It's London calling again, as EuroGamer News has another batch of coverage from the 1999 European Computer Trade Show, serving up a look at Unreal Tournament, an X-Com Alliance preview, and more, with plans on still more, with profiles of Vampire The Masquerade, FAKK2, Soldier of Fortune, Dark Reign 2, and KISS : Psycho Circus planned.

The British invasion of info coming out of ECTS in London to help you feel like you've attended the event continues in BarrysWorld's ECTS 99 page, which offers all sorts of coverage from the event, including the Unreal Tournament party and loads more about the games and hardware being shown off at the show. Also, their affiliate Quake Nation is covering all the Quake tournaments at the show.

Bob's ECTS News has been updated with even more TF2 info with photos of screens showing the Character Models in TF2 (including "the cool neck movement"), and a page of new TF2 info. He's also added new Opposing Force screenshot photos showing off the weaponry and more in Gearbox' upcoming Half-Life add-on.

U-Game's Soldier of Fortune Preview is up as part of their ongoing coverage of the well-covered European Computer Trade Show. The piece offers impressions of face time with the game, as well as the shots and stuff from the Activision press CD.

Saw on The Descent Chronicles that a thread called UK Release delay on the Volition, Inc. Bulletin Board offers reassurance from Volition's Philip Holt that the UK version of their upcoming FreeSpace2 will be released simultaneously with the North American version, although the German version would indeed follow after:

The North American and UK versions will be a simultaneous release. You won't have to wait to play in the UK. The German version will come out shortly after...

Saw on PlanetUnreal that a new build 55 of RealCTF, the capture the flag mod for Unreal, is now available. The new version includes the first public beta of RealCreeper. Word is that build 55 is not backward compatible with previous builds, so if you're an avid RealCTFer you'll probably want to keep the installer for the prior version handy until all the servers make the switch-over.

Steve Goldberg and Frans at 3D Action Gamers both point out that the Rogue Spear movie in the GamePower's first look at Rogue Spear mentioned earlier (story) is indeed new (I was uncertain, being unable to view it). Frans passes along a brief description, saying the movie "runs for 2:22, has lots of gameplay footage with a detailed overview of the various features, with a voice-over commentary." The movie is in VIVO format.

More ECTS happenings, as ActiveWindows ECTS News has posted 30 screenshots from NovaLogic's upcoming space opera Tachyon - The Fringe, which will feature the voice talents of perennial gamers' favorite Bruce Campbell (story).

Q3Test Shots on a VideoLogic Neon 250 showing off the visual quality on a PVRSG-based Neon 250. The shots are in 1024x768, 32-bit color, and while they don't provide benchmarks, they describe it as "perfectly playable -- getting some good frame rates" (obviously a subjective judgment that varies with the individual). Word is to expect a preview with benchmarks and impressions soon.

Datumplane::Starsiege sent off a question to Dynamix Programmer Tim Gift asking whether there were plans to include the ability for mod authors to compile their scripts for Dynamix' upcoming Starsiege TRIBES2, which might allow them to execute faster, and would discourage, if not prevent, the theft of code from mods. The answer Tim provided them talks of a way this could be handled, concluding, "As we get closer to ship time, we'll see if code 'stealing' is still an issue."

Command & Conquer Renegade takes over ECTS reports the hyperactive GameSpot UK - ECTS99 coverage with a look at Westwood's upcoming entry into the third-person action genre, accompanied by four screenshots.

Also on the US GameSpot is a new Preview of Diablo II giving a seven page look ahead at the sequel to Blizzard's smash-hit written by Elliott Chin. This actually is the first in a four-part series of previews, broken down like this: The current article is "about the game in general, including the interface, gameplay mechanics, the new map, as well as some multiplayer features." Next week will be about "the three acts, revealing quests, NPCs, and monsters." Followed the week after with details on the five characters, capped off a week later with a "a comprehensive beta report, because by that time, the beta will have been in full test."

1.6GHz Alpha to be fastest Quake chip on planet is a headline of interest on THE REGISTER, known for often being one step ahead of the techie news scene, but consequently known for often being led astray by false conjecture as well. I saw that on The Shugashack along with another story that says AMD to intro K8 at Microprocessor Forum, saying AMD will announce details of the 64-bit successor to the Athlon next month.

• Guillemot has announced their first card based on the GeForce 256 chipset from NVIDIA, which they're calling the 3D Prophet. Details are available on 3DGPU.com.
• LeadTek has announced their GeForce 256 card as well, called the WinFast GeForce256.
• Fast3D reviews the Voodoo 3 3000 AGP card.
• SystemLogic has posted an editorial titled, "Is the Floppy Drive Dead?" which seeks to answer this question that keeps popping up ever since the iMac's debut without a floppy.
• 3dfx has been promoting their T-Buffer technology at this weekend's ECTS show, as GameSpot UK is reporting.
• Tom's Hardware Guide has posted part two of their 32 Graphic Card Meltdown, which pits 32 cards against each other using Shogo, Q3Test, and Descent 3 as benchmarks.

The sharp-eye newsies at Captured.Com noticed an update from a few days ago on the Playspoon website with the first new version of the SpoonBot for TRIBES in over two months (the next release is promised without so much of a delay). The new release is still considered a beta, as there are still "issues" remaining, but there have been so many bugs squashed since the last release, the author felt it was time for a new release. While the bot is described as "by no means a replacement for human opponents," word is they "become more and more human-like, and for the first time they are able to make dead meat of enemy turrets too ;-)" More details are on their TRIBES page.

Saw on PlanetUnreal (by way of DNF World) that Sgt Hulka's Bootcamp recently posted some more IRC interview stuff that offered some insights from 3DRealms' George Broussard on why Duke Nukem Forever, their upcoming Unreal-engine shooter, will not offer support for cooperative multiplayer play, along with more on the general reason this seems to be a common theme in current shooter development, which may not make coop fans feel any better, but perhaps explains why it isn't a conspiracy against them either. Here's the quote (thanks again Sgt Hulka's Bootcamp):

Ghostinmy: Georgb3dr--- yeah is duke foreva going to have co-op support :-)

GeorgB3DR: DNF coop: Probably not due to the single player level structures. Once you get beyond simple levels like Doom or Duke 3D and have cut off points and scripted stuff you can't do co-op well anymore

This Adrenaline Vault Downloads Patch page has "Bonus Pack #3" for Dungeon Keeper 2. The bonus consists of a new two-player Skirmish and Multiplayer level, described as a "real mano a mano test, you'll need to find the secrets and rescue the Mistress to tip the balance in your favor." To touch on some other RTS-related news, there are some new WarTorn screenshots on Gamer's Alliance Strategy, and finally, Ellipse Studios and NetGames have announced that Ellipse will be implementing support for the Free Standard Game Server (FSGS) in its upcoming real-time strategy title Submarine Titans, including all the features of FSGS like team ladders and tournaments. FSGS is described as "an innovative multiplayer online gaming system that supports a number of popular PC titles and is freely available to users worldwide."

S.A.S's Guide to Tribes offers a strategy guide for Dynamix' online multiplayer shooter, Starsiege TRIBES. Check down the sidebar for a fairly comprehensive list of tips, hints and strategies that will have you and your teammates shouting "How'd that feel?" until you're exhausted from celebrating.

Logitech Debuts Force Feedback Mouse News reports GameSpot UK's ECTS coverage announcing the Logitech force-feedback mouse, a breed of gaming peripheral that I think many of us have puzzled over whether it will help or hurt players of action games.

GameSpot UK - ECTS99 coverage offers four new Tomb Raider The Last Revelation screenshots showing off the next in the ongoing adventures of cover girl Lara Croft. Also, GameSpot UK - ECTS99 Final Fantasy VIII screens continues their relentless coverage with seven new screenshots from the PC version of the popular RPG series. There are also new Star Trek Klingon Academy Screens.

EuroGamer News is offering heavy live coverage of ECTS in London. Also, Speedy 3D's ECTS report is online with all their sped-up three-dimensional thoughts on the big show in London, including the following reports: Half-Life: Opposing Force, Incoming: Forces (in-progress), TeamFortress2, Unreal Tournament (in-progress), Quake III Arena (in-progress), C&C: Renegade, WarCraft III ,Starsiege: TRIBES2 (in-progress), Delta Force2 (in-progress), Dreamcast (in-progress), Final ECTS Report (in-progress), GeForce256 sneak peak (in-progress), and G400 on the stands (in-progress). Finally, Fragtasic's ECTS screenshots offer looks ahead at Carmageddon III: TDR2000, Titanium Angels, and more.

ECTS99 - Hitman Puts A Contract Out On Eidos announces a new game from Eidos Interactive, "a brand new third person action blast in which gamers get a chance to enter the murky world of staging hits, carrying out contract killings and 'whacking' unsuspecting marks.*"

Another of those ever-so-dangerous gold reports, GameSpot UK - ECTS99 coverage reports that Prince of Persia 3D, for which we've already had one false gold report (story) that was corrected (story). This report looks like the real deal however, as it is on-the-spot at ECTS.

John Carmack's .plan has word that he's decided to implement a skeletal modeling system in the Quake III engine (albeit not a hierarchical one), along with his latest work log. Here's the poop:

It looks like we are going to go to a skeletal model system. Jim Dose of Ritual had already started on an exporter from character studio, so we decided to just meet in the middle.

I implemented the loading and rendering support this weekend and tested it with a couple hand-inserted bones, so now we just need to write the glue between character studio and the new .md4 format.

The new format is bone based, but it is NOT hierarchial. Each vertex just has an arbitrary weighted list of the bones that influence it. Bones are just 4x3 matricies of floats.

A hierarchial skeleton has some advantages (angles instead of matricies, ability to do IK, etc), but this is a direct and simple replacement for our existing infrastructure that doesn't require any cached state per model instance.

A single .md4 file holds multiple level of detail surface sets, which all share the same bone frames.

In use, it is exactly like the existing models (interpolate between two frame numbers), it just saves a huge amount of space.

I used perl to generate my test data, and it was definately faster than having a separate msdev open and doing it in C.

I am trying to use parenthesis on all perl functions, but when I type "print", my fingers seem to have a flashback to applesoft basic fifteen years ago, and I wind up with bare quotes on prints and parens on everything else...

Does anyone know if there is an existing msdev syntax coloring file for perl? (no, I don't want to switch to a different editor!)

* md4 model loading and displaying
* removed clip models from cgame, use renderer models instead
* fixed mover pushing again
* fixed bug with culling of mirrors made of multiple faces
* fixed quad on spinning machinegun
* surfaceparm alphashadow This causes q3map -light to check individual texture pixels on transparant surfaces for light shadowing instead of making the entire surface either cast or not cast shadows

GameSpot UK's ECTS99 Black & White preview is a preview based on a private showing of Lionhead's upcoming 3D god-game at ECTS. The piece offers several quotes from Peter Molyneux, Lionhead's founder and director, and the designer of Black & White.

Bob's ECTS News has some face to face impressions of several games at ECTS including Valve's upcoming TeamFortress2 and Gearbox' upcoming Half-Life: Opposing Force. There are screenshots of each game, though not very high fidelity, as they are photos of the screen, but they do show off the games and give a sense of what was being seen at the show.

BarrysWorld THQ ECTS Screenshots shows off more of the shots that were released at ECTS this weekend with shots from THQ International showing off Summoner, X: Beyond the Frontier, and Sinistar: Unleashed. Thanks A Talent For War.

GamePower's first look at Rainbow Six Rogue Spear offers a hands-on preview of the upcoming sequel to the Tom Clancy-inspired tactical shooter. The article includes a video in VIVO format, as well as some screenshots. I'm not sure if the movie is new (my browser seems to dislike some ActiveX on the page), but the only other Rogue Spear movie I can recall is that 35 MB intro released couple of weeks ago (story), so at worst this is a more bandwidth friendly version of that. Thanks Vapor at Outcast Central. Among the things they discuss are the sequel's improved graphics. Here's a bit:

Just booting the CD lent credence to Red Storm's claim of an entirely new graphics engine. The original game wasn't shabby, but neither was it an Unreal. Much of Rainbow Six's graphical acclaim could be attributed to press by hexagonally rooted war-game reviewers who weren't used to the graphical splendor of Unreal or Quake 2.

But Rogue Spear is a polygon of an entirely different color. The game supports -- or should I say revels -- in resolutions as high as 1600x1200. The graphics engine draws entire villages and blazing opera house chandeliers, team members crunching across fresh snow leaving bootprints in their wake, MP4 submachine guns...

AnandTech's September 99 Desktop CPU Comparison is online, offering a round-up of nearly all the many processor options now available, along with insights into some of the factors in trying to create apples to apples comparisons (figuratively, of course, this is a PC roundup with no Apple Computer products), with things like 3DNow! and SSE factoring into the equation. The article compares Intel's Celeron, Pentium II, and Pentium III as well as AMD's K6-2, K6-III, and Athlon.

IPlayGames First Look at Giants Citizen Kabuto is online with a short preview of PlanetMoon Studios' upcoming third-person action adventure where you play your choice of a topless sea maiden, a hungry giant, or four hyper-caffeinated little space men.

A Talent for War is holding a chat with several developers of Space Sims. Here's the poop:

The latest of ATFW's developer chats is now set. It's scheduled for this Saturday, September 11th at 1 PM EST/10 AM PST/6 PM GMT. If you need a translation to your time zone, hit CNN's time zone converter (Javascript required). Guests at the third dev chat include representatives from Jumpgate, Klingon Academy, Parsec, Starfleet Command, Starlancer, and Tachyon. As always, the chat will be held in the #space-sim channel on Gameslink's IRC network. For your nearest server, check out their Servers page). The chat will also be mostly moderated; for more info, check out the Chat FAQ.

The Skull Hunters page has the first release of the Skull Hunters mod for Heretic II, bringing the teamplay mod first introduced as HeadHunters Quake, and then revived with TRIBES Hunters, to Raven's Quake II-engine third-person action slash-fest.

PlanetStarSiege has narrowed down their demo competition to five finalists. You can grab the demos of the finalists on this page, and you can use them as research material if you wish, since they plan on holding a poll in the next few days to collect votes for a tie breaker for the grand prize, which is a coveted spot on the TRIBES2 beta team. Also, as I often do, let me stick in a reminder that our New Trivia contest is underway, so if you're feeling lucky (well do ya punk?), head on over and see if you have the mad trivia skillz. Boo-yeah!

• The Adrenaline Vault reviews Drakan Order of the Flame.
• Electric Games reviews DarkStone. Thanks Frans at 3D Action Gamers.
• 3aG - 3D Accelerated Gaming reviews the ERAZOR 3 eXtreme.
• Extreme Poodoo reviews the Everglide Large Attack Pad versus the 3m Precise Mousing Surface.

• The PowerZone Beta Testers page seeks beta testers for a new 3D action game "The Dead Planet," there's a form to fill out to apply. Thanks New Reality Gaming for the heads-up, and Beta Bites for the reminder...
• The Home of the Jumbot Launcher has a new version 0.2 of this front-end for the Jumbot for Half-Life. Thanks Planet Half-Life...
• MagixX has posted 12 new PainKeep maps, maintaining their long-time interest in this classic Quake mod...
• Synchroplay has a 52 model pack for Quake II for download as well as a 150 Kingpin skin pack and a 122 skin TRIBES skin pack. Also, The West Australian Gaming Zone has posted a pack of what they feel are the finest in Quake II models...
• The Adrenaline Vault Downloads Demo has Expert Pool, which "...is the only computer pool game to capture the atmosphere, style and intensity of a live pool game," though I can't see how they can work the smell of smoke in there...

Okay, loony and I are both stuck with a similar problem, so I was hoping maybe it was worth a shot that someone out there has experienced it as well and could offer some advice. We each have a startling amount of email in various mailboxes in our Eudora Pro email clients. Each of us has been unable to even see if we want to switch to Outlook 2000 because we each end up crashing Windows with a GPF upon trying to convert our old mail (we each presume due to the unavoidably large mailboxes involved). So the question is, does anyone have any specific experiences that may help here? Not to be a begging chooser, but we've run the gamut of logic, so educated guesses (and alternative suggestions) will probably not be as useful as help from someone who has actually experienced this and has found a solution (provided there is one). Thanks!

Link of the Day: Desktop Yoga. A combo legit RSI prevention, and crack up (go ahead try #12 and #13 in your office while people are around). Thanks sneaker.
Image of the Day: Astronomy Picture of the Day-August 30, 1999 - Looking Back on an Eclipsed Earth. Or is that Los Angeles? Thanks Ant.

* "Have a cookie..."