Archived News:
PC.IGN has posted an interview
with Dave Walls, one of the developers of Hasbro Interactive's Nerf Arena Blast,
talking about their happy-sunshine first person shooter (which is actually a
ton of fun). According to the interview, the game will be shipping in the first
week of November.
GameSpot's Nocturne
Developer's diary has been updated, and now features Jeff Mills' experiences
with the beta test of this spooky adventure game that should be shipping soon
(thanks Frans).
Dynamix' Dave Meddish updated his
.plan, addressing some of the rumors that have been floating around about
the company, and their two games in development, Starsiege: TRIBES 2 and TRIBES
Extreme, as well as the shocking truth that he is not in fact "shacking
up" with Jeri Ryan. Here's what he had to say: In lieu of the recent
events here in sunny (for now) Eugene, OR, I thought I'd take a moment to clear
up some potential misconceptions and quash those nasty rumors floating around.
"TRIBES 2 will be cancelled."
No, we're still on track for a Q1 2000 release. There is discussion of a possible
TRIBES 3. And TRIBES Extreme is chugging along nicely, so be sure to put that
in your letters to Santa.
In fact, ol' dBack has almost finished something like a gajillion missions for
TX (well, it sure seems like a gajillion...I'm starting to see the Terrain Editor
in my sleep). For those itching for new missions to play, TX oughta be your
bag.
"Sierra is closing Dynamix down and moving it lock, stock and barrel to
Seattle."
As far as I know, we're not going anywhere. Say what you will about Eugene,
but it is cheaper than the other Emerald City (although far-more hippie-infested).
"Dave is shacking up with Jeri Ryan from Star Trek: Voyager."
Sadly,
this rumor is untrue as well.
"Dynamix was eaten by a 60-foot radioactive squirrel."
This, believe it or not, is true! We got pictures to prove it! (http://tribesforum.sierra.com/tubb/Forum1/HTML/004993.html)!
Oh, the humanity!
And if Blake comes near me with a vacuum, I'm gonna break out the whuppin'
stick...the things I gotta put up with, I swear...
AGN3D
has posted an interview with Ritual's Berenger "Zor" Fish, talking
about his duties as level designer on their Quake III: Arena engine title Heavy
Metal: FAKK2 (thanks Frans).
sCary has posted his hands-on report with Q3Test version 1.09, which he was
lucky enough to try out over at his ShugaShack.
The new version has a number of changes, including a decreased weapon switch
time (450ms down from 600), a new animated machine gun (with reduced damage),
a new Railgun effect, and more.
We received an e-mail from ASC Games' Joel Reiff regarding the news posted
here the other night that their Unreal-engine title Werewolf: The Apocalypse
had been put on hiatus ( story).
According to him, the news was a misunderstanding, and the game has been delayed,
not cancelled, and is currently shooting for a 1st quarter 2000 release.
The always alert Frans sends word that
Epic has updated their UT
demo bug list with a new networking bug. Here's the scoop: The remote
server admin will crash your server with the error "failed to find object
'Class Any.None" if you attempt to admin a server running the "Entry"
level. Entry is a special level which is loaded when no other map is loaded.
Be sure to start your ucc server command line with a map filename as outlined
here, and you won't have any problems.
Pandemic Studios has released this week's Battlezone
II Shot of the Week, and this week's image shows off the previously unseen
"Dark Planet". Woo...creepy. Thanks to BZ2.com
for the tip.
Activision's official Soldier
of Fortune site has gone live, and sports a number of screenshots from Raven's
upcoming Quake II engine title (I'm not entirely sure how many, if any are actually
new, but they look new to me). Thanks Jacob.
GameFan has posted
a hands-on preview of Westwood Studios' 3D action/adventure game Nox, complete
with a number of new screenshots.
Monolith's official Odium site
has posted the demo for this adventure game, which is known overseas as Gorky
17 (thanks Frans). The demo is a whopping
80 meg, and includes a large portion of the first episode in the game.
The FM described in this morning's Out of the Blue has spread, and currently
none of loony's or my access numbers are working (it's just a little more FM
that allows me to make this update now). We're working like crazy on the
situation to get it fixed (or at least yelling like crazy on the phone at the
people who are working like crazy on the situation to get it fixed), and with a
little luck, hopefully normal updates will resume shortly.
AVault
has posted a version 1.01 patch for Force 21, Red Storm's 3D strategy game.
For such a small numerical increment, the patch is loaded with fixes and improvements,
so be sure to download it if you plan on playing the game.
Computer
Games Online has posted a preview of The Collective's third person, Unreal
engine title, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - The Fallen, complete with several new screenshots.
Also of note is GA-Source's
preview, which contains high-resolution images of the character designs, which
are pretty impressive looking, even to a jaded trekkie like myself.
Ritual's Mark Dochtermann updated his
.plan with an update on that Sin anime movie that was announced a long time
ago (hey, traditional animation takes time, you know): Yesterday we received
a small package from our good friends ADVFilms containing the latest trailer of the Sin Anime. I can't tell you how cool it
was for the entire Sin team to sit in the TV room and watch the carnage unfold
on the screen. There is nothing quite like Anime when it comes to futuristic
battles with hot animated babes and guys heads being blown apart. Even though
the crowd was well tempered by other Anime like Akira and Urotsukidoji, there
were a few scenes in the trailer that had everyone in the room going, "Ooooh!"
in unison, so you know it has to be good.
The movie is due out in the November/December timeframe and has a few twists
of its own compared to the original game. Blade, having been gunned down as
an innocent bystander years ago, is now half man, half machine. You won't have
any trouble picking him out though, because he still looks like Blade and kicks
some major Ass. Of course Elexis is still his chief nemesis, but now she is
joined by a very sexy looking "companion"/"assistant." I
think you know what that means. Here is the biggest shocker of them all, JC
is a girl. That's right, the original JC gets picked off early in the film (no
cheers from the crowd please ;) ) and his cousin, also called JC stands next
to Blade, out for revenge.
As we get closer, we will be sure to update you but if you are into Anime, I
highly recommend checking out http://www.advfilms.com/ for all your Anime needs.
Another update to the Unreal Technology
page adds two new bugs (thanks Frans).
Here they are: Direct3D
- We've seen very poor performance on TNTs in systems with only 64MB RAM.
The Direct3D driver appears to be using a lot of memory and is causing the
game to continously swap. We are working on a solution to this. Please keep
an eye on the Tech Page for updates.
Networking
- On some machines - usually with a Voodoo Banshee, non-dedicated servers
will return to the desktop at the end of the game, when the server attempts
to process and upload the ngWorldStats for the game. The only solution at
the moment is to turn off ngStats for the server, from the Stats menu.
Stomped has posted news that version 1.02
of Quake II for the Macintosh is available on Logicware's FTP.
The new version reworks the mouse code yet again, as well as adding a bunch of other
fixes. Thanks Squonkamatic. Word is a version 1.03 with integrated GameRanger
support should be released soon.
Epic's Tim Sweeney updated the Unreal Technology page again with this bit on hardware troubleshooting: More Hardware Troubleshooting
- We received some more confirmations of Unreal working better on TNT's with
the Creative Labs unified drivers using Glide than Direct3D. If you
have a Creative Labs TNT card and have having performance problems, try
that. Especially if you have under 128 megs of RAM.
- Lots of reports of slowdowns from users with Monster Sound's who have
enabled the "Advanced Options / Audio / Use3DHardware". If
you're having this slowdown, disable Use3DHardware and try again. Then
please email utbugs@epicgames.com
and let us know whether that helped. I've seen three confirmations
from users that their problems (huge slow down) went away after disabling
this.
- Jack and I have been tracking down the performance problems with the TNT
on 64-meg (and lower) machines. To our great surprise, it appears that
the TNT is keeping duplicate system memory copies of all our textures--we
saw system memory grow and shrink in almost exact proportion to our
"supposed" video memory texture allocations. Thus the game
uses an extra 12-26 megabytes of system memory--a very inefficient
allocation of resources. This is a big surprise, because the NVidia guys has
always told us this isn't the case.
Problem in my code?
I don't think so, but I'd love to be proven wrong. I'll follow up with
our henchmen at NVidia and Microsoft and see if we can track this down...
A new version 3.0 of the NOP
log parser is now available. The new version adds several new twists to this
program that can output stats from deathmatch servers in various forms. In
addition to new functions and features, the new release adds Unreal Tournament
support to the program's Q3Test support.
Mod Central Unreal has
posted some more mutators to add game types to the Unreal Tournament Demo. The
one described as the "biggie" is a mod called Soul Harvest, which
causes a "soul" to rise from a fragged player that can be collected
for an extra point. One of the side effects of this DM variation is that it
discourages camping, since it's not so easy to collect those souls from sniping
points.
IPlayGames Kingpin Map tutorial
Part 6 is online, following up the previous five chapters in this guide to
making levels for Xatrix' Quake II-engine life of crime shooter.
PC.IGN.COM previews Command and
Conquer: Renegade looking at Westwood's upcoming third-person action shooter
in the C&C universe. Thanks Ant.
Here's a little bit that outlines the hurdles that the game must overcome:
The ability of a license to transcend its original genre has been a topic
of discussion around here for a while. X-Com's Interceptor attempted it with
mixed results and the recent Warcraft Adventures was finally cancelled. If
anything, this proves that the ability to cross over into new fields is
apparently beyond the reach of most genre bound franchises. The key is in
preserving the concept of the original while adjusting the gameplay to suit the
limitations and possibilities of the new game's style. It looks like Renegade
will do just that.
Playing With the Big Kids
is the online version of an article that appeared in yesterday's print Newsday
(New York area newspaper) discussing the Unreal engine, licensing
arrangements, Unreal Tournament, and more. Thanks James.
The extensive map archive on I.Am.Team Fortress Classic
has been updated with 40 more new maps for the Team Fortress Classic add-on for
Half-Life. The maps are viewable though an interface that allows you to sort the
file listing.
The DooM forever page has the debut
public release of this conversion that attempts to recreate Doom using the Quake
engine. Thanks Jacek Fedoryński. The first release focuses on multiplayer play,
rather than single-player, and seems to offer bot support(!).
The Parsec Homepage has been updated with a
new Gallery section with
screenshots from this upcoming space shooter, as well as a
FAQ answering questions about the game.
The Blast Chamber Mapping Contest
is underway, looking to inspire map designers to create levels for this Quake II
mod.
There are two new Homeworld ladders on Clanladder.com,
a one-on-one
ladder, and a
teamplay ladder.
The daily thank you to Frans at 3D Action
Gamers for a chunk of these:
On occasion I've been able to share some stories of encounters with F.M., the
dreaded F'ing Magic that so often seems to be the cause, or cure, of PC
difficulties. Now I have come up with a new one that loony and I feel is a
defining moment in FM history: At some point last night I was unable to get the
site in a web-browser, and I assumed the server was down, even going so
far as to request a reboot. When I spoke to loony, however, it
became clear that the problem was on my end, because the site came up fine for
him. After a bunch of experimentation, it turns out that I am only able to
reach the site by using one of my ISP's ISDN lines in particular. If I use the
number I've previously used, I am unable to reach Blue's News, but I can
seemingly hit every other site on the Internet. The really odd part? None of
this seems to be happening on loony's end, and we live scant blocks away from
each other, and yup, use the same ISP. F.M., I tell you.
Link of the Day: MAMBO #5.
Thanks MxM. A little bit of midi, in my life... C'mon, crank up the volume and
whack out co-workers. you know you want to.
Image of the Day: Pyrite got a Quake III Arena symbol shaved in his
head. Again, the report offers no insight into the hairdos impact upon
dating prospects. Thanks Ryan.
Bonus Link: ZDNN 'Jesux' site called a hoax,
following up on yesterday's Bonus Link: "The Jesux page author, who claims
to be a Unix administrator, goes on to say that "Jesux was not intended as
a slam on anybody." He adds that he is a Christian himself." Thanks
Tim Kerby (first of many with this one).
AVault
has posted a version 1.03 patch for Sierra's Homeworld. Here's what it does for you:
- A problem with auto-detecting firewalls was fixed. Previously it would always
detect that you were behind a firewall.
- Previously, OpenGL was not available for any of the Nvidia TNT cards under
Windows9x. This was disabled due to driver problems under Win95. OpenGL is
now available for Win98 but not Win95.
- The Intel i740 is now more reliable under Direct 3D.
- To fix problems associated with Voodoo2 SLI configurations, gamers need
to visit http://www.glsetup.com/where.htm
and download version 1.0.0.107 of GLSetup. Homeworld ships with 1.06 but it
does not help with SLI users.. 1.07 does.
Despite the fact that they just posted a new preview of the game...well, yesterday,
PC.IGN is reporting that ASC
Games' planned Unreal-engine title Werewolf: The Apocalypse has been "put
on hold indefinitely, due to delays with game pushing it to next march."
Expect more to this story soon.
Xatrix' Ryan "Ridah" Feltrin sent along an e-mail letting us know
that he's released the version 1.21 patch and SDK for Kingpin (they're available
for download at 3DGamers).
Here's what he had to say: The Kingpin v1.21 patch and SDK is now available.
While this is an official patch, it may not work it's way onto the "official"
Kingpin page at Interplay, due to circumstances out of my
control. So please spread the good word my friends.
Unfortunately my Linux box is unavailable at this time, so the Linux port will
be somewhat delayed.
An update to the Unreal Technology Page
explains some of the Direct3D anomalies that people have been running into (thanks
Unreal Universe). Here's what it
says: We've been looking at the feedback on Direct3D performance and investigating
some strange reports. Recently, we've mainly been testing on 96-meg and 128-meg
machines (I have a Celeron 400, Jack Porter has a K6-2 450). On these machines,
TNT1 performance is good -- average 28 fps at 648x480, 25 fps at 800x600. The
TNT2 performance is significantly better.
However, upon removing some RAM and testing Direct3D on a 64-meg K6-2, the "precache"
time increased by about 5X, and performance dropped to a few frames per second.
These performance drops don't occur in the software renderer, and don't occur
in Glide. Something is going wrong between Unreal, Direct3D, and the TNT's Direct3D
driver, and we're investigating.
Overall, the feedback indicates a very wide variance in performance among TNT
users, much more so than with any other card. Our internal testing has indicated
this too; for example, we've found (and worked around) a lot of driver bugs
that only happen on one machine, and not others with otherwise similar configurations.
Don't Try This At Home Dept.: Some TNT users have reported that tweaking their
BIOS's "AGP Aperture Size" improves performance on 64-meg machines.
We have tried this and couldn't find any differences on our 64-meg test machine.
Others report that the Creative Labs unified drivers (with TNT Glide support)
outperform Direct3D on their cards. If anybody finds definite improvements or
workarounds, or has insight into what's happening, please email utbugs@epicgames.com
and let us know.
Frans of 3DGamers sends word that the
second Tread Marks demo has been released, and is available for download at
the official site. This
demo (which the site stresses is not a finished demo, but rather a publicly
available test) features two maps, and two tank types. 3DGamers has a
mirror up if the main download link is too slow for you.
id's David "Zoid" Kirsch made an appearance on IRC this evening to
gauge reactions to the announcement earlier that Quake III: Arena CTF wouldn't
be shipping with the grappling hook enabled (although again, the code is in
there). A full log is up on Elite
Strike, and here's a quick explanation of the decision (which wasn't made
lightly): No instant weapon switching--no grapple. Grapple worked in
Quake because you could chase--switch, launch, switch fire. You can't in Q2.
I didn't like how the grapple turned out in Q2. You couldn't chase grapple monkeys--they
were just gone if you didn't kill them immediately.
The
Shadow Company: Left For Dead demo page has a newer version of the playable
demo for Shadow Company than the one previously released. There's no word on
what's different in the new version, but its possibly substantial, since the new
file, at 39 MB is 7 MB larger than the previous release. Thanks again Frans at 3D Action Gamers.
Frans noticed the UT
Demo-Known Bugs list has moved to a separate page on the Epic site, and has
had a single item added to it about the server browser flicker: Networking
* People have noticed that the server browser now flashes the screenshot and the
server title every 5 seconds. This is the server being repinged every 5 seconds.
The 3dfx version did this as well but it did not cause flicker. It only does
this while browser is visible. It is NOT repinging servers once the browser is
no longer visible.
The Rogue Spear
support page has been updated, and now has three more frequently asked questions
(thanks Frans). The questions deal with
Riva 128 and Permidia 2 cards, as well as other sound and video issues.
EuroGamer
has posted an interview with Ritual Entertainment's Robert Atkins and Tom Mustaine,
talking to the art director and level designer for Heavy Metal: FAKK 2 about
their Quake III: Arena engine title. The interview also contains three new screenshots
from the game.
3DFiles has posted
the massive Drakan patch. This patch is jam packed with features, including
the new winsock based networking (instead of DirectPlay), and tons of gameplay
tweaks and fixes. The full list is posted along with the download.
Okay, so it's a little late, but here's
this week's Mail Bag! In this week's thrilling installment are comments
about the Unreal Tournament demo, more on consoles vs. PCs, that GeForce 256
card that should be out soon, the cancelled Babylon 5 game, and of course, whole
bunches more. Swing
over and take a read.
Blizzard has released patches for both
StarCraft, and StarCraft: Brood War (Brood War owners need only download the
second patch, not both). You can snag them from Blizzard's
site, through the Battle.net auto-update, or at AVault,
where they have local copies of both files. No details are available, but it's a safe assumption that these patches fix bugs n' stuff.
3D GameForce
has posted an entertaining interview with the divine Graeme of id Software,
talking about (surprise, surprise) Quake III: Arena (you know, that game they're
working on over there instead of sleeping). There's a few goofy answers in here,
including this one which gave me a headache trying to figure out (and yes, I've seen Twin Peaks): Mark:
Any specific novel features you can now reveal?, any more details on how
the single player side of Q3A will work?
Graeme: The owls are not what they seem.
GameSpot
UK has posted their preview of Gabriel Knight: Blood of the Sacred, Blood
of the Damned, offering a look at this fully 3D adventure game from Sierra,
complete with a number of new screenshots.
id's Graeme Devine updated his
.plan with some thoughts on the grappling hook and its relationship to Quake
III: Arena CTF as well as word that Jan Paul, author of the Gladiator bot is
helping out with the bot code in Q3A. You'll note that he says the code for
the grappling hook is in there, but that the levels shipping with the game don't
use it. Here's what he had to say: Ah, grappling hook hoopla – when
I read about the hoopla over UT grapple CTF I knew we’d have a similar
impact (BTW, believe it or not, there is room for both games in the universe!).
The grapple code is still going to be in Q3A (through bot reachability and so
forth), it’s just not on the maps we’re shipping with the product.
The CTF maps we have in there are designed for non-grapple use. CTF and grapple
are not tied implicitly together.
Mr. Elusive (aka Jan Paul) is over here from The Netherlands helping finalize
the game. He is of course the famed author of the Gladiator bot for Quake II.
As some of you have been guessing he’s been working with John Cash on the
bots in Q3A. We’re very pleased to have Jan’s expertise on Q3A.
id's John Carmack updated his
.plan with his response to a question posted to a Mac OpenGL programmer's
mailing list dealing with "display lists" and how OpenGL handles them.
It's very technical in nature, but here's an excerpt that explains a bit of
what he's talking about: In a busy Q3 battle, the triangle count may
be split roughly evenly between character models and world geometry. Going from
an empty scene to a pitched battle can result in a 50% performance drop if you
are triangle limited. Not great, but livable.
If we kept the same ratios and designed for geometry acceleration with all the
static world geometry in display lists, then the empty scene could have 4x the
geometry and still be running the same speed. However, current OpenGL display
lists can't really accelerate high quality skinned characters, so when an equal
number of character polygons was in scene and passed through normal direct rendering,
the performance would drop to 20% of the original. Unacceptable.
So, either you would have to use significantly different polygon counts in characters
and the world, or some new API features would need to be defined. Nvidia has
a skinning extension that gives some benefit, but still requires a character
to be broken up into one static list per bone pair, instead of a single list
for the entire character.
This HearMe Press Release
announces that Mpath has acquired Resounding
Technology, the Massachusetts-based developer of Roger Wilco, the software
that can add real-time voice chat to any multiplayer game played over the
Internet. In recognition of the impact of the acquisition, Mpath is changing its
name to HearMe ( www.hearme.com), and this
quote from the press release makes it clear that they view this as a move not
just aimed at the world of gaming: The acquisition of Resounding and the
accompanying name change from Mpath Interactive to HearMe better position the
company to capitalize on significant trends in the Internet industry that are
opening the door for mass consumer adoption of live voice. First, HearMe will
take advantage of an evolving area of Web usage focused on communications,
collaboration, and community that is already being driven by the increasing
popularity of e-mail, chat and instant messaging.
There is also word on
the Roger Wilco page that a program
called Rapman for Roger Wilco is
now available, offering buddy lists for RW users. Thanks ripsaw.
There are four new
Halo screenshots on Halo.Bungie.Org that seem to be scans of shots that
appeared in a print version of Computer
Gaming World. Saw that on The Shugashack.
Halo is Bungie's upcoming third-person multiplayer action game.
Redwood's Quake 3 Arena Status
is a hands-on report after a few more hours playtesting a more recent build of
Q3Test than the public version during a visit to id software. The article
describes what's new and different, including the newly-added music, though he
points out that "Q3Test 1.09 hasn't even been built yet in any form so it's
not really close to coming out."
nV News'
Tweaking Quake 3 Test Graphics has been updated with info on how changes in
version 1.08 of Q3Test impact performance compared to 1.07, along with all the
latest intelligence on how to improve your Q3Test framerate.
Thresh's FiringSquad's
"What's right with UT" is an editorial talking about what's got
them so impressed about Unreal Tournament from playing the demo, examining the
demo's strengths, and making some comparisons to Q3Test.
Though not reflected on the Netscape Netcenter
as of this writing, this
Netscape FTP directory has version 4.7 of Netscape Communicator. Also, while
the Winamp.com homepage similarly does not
mention it, this NullSoft FTP directory
has version 2.5d of the now-freeware Winamp mp3 player. Thanks Mike Rutkas.
Thanks Frans at 3D Action Gamers:
- Word on the Qtracker Homepage
is that this server-browser is no longer shareware, but has reverted to
freeware...
- Act Two - No. 84
is the new Diablo II screenshot of the week showing off a Barbarian, Amazon,
and Necromancer fighting over a dozen skeletons in a shot that shows off the
lighting effect in the new Town Portal animation...
- GameSpot's Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun Game Guide
is online to help if you're stuck for S' in this RTS. Thanks Frans at 3D Action
Gamers...
- NameMaker offers an on-line
resource to create extended ASCII names for games that support them. The
website is done up in an amusing news site send-up style...
- There's a new Need for Speed High Stakes
car for download. Vroom! Thanks Moondog...
Ooops, another late start, got a little too caught up in playing the new UT demo
last night (I should try and cover up, but they have those darn stats online
making an alibi difficult to pull off). Fun stuff.
Link of the Day: Nitrous Express 15lb. Bottle Explosion.
As John Guajardo, who sent this along, comments: "This guy has Darwin Award
written all over him."
Story of the Day: Tobacco giant tells smokers it loves them.
Thanks Eric "Rush" Bennett. "The recorded message, while
proclaiming its love for B&W consumers, also uses the line to take a swipe
at its competitors. 'By the way, the other tobacco companies hate you and think
you're ugly,' the voice says. 'They told us so.'"
Bonus Story: (Almost on-topic): Here's Linux for fundamentalists.
Yup, Jesux.
Thanks AllanOne and marley.
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