NVIDIA is throwing a $10,000 contest and all you have to do is fill out this form. Well, you also have to win the drawing, but at least there's no physical labor involved. In other NVIDIA news, the GeForce 256 bidding on eBay has skyrocketed to $20,100. So I'd suggest entering the contest before making a bid (the bidding on the Excite and Yahoo auctions are still within a reasonable range, however).

GameSpot has posted a preview of Odium, a third person, turn based RPG currently in development by Metropolis (and set to be published this October by Monolith). The preview features seven new screenshots that give a good feel for the game's interface.

ClanFHA has posted a preview of TeamFortress 2, based on the author's recent trip to Valve's offices (thanks VE). The preview contains a Q&As with Robin Walker and Gabe Newell, as well as a downloadable movie of game footage and an exclusive screenshot.

Tactical Planet has posted the version 1.2 patch for Hidden and Dangerous. Here's the scoop on this 3.7MB patch:

• Full configurable controllers. Status: included full configuration of mouse and joystick. Support for first joystick attached to computer.
• Crashes when leaving static guns. Status: FIXED.
• Mouse lag. Status: A new checkbox 'Vertical sync' added to hardware configuration utility. If you encounter problems with mouse response, please check this.
• Quick game load. Status: a new menu item appears in the in-game menu (after pressing ESC).
• Boats - death of on-board soldiers. Status: FIXED.
• Static guns: possibility to use in crawl mode. Status: OK
• When walking or running, auto-centering disallows aiming up or down. Status: Auto-centering is now a bit smarter.

The Adrenaline Vault Downloads Patch page has a new version 1.8 of the patch for the full German version of X-Beyond the Frontier (not the English version of the demo as I originally wrote). No word on what the patch addresses.

CNET Gamecenter's System Shock 2 guide promises to help you Show Up SHODAN. Of course in a game like SS2, the whole point is to figure out stuff for yourself, but it sure beats giving up on the game if you're stuck (I avoid spoilers my self, but Billy peeked and says it's a good concise guide).

The Microsoft Age of Empires II Age of Kings page has posted the AoE II box art though you have to work for it, by solving a "Microsoft's Pandora's Box" puzzle, described as the next generation puzzle game by Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov. There are also some new Dark Reign 2 screenshots on Gamer's Alliance Strategy. There are also some exclusive Metal Fatigue screenshots on Planet RIVA.

BetaNews has word of new ASUS P2B BIOS' on the ASUS German FTP site. There seems to be a new beta BIOS there to work on any P2B board.

Also on BetaNews is word that yet another new ICQ beta is available, as ICQ v3.19 Build 2569 is on the ICQ website.

Mail has been rolling in to the Blue Tower trying to figure out what's going on with the Master Servers over at id Software. Hearing the call, id Software Designer Graeme "Zaphod" Devine updated his .plan with word that the Master Server hasn't blown a master cylinder, but there is a problem seeing empty servers (which of course makes it hard for them to stop being that way to show up). This is going to be addressed in the next release. Here's the update, which also includes word of some new id servers, and the story of the mad mapper:

Some of you have commented on the master server being a bit odd right now. It's actually running just fine, it's just responding to queries for protocol 41, which is not entirely compatible with protocol 40. Only servers with people on there will actually show up. You can force showing the empty servers with the keyword "empty", but this isn't so useful since in 1.08 you can't combine that with game types (e.g. you can't say "empty tourney"). For completeness's sake, you can also say "full". But heck, if you type in "nude reptiles", you can scan that too and get exactly zip.

All of this is of course fixed in the new test and browsing gametypes, keywords, and so forth is easier than ever. You'll swoon. Trust me.

For those of you, and there's a bunch of you, who believe that our previous efforts had better network support than 1.08, we've set up servers here for you to get side to side experiences. Go try them and let me know.

Q3test 1.05 - 192.246.40.68:27961
Q3test 1.08 - 192.246.40.68:27960
Quake 2 version 3.20 - 192.246.40.68
QuakeWorld version 2.30 - 192.246.40.68
Quake version 1.09 - 192.246.40.68

We're pretty confident you'll be seeing things our way pdq.

Eric, our in house live human, bet Tim that he couldn't make a fun map in under an hour. Tim, being Tim, took him up (the exact nature of what was bet remains somewhat fuzzy, but it may have involved lunch). Forty-five minutes later we had "fun", which has remained interestingly addictive throughout the last week to the entire company (of course, listening to Tim tell this story, it's down to thirty-five minutes while he had no power, and the mouse was disconnected from his machine).

The lesson from all this is either that Tim really values something fuzzy to do with lunch, or that Quake 3 is so darn cool you can toss together maps in less than an hour. Okay, maybe knowing what Tim knows helps, so we're going to dissect his brain for science and get him working as our own personal AI (John swears it's possible) churning out 24 levels a day 24/7 until some odd Y2K bug causes him to make every telephone in the world ring at once. Oh wait, that was Lawnmower Man.

Dynamix' Mitch Shaw updated his .plan with an update on TRIBES Extreme. Here's what he had to say:

I'm hip-deep in mission scripting for TRIBES Extreme now. Jesse Russell did the scripting for two of the training missions before moving on to campaign scripting, and I'm doing the others. I think it's going pretty well so far, I have about 80% of them in a good "first pass" state, and Scott "Cap'n America" Rudi is providing feedback and tweaking the text. The training missions for Extreme look like they're going to be much more comprehensive and "event-based" than the original TRIBES ones -- Greg had very little time to put those missions together, and I think he did an amazing job with them when you consider just how little time he had.

As a consequence of the head-down, full-on assault on the training mission scripting, Freeze has been put on hold for now. There are still several problems with it, and I would dearly love to get it finished and released, but it's strictly a "free time" project. Hopefully I'll be able to get back to it before too long. My apologies to anyone who's been waiting for a Freeze release (if there is anyone).

I would like to encourage everyone who hasn't done so recently to visit the TRIBES Extreme area of the website (http://www.tribesplayers.com/tribesplayers/extreme-index.html) and give a look at what we've been working at so hard lately. There's information about the game, screenshots, witty bon mots, and more stuff on the way. It's more fun than you can shake a barrel of monkeys at, or something like that.

Happy Puppy has posted a preview of Sierra's SWAT 3 (thanks Frans). It's a hands-off preview, but it does feature what would appear to be two new screenshots (although admittedly I can't be 100% sure) from this Rainbow Six style tactical game.

According to Darkstone News, the English version of the Darkstone demo released earlier today (story) will be an exclusive download from PC.IGN, and will be released at 9:30 Pacific Time (thanks VE).

With this morning's announcement that TEN has been renamed to Pogo.com (story), and dropped much of the gaming content they were originally known for, and the coincidental fact that currently the official PGL site is currently offline, coupled with the fact that their next season has been cancelled, many people have been leaping to the conclusion that the PGL is closing down. I spoke with a PGL representative who assured me that this is not the case. The PGL will have to find a new online partner to host the online portion of each season (since it used to be hosted by TEN) but this shouldn't affect their future. In fact, the StarCraft division was hosted by Battle.net last season - not TEN. Rest assured that we'll keep you up to date as new information is released.

GAStrategy has posted a brief Q&A with 10six producer Al Rivera, as well as three new screenshots from SegaSoft's morbidly massively multiplayer strategy game that's currently entering its beta testing phase.

Raven's Rick Johnson updated his .plan with a clarification of a misprint in the current issue of PCGamer:

There's an article in the October 1999 issue of PC Gamer about SoF with a very bad typo: "Vertex compression allows us to use more animations and model variety and still run on a machine with 32MB of RAM. Also, since the compression is high quality, there's 'swimming' visible on the models, even when very close."

That should read "Also, since the compression is high quality, there's NO 'swimming' visible on the models, even when very close."

IMG Magazine has posted a preview of Bungie's third person game of anime action, Oni, which is based on the author's experience with an early Alpha build of the game. They've also posted an interview with Alex Okita and Chris Hughes (two artists on the game) as well as Brent Pease, Oni's project leader at Bungie West.

Since only one of the shots they posted yesterday was actually new (story), GASource has posted two new screenshots from Half-Life: Opposing Force, Gearbox Software's official add-on for Half-Life.

Team Abuse's Q3Tourney guide gives maps specific strategies to the third level in Q3Test, Q3Tourney. Thanks Matthew Rorie and Redwood.

• MSNBC reports Intel ships samples of Merced calling it "a major milestone in the development of its next generation processor." Thanks Phil "Cain" Hall.
• Sharky Extreme's GeForce 256 Steps Out in Style article offers an interesting unconfirmed deduction about the clock speed on the newly-announced GeForce 256, saying "it's easy to do the maths- simply divide the 480Mpixels by four and you get the general picture- 120MHz." Maths? Hey Sharky, you're in America now, learn to speak the language.
• Coppermine To Come Sooner, Run Faster describes 700 MHz PIIIs this fall. Thanks Redwood (someone also sent me a ZDNet link to this, but I had trouble with the URL).
• SystemLogic's Building A Dual Celeron System Part 1 is online.
• Part one of Ars Technica's NT Pagefile optimization is online.
• From USB Workshop: Iomega offers a new ultra-slim USB Zip 250MB drive with dual USB-PCMCIA interface.

There's a Quake III Bus Tour Feature on Extreme Hardware with another perspective on the tour that's currently winding its way around the Southwest US showing off the game to eager sun-baked masses. More on the tour can be found on id's official Quake 3 Arena Road Tour Page, our Quake Arena Road Tour message board, and in loony's Quake III Tour Diaries.

Borderfield productions has posted a new version of their Q3A - Total Control utility for Q3Test, which they describe as "the ultimate Q3A tool." It contains a FunName editor, a Key Binder, a Dialup Optimizer (they say it "can reduce lag with up to 30%"), a Server launcher, and a Config Editor that you can use to tweak your graphics, RailGun settings, HUD and much more. This is an updated version to a release that was not mentioned here because it violated the EULA, since the original version had a pak explorer, which was removed when they learned it was a problem.

RedStorm need 50 beta testers for their upcoming strategy/RPG game ShadowWatch. Interested? Here are the details (thanks BetaBites):

In Red Storm's new strategy RPG, Shadow Watch, you will lead a crack team of operatives to uncover a nefarious plot to stop humanity's advancement to the stars. Use your operatives to launch covert missions to rescue hostages, plant surveillance devices, raze buildings, and assault enemy strongholds. You'll have to use your wits on and off the battlefield to win. This isn't a battle to save the world; it's a battle to save every world.

Sign up for the Beta Test is Sept. 3. 1999 starting at 12:00pm EDT. NOTE: Any duplicate names and incomplete information will automatically be disqualified.

Shadow Watch Beta Testing will begin on Sept. 22, 1999 through Oct. 18, 1999. Minimum Requirements to become a Beta Tester are:

- Windows 95 or 98 Operating System
- 166 MHz Pentium
- 32 MB RAM
- 16 bit Color SVGA video
- 2 MB Video Ram
- Sound Blaster 16 or compatible
- 600 MB free (required)

If Selected a Beta Tester must:

* Sign and submit a NDA (non-disclosure agreement) to Red Storm Entertainment Inc. before receiving Beta CD.
* NDA must be received at Red Storm Entertainment by Sept. 15, 1999
* Complete Each of the 18 Mission Maps and send results for each via E-mail.
* Submit comments and bugs via E-mail using Solo bug
* After completion of all of the above the tester will receive a copy of the game.

Selected Beta testers will be notified by email on Sept. 7, 1999. If you are interested in registering to be a Shadow Watch Beta Tester, sign up at http://obiwan.redstorm.com/cgi-bin/betatest/application.cgi on Friday, September 3. (The page will not be live until Friday!)

Here's an interesting story: according to this story on ZDNet, GT Interactive (publishers of Doom 2, Quake, and Unreal, amongst other games) is being sued by developer StarPlay of publishing their game Alley 19 Bowling under a different name via their German publisher GT Value (thanks to everyone who sent this in). GT had no publishing agreement at all for Alley 19, and therefore the term "piracy" is applicable. StarPlay is asking for $110,000 in direct damages and an extra $5 million in punitive damages.

Wantree Games World has released a patch for the popular recamed version of Quake Done Quick 2 by Zarathustra Studios that fixes a bug where the VWEP doesn't work. The patch is available in both Linux and Windows versions.

It's a Wednesday, which means it's time for this week's Mail Bag (no really, this time we're sticking with the schedule). In this week's incredibly exciting edition: beating on LPBs, that Ottawa Sun article, cute furry animals, Jolt, and of course, a whole bunch more. Head over and take a read.

The Adrenaline Vault Downloads has a new demo for Delphine's Diablo-esque action/fantasy game DarkStone. The demo is a 26 MB download, and is apparently in French.

The Iron Strategy Demo on The Adrenaline Vault is a non-playable demo of the giant robot combo action and strategy game announced the yesterday (story), where you can be either a general or a pilot. The download is about 23 MB. Interestingly, there's no word of the demo available on the Iron Strategy site other than it's available by special request. The demo is also available on 3DFiles.Com.

Matrox Graphics Millennium G400 Latest Windows 9x Drivers page has new version 5.21 Millennium G400 Windows 9x display driver. From the notes, word is this driver can not be used with the Rainbow Runner G-series, you should uninstall any previous Matrox drivers using this procedure before installing the 5.21 drivers, and come time to uninstall the 5.21 drivers you will need their uninstaller utility. Finally, the 5.21 drivers are 32-bit, QuickTime 16 will not work properly with these drivers without this work-around.

A new version of GLSetup, the program that detects your hardware and automatically installs the OpenGL drivers you need has been released. This version (Public Beta v1.0.0.107) is dated August 31st (although curiously it's dated August 30th in the readme file) and is available as an ActiveSetup download (which only downloads the drivers you need) or a monolithic 43MB version that contains every single driver (this is great for networks, by the way). Thanks Kurt Hoffmann.

Ritual's Robert Atkins sent along two more images from Heavy Metal: FAKK 2. These shots show off really nicely the cool special effects they can do thanks to their custom FX engine, which they've dubbed Ghost (not to be confused with Ghoul, Raven's modelling system on Soldier of Fortune). Enjoy!

   

In a strange turn of events, the online service formerly known as TEN has become - Pogo.com (thanks AGN3D). This new site focuses entirely on the more mainstream games that TEN offered, including card games, and "classic arcade games". It would appear that games that are available at retail with TEN's software are no longer supported. I attempted to find Miz Beaver, Porky Pine, Howland Owl, Churchy La Femme and of course Pogo on the site, but it would appear that they too, are no longer welcome.

The Intel Developers Forum is currently underway, and there are a number of products being shown, as laid out in this ZDNet article (thanks OmegaFoRCe). At the top of the list is news that the first sample Merced processors have been handed off to PC manufacturers, and were demonstrated running 64 bit versions of both Linux and Windows. Also demonstrated was Intel's 800MHz Coppermine processor, as well as something being called the "Ottoman PC". A computer shaped like an Ottoman, complete with a leopard skin cusion.

GT Interactive sends word that the Eurocom developed Duke Nukem: Zero Hour for the N64 has shipped to stores and should be available right now. Zero Hour is an original game (not a port from the PSX or PC titles), and is played from a third person perspective.

id Software Lead Programmer John Carmack updated his .plan discussing memory usage in Q3A, his forays into PERL, and a new worklog. Here are a couple of excerpts, in the first he mulls the possibility of implementing a skeletal animation system at this late stage of game development:

Loading a large map with full resolution, 32 bit textures and mipmaps consumes almost 40 megs of texture space. The default of picmip 1 and 16 bit textures reduces that to six or seven (not all images observe picmip) in theory, but some OpenGL implementations keep a 32 bit version of the texture around even if the card only uses 16 bit (I consider this inapropriate), so it may still be twelve or more megs just for the images.

I have been able to save a couple megs off of the true capacity requirements by not rolling through some larger buffers when not needed (not smp and not dedicated server), and several megs more of one-time data mostly by moving a lot of static tables to dynamic allocation.

I can probably save another meg of true capacity and I think three or four megs of initialization data. The big thing that I might be forced to do is go to a skeletal animation system. I would hate to do that at this late a point in the project, but it would save about two megs per player model in the game.

In the process of chasing down the static memory hogs, I finally got around to starting something I have needed to do for years: learn perl.

The update goes on to describe John's experiments with PERL, and give his latest worklog mentioning tweaks to lightning damage and machine gun ammo in teamplay. Here's the worklog:

* save 2.5 megs by reworking shader allocation
* save 1 meg by not double buffering backend if not smp
* convert all tr. arrays into pointers
* don't allocate as many snapshotentities when non dedicated
* new shader option: deformvertex move
* stackable deformvertex
* reduced lightning damage by 10%
* light emit from two sided surfaces
* reduced starting machinegun ammo in teamplay to 50 from 100

Busy Frans at 3D Action Gamers sends word that an updated version of the Mortyr Internet Demo has been quietly slipped into circulation. The original is on the very poor connection that made the first demo so hard to nab, but Frans has it mirrored on this page on 3D Action Gamers. The new demo is a bit smaller than the original, and is version 1.06 as opposed to the original 1.02, the new release addresses some bugs. Frans also mentions that the new demo will not break your old saved games.

There's a TRIBES2 screenshot on Penny Arcade Cartoons. Not a goof or a drawing, a real screenshot of a landscape described as the never-before-seen Swamp World in Dynamix' upcoming sequel to Starsiege TRIBES.

• There's a Chat log of last night's GeForce 256-inspired IRC session on Tweak3d.net which includes the participation of NVIDIA's Nick Triantos, Christopher Donahue, and Kenneth Hurley and the WXP gang.
• Sharky Extreme's NVIDIA GeForce 256 Steps Out in Style.
• Computer Games Online previews the Savage 2000.
• CPU Review's Athlon/Pentium3 Price Comparison v4.
• 3d Wars' Gary Peterson Interview talks with the author of the "infamous" Voodoo2 and Voodoo3 overclocking utilities who now works for 3dfx.

Saw a note on MacGamer's Ledge revealing that the clamor for the Quake III Arena hats and mousepads that are being handed out on the Bus Tour has been heard, and these items will soon be for sale. Here's the scoop from the id Quake 3 Arena page:

A bit of cheerie news for all of you who have been e-mailing about the Quake III Arena t-shirts, hats and mousepads. Your voices have been heard. I've received news that we will soon be making them available for purchase via 1-800-id-games. I'll make an update on these items once they become available.

Frans at 3D Action Gamers sends word that Activision has posted a movie showing their updated Space Invaders in AVI format (about 3.6 MB).

A thread called Software mode on the 3D Realms Bulletin Board has a post from 3DRealms' George Broussard (thanks Brian) talking about the hassles of software rendering in a world where hardware acceleration is becoming the standard, saying that software mode might just end up not being included in Duke Nukem Forever when it's released.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Software go away in DNF. It's a real hassle to add things that look cool in hardware then have to deal with the software version ramifications of that. We had decided to go hardware only way back in the early days with Prey, so it woulnd't be outside the realm of possibility that we go hardware with Duke.

The bottom line is that is software looks "ok" and won't cost us weeks of extra development time to keep it current with the hardware version, it can stay. But as of right now, we've all but abandonned software mode and have the attitude that hardware is the priority.

The reality is that no system ships now without a 3D accelerator. Added to that will be a flood of Voodoo 2 level cards on the market as new hardware ships. And once everyone can have 3D acceleration for under $100, it becomes the same issue as a sound card. Just go buy one.

George Broussard

I saw on RainbowSix.Net that R6 Trigger Happy has posted a mod for Rainbow Six that attempts to duplicate the planned weapons in Rogue Spear, the upcoming sequel to Rainbow Six, if you have an itchy trigger finger (sorry, couldn't resist).

A post on Tweak3D.net (thanks Game Forces) clarifies the deal with those auctions mentioned yesterday (story), and it seems my skepticism was unfounded, and that this eBay auction, this Yahoo auction, and this Excite Auction (as of this writing, neither of the last two seem to be active yet) are all legit. Apparently the GeForce cards are being auctioned for charity by NVIDIA, and the cards being auctioned will actually be autographed of all things.

As usual, thanks Frans at 3D Action Gamers for the assist with these:

• Beyond Tron reviews Hidden and Dangerous.
• Thresh's FiringSquad reviews C&C: Tiberian Sun.
• GameRush reviews C&C: Tiberian Sun.
• Gamecenter reviews Shadow Man, written by one-time Prey designer Paul Schuytema.
• Happy Puppy's Pawprint Press reviews System Shock 2. Woof.
• Thresh's FiringSquad reviews Hidden & Dangerous.
• GameSpot UK's X Beyond The Frontier Review.

In the initial post about the 10SIX beta sign-ups yesterday (story) we referred to the requirement that applicants be HEAT.net "Premiere" members, which I'd say implies paying, but it turns out that you must, in fact, be a "Perimeter" member, which is a free membership. Sorry for the confusion, thanks Al Rivera the producer of 10SIX for the clarification.

• A pair of free Half-Life projects are playing show-and-tell, as The Skynet Project has posted some new screenshots of their Terminator-inspired modification, while the Redemption for Half-Life project, an upcoming free project that's a collaboration between Maverick Developments and PC Zone magazine...
• The HotMail beach has cooled, but Swede Says Microsoft Took 10 Hours To Repair E-Mail Breach. Thanks Robert Kee...
• A new Diablo II Screenshot of the Week is up. Thanks Voodoo Extreme...
• This Enter the Game IRC update is basically a plea to stop hacking their network, as they are in danger of being bounced by their ISP...

Yesterday was not the first time we've seen some event or another brown out our little gaming corner of the Internet, but it was the first such time I remember when the cause was a hardware announcement, rather than a demo/shareware/software release of some sort. NVIDIA certainly did a fine job of creating a fuss... I don't know if it changed the world, but it certainly almost broke the 'net, with the announcement bringing a few hardware sites, including NVIDIA's, down or to their figurative knees for a good part of the day. It is certainly the first time I can recall needing to mirror a press release because so many people were having a hard time accessing it.

Link of the Day: Crack Aficionado Online. Thanks the Pon+iff. Please skip if you don't like crack jokes, but damn did that "crack" me up, even if they do mock my beloved, if eminently mockable, LT.