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).
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