
the site:
- 128-bit memory support (up to 200MHz).
- Up to 200MHz engine clock.
- Up to 64MB of memory - allowing resolutions up to 1600x1200 triple buffered
with 32-bit per pixel color depth and a 32 bit Z-buffer, with 32MB left for
textures, and also full-scene anti-aliasing at higher resolutions.
- 350MHz RAMDAC.
- DVI-compliant digital flat panel technology.
- TV-out support.
- AGP 4X technology.
- Sustained fill rate of 700+ MegaTexels/second.
- QuadTexture engine.
- S3TL Transform and lighting engine.
- S3TC.
- DTV/DVD Playback.
- Motion Compensation Engine.
- Fully Compliant VIP 2.0 Bus.
- Priced at $29 (USD) each in quantity of 10,000 units.
There's a new MDK2.com Development Update
giving designer Greg Zeschuk's development diary describing showing MDK2 off to the
European press. MDK2, is, of course, the sequel to the first/third-person single player
action game MDK, which, as everyone should know, stands for Mild Detergent Kleanser.
A couple of programs loads of readers of this site use:
The once-canceled Webdog has returned with
a new version 2.0 that has a whole boatload of changes, including a swanky new
interface, an auto-updating system, a cool new ICQ-like "tiny mode",
and tons more. Swing by the site and grab
it now.
Build 53 of RealCTF, a CTF
mod for Unreal has been released, and is available for download over on its
homepage (thanks Killjoy).
This version fixes a "dim message text" bug, tweaks the charge costs,
and has other changes as well.
Spawn sends word on a way to add 1024x768 resolution to Command & Conquer: Tiberian
Sun. Interested? Just add this to your sun.ini file: [Video]
ScreenWidth=1024
ScreenHeight=768
StretchMovies=no
Fact is 1600x1200 resolution is possible with this method. Thanks Spawn. If you're
curious about the difference, TSNation has posted a
screenshot showing off the difference between 800x600 (the game's max resolution without
this method) and 1024x768.
Desslock's
RPG News has posted an interview with Irrational Games' Ken Levine, talking
about their incredibly addicting (and well-made) first person RPG System Shock
2.
A few things of interest to those who like to get under the hood and tinker with the guts
of the games:
The finals in that $50,000 Descent 3 Tournament took place last night in Las Vegas, NV. Descent3.net has posted the results, which has Fatal,
described as "one of the 1st and long lasting Descent3 pilots from all the way back
to Demo1.1 days" winning the big prize. Thanks LLAMA. There's also lots more coverage
there of everything that led up to the finals. Congrats Fatal, how about a loan?
This article by Jonathan Clark,
formerly of Crack dot Com, goes into how those lucky enough to be on a fast Internet
connection can take advantage of it for gaming, even if stuck behind the dreaded
Firewall.. Thanks Jacek Fedoryñski.
- The RIVA Station (that's the
English version of the original German page),
has posted a photo of an ELSA ERAZOR III Pro along with some info they found in a German
magazine they make sound like NDA stuff, describing an upcoming 0.22 Micron 143/166 MHz
"TNT2/Pro" chip.
- Review
Zone's Athlon Vs. Pentium III is a 15 pages article comparing the two CPUs on the
technical side as well as the performance side. Loads of benchmarks on four Athlons,
several Pentium IIIs, going so far as to overclock an engineering sample of a Pentium III
600 to attempt to replicate Pentium III 650 performance to compare to the Athlon 650.
- And last, but not least, Intel
preparing megahertz megablitz is a ZDNN article
(seen on on AnandTech , albeit minus the link)
describing the roadmap for the big I's upcoming CPU announcements, currently (and we know
how these things can change) planned to kick off with the i820 chipset and some
accompanying new P3's on September 27. Here's a chunk from the article:
The 820 chip set will debut, along with two new Pentium III processors, a 533MHz
Pentium III and a 600MHz Pentium III chip, on Sept. 27, sources said. The chips, which
support the 133MHz bus, will be based on the current .25 micron Pentium III design.
Intel is planning to follow those Pentium IIIs quickly with the Oct. 25 launch of six new
desktop Pentium III processors, based on its Coppermine technology. Coppermine is the
code-name for Pentium III chips manufactured on Intel's 0.18 micron process. The new
manufacturing process will help Intel reduce the Coppermine Pentium III's voltage
consumption and heat production, versus current .25 micron Pentium IIIs. It will also lead
to smaller die-size, allowing the integration of 256KB of integrated cache with desktop
Pentium III chips. Mobile Pentium II chips already offer this feature.
Chip confusion coming? Of the six new Coppermine-based desktop Pentium III chips, all are
designed for use with the 820 chip set, and three, including a 500MHz, 550MHz and 600MHz,
will be for use with a 100MHz bus, sources said.
Three more, a 600MHz, a 650MHz and a 667MHz, will support either a 100MHz or 133MHz bus,
sources said. Intel may release a 700MHz in place of the 667MHz, sources said, however
this was unclear at press time.
The Parsec Homepage has been updated with a new OpenGL screenshot showing "an entirely new spacecraft, background nebula, and planet"
from this upcoming action-oriented Internet multiplayer cross-platform space combat game.
They've also added a new "Events" section in the news to cover previous
happenings, staring it off with photos of their booth at LinuxTag and the conference talks
we have given in the past. The "Work in Progress" section (also in the news) has
also been updated with the latest development happenings.
id lead programmer John Carmack has warmed the hearts of a bunch of us looking for some
news to post this morning by updating his .plan with his latest Quake III programming worklog. He
also probably warmed the hearts of many high-ping players since it offers news that he's
cooked up a new option for servers called sv_maxRate that will be able to help level the
playing field across pings when utilized. Here's the full list: * spinning
machinegun barrel
* changed q3data -origin option to -offset, defaulted to 0 0 24 for all player grabs
* removed second parm from -lod in q3data
* fixed 0 ping on last player killed before fraglimit
* better ping calculation right after transitions
* add time back to scoreboard
* sv_maxRate option to force all clients to play with a max rate. This can be used to
limit the advantage of LPB, or to cap bandwidth utilization for a server. Note that rate
is ignored for clients that are on the same LAN.
* fixed bad name vs name in tourney after first player left
* added hitch warning messages to server console
* new time clamping rules for net play
* avoid sending usercmds during connection
* send explicit heartbeats to the master server when a server transitions to or from empty
or full
* shaders that aren't found will return index 0, but still keep the allocated slot to
prevent rescanning if registered again
* use nextSnap for player prediction when available
* removed teleport dest invisible objects
* reduced client to server bandwidth by 35%
* changed logging for chats to guarantee parsing properly with names that conflict with
commands:
from: G_LogPrintf( "%s say: %s
"
to: G_LogPrintf( "say: %s: %s
"
Nihilistic's Rob "Innerloop" Huebner made an update to his .plan talking about his upcoming presentation at next
month's Game Developer's mini-conference, and the portion quoted below giving the latest
on their upcoming game, Vampire: The Masquerade--Redemption, talking, among other things,
about improving upon mother nature (don't stand near Rob when the lightning starts):
We've been pretty much putting our heads down and cranking out a lot of gameplay
elements in the last few week, which is pretty exciting stuff, actually. I've been having
some fun with networking and AI, and we're getting tons of new art, models, and interface
screens in every day. One of these days we need to snap some shots specifically of the UI
-- its gorgeous. And the new skies for the modern day levels will floor you, trust me. We
were driving to go see "The 13th Warrior" tonight, and when I saw the full moon
out, I couldn't help thinking, "Ours looks better than that"...
IGN64.Com previews Daikatana on the
N64, offering this cynical headline: "Kemco Japan does what Ionstorm couldn’t
and delivers a playable version of Daikatana on time." Thanks Oedipus. They had a
chance to sit down with a "50% complete" Nintendo 64 version of
the game earlier this week at Nintendo’s Spaceworld show in Japan, saying they are
"very with what we’ve seen thus far." Looks like a copyediting mistake
omitted an adjective in there, but they do sound positive (I'm guessing they were
"impressed," I guess it's a user-participation preview). There are also three
images, but don't get your hopes up to see what N64 Daikatana looks like, they are just
the rendered backgrounds from the menus in the Daikatana Mplayer demo.
Perhaps particularly interesting reading in light of the recent Ottawa Sun article that
rankled so many, is E! Online - The Hot
Spot - Stars on Violence quoting several Hollywood types on the subject of media and violence, including
James Wood ( on this
page), who understands the silliness of pointing the finger at violent movies like his
most recent "The General's Daughter," when the real problem is "gratuitous
violence, like in those video games that are just training manuals for psychotic
kids." Sigh. Thanks KnyteStorme.
A little pop culture on Friday, quoting Ray Walston as Mr.. Hand from Fast Times at
Ridgemont High. testoclese (a word I actually remember Tony "Heh, he said" Wood
inventing at Camp Trexler in the '70s--that's not you, is it Tony?) sends along the consummate Jeff Spicolli reply:
"That was my skull!" Click here (opens another browser window) for the appropriate sound
effect to read the next portion (thanks Whisp). Wow, yesterday was quite a draggy news
day, and this morning is certainly no better. The last few weekends have been so unusually
busy, I almost forgot what a "normal" Saturday was like. Oh well, it gave me the
chance to do some site housekeeping.
Link of the Day: Global
Monetary. Makers of a subcutaneous e-commerce chip in your hand read by a sensor in
your mouse. Thanks Jim Dosé. If they were serious that $250 might pay to get me to read
about having such a chip implanted in my hand, but that's about it (besides, they don't
say if it supports USB).
Actual News Story of the Day: ZDTV
Virtual Vector reports Scientists target an online chat room as ground zero of an outbreak
of syphilis. Thanks Thunderbutt. I guess that's the 90's version of catching an STD
from the "toilet seat."
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