Archived News:
Bungie's official Halo site has undergone
a redesign, and now contains the MacWorld movie in three different quicktime
formats, small, medium, and large (which are 5.6, 11.6, and 26.6 meg respectively).
The movies are all in Quicktime 4 format, and are of a much higher quality than
the 50 meg one that's been floating around.
There's an Exclusive Codename Eagle Demo on GA-Source
with a playable demo of Take 2 Interactive
and Refraction Games' upcoming
action/adventure game of sea, land, and air combat. The demo is about 31 MB and
offers a single level with five weapons and a number of other usable items as
well as drivable vehicles like a motorbike, an armored car, and an airplane.
This week's Diablo II shot
of the week has been posted by Blizzard, and this week's shot shows the
Paladin duking it out with a camouflaged Razorback (thanks Diablo
II.net).
Activision has
announced that the Playstation version of Quake II has shipped, and should
be available in stores soon. The PSX port features 19 levels, dual shock and
PSX mouse compatibility, as well as a new enemy.
Epic's Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart updated his
.plan again, with details on a "runes" style system he's working
on for Unreal, as well as details on the new interface for Mutators. Here's
an excerpt: I'm working on a rune style system for UT. Instead of "runes"
I'm calling them Relics. Anyone working on runes for UT will probably want to
hold up and wait until the Relic system is ready. It'll allow mod authors to
quickly make new types of Relics that server admins can download and add to
their games. I'll have a set of guidelines for writing new Relics. The Relics
may not ship with UT since they'll need a good bit of testing for balancing.
Relics will be the "official" method of adding runes to maps and can
be added to any gametype (DeathMatch, CTF, etc).
GT Interactive has released a
patch for their literally just-released action racing game Driver that fixes
all kinds of bugs that managed to make their naughty way into the shipping product.
Thanks to AVault for the tip, and they've got a
local copy of the file up if you need an alternate download site.
Apple has announced their new lineup of
iMac computers, which now sport faster processors (350 or 400 MHz G3s) as
well as a new beefier sound system from Harman/Kardon, ATI RAGE 128 video cards
(with AGP 2x), an optional DVD-ROM, and even compatibility with their AirPort wireless networking
system. Thanks Jacek Fedoryñski
for the tip.
Epic's Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart updated his
.plan with a quote from NetGames USA's Craig Sparks regarding the way bots
are handled in their ngWorldStats tracking
system. Here's the scoop: There has been some concern over stat padding
using bots in ngWorldStats. Bot activity in ngWorldStats is ignored for the
accumulation of individual player stats. Here is the word from Craig Sparks
(President of NetGames, USA):
"A individual games "ngStats" will show the bot kills and match
up tables, etc. But that player's ngWorldStats totals and stats only take into
account human vs. human interaction. All bot information is ignored for those
totals. The ELO rating system (which will be documented in the coming days)
only takes into account wins/losses/frags/etc. against human players."
AVault
has posted two new shots from Daikatana (taken at this weekend's ION Storm press
reception). One shows off the game's final, "Alcatraz" episode, while
the other shows off one of Romero's favorite enemies.
Unreal Universe has posted a new
screenshot from ASC Games upcoming
Unreal-engine lupine action game, Werewolf: The Apocalypse--Heart of
Gaia--Scourge of Darkness--Legacy of the Night--Terror... oh yeah where was I?
The shot is one of three they've gotten their claws on, and they plan on posting
the other two over the next couple of days.
Olivier Demangel, project manager on Omikron: The Nomad Soul passing along word
that they've just completed work on a playable demo for this upcoming
third-person action game. As for when it would be made available, Oliver says,
"I think it will be available at the end of October."
The OpenGL DooM Legacy
page has a new beta 9 of version 1.2 of OpenGL Doom Legacy, the OpenGL port
of Doom Legacy, the updated version of Doom, id Software's classic shooter. The
new release fixes some bugs, adds a game launcher, and improved Glide support.
Thanks Frans at 3D Action Gamers.
There's a new patch for the just-released FreeSpace2 that fixes a problem on
Win95a/OSR2 systems that causes the game to repeatedly ask for CD #2 on
installation. Parallax Online has
instructions how to get the new version 1.01 through the FreeSpace2
auto-updater, where it has been available for a couple of days (even if the
install didn't work properly because of the problem the new version addresses),
and now Freespace2.com and The Adrenaline Vault Downloads
have the patch as a separate download. Thanks Frans at 3D Action
Gamers.
There's a KISS Psycho Circus Interview
on CheckOut Games offering a Q&A with some members of Third Law Interactive,
including Mark Morgan (artist), David Namaksy (level designer) and Mike Maynard
(programmer) about progress on their upcoming LithTech-engine first-person
shooter based on Todd McFarlane's comic based on the (hopefully) made up
exploits of the world's most made up rock band. Here's a quote from Artist Mark
Morgan on KISS' level of involvement with the project: KISS has given us
liberty to direct Psycho Circus as we see fit. Gene has himself seen the
game and was pleased with what we had done at that point in time. Obviously,
with any license, there are certain guidelines that must be followed, but so
far, nothing we've designed steps outside those boundaries. I assume it's safe
to say that KISS will let us work freely unless we step on someone's toes, which
we have no intention of doing.
IMG Magazine
has posted an interview with Kathy Tafel, a member of Apple's developer relations
group, talking about the Macintosh as a gaming platform, as well as her background
in the industry.
According to Well-Rounded
News, publisher Codemasters has purchased the rights to two titles originally
owned by Sierra: Navy SEALs, an Unreal engine tactical shooter, and Yosemite
Entertainment's massively multiplayer RPG, The Realm. Navy SEALs is based on
the novels of Richard Marcinko, a former SEAL officer, and has been delayed
from its original ship date of mid-2000, to an as of yet unannounced time (thanks
Chris Morris).
The Q2PMP has posted a message
from Raven's Brian Shubat regarding the interchangability of Quake III: Arena
and Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force player models in deathmatch (originally
posted to Raven's
Forums). Here's what he had to say: We are going to attempt that
Q3A and Star Trek models be interchangeable and compatible between each program.
That is to say when it comes to multiplayer deathmatch there shouldn't be a
problem. Single player is a different matter altogether and Voyager will require
many additional animations from Q3A models.
Billy "experienced" Wilson has posted an interview with Patrick Moynihan
on Voodoo
Extreme, talking to The Whole Experience's designer about their hardware-intense
FPS Experience. The interview features questions from Epic Games' Tim Sweeney,
as well as a collection of previously released images at the bottom.
According to FGNOnline,
the Terminal Reality developed and GOD published title Nocturne (a creepy adventure
game) has gone gold, and will be released to retailers this Halloween (just
a few scant weeks away).
AVault's David Laprad was one of the members of the press that attended last
weekend's press reception at ION Storm, and he's posted a
big update on all things Daikatana. It's quite detailed, and contains descriptions
of the sidekicks (who can be controlled via a voice menu that sounds similar
to TRIBES or Unreal Tournament), as well as the character statistics system,
and word that, "the core content is complete, with only testing and bug
fixes remaining." There's also three new shots for your viewing enjoyment.
The Halo movie that was originally shown at the NYC MacWorld expo is included
on the latest edition of Computer Gaming World, and has been uploaded to Bungie.org,
as well as 3DGamers
Archives. The Movie is big, but very high quality, and if you've never seen
the game moving, you should definitely check it out. And for the record, the
movie is 100% in-game.
GameSpy.com's The
Future of Action Gaming offers opinions from both Valve's Gabe Newell and
Epic's Tim Sweeney on the subject of where the genre is heading, along with one
of the most horrifying accompanying graphics since the animated John Carmack
moving mouth image some time back. The article is the second in a three part
series, the first focused on The Future of
Strategy with a planned third installment to look at RPGs. Here's a bit that
quotes both Gabe and Tim on the impact of technology: Finally, Sweeney
feels that "Networking, RPC, security, and synchronization tech will
improve and make huge distributed games more possible" and that
"Eventually things will go to multi-server, seamless huge environments (at
least in games where that is desirable.)"
Gabe Newell felt that the single most important issue facing game companies
today, and the one that developers will have to solve before pushing the
technology much farther, is the issue of scalability: making games that will
work across multiple platforms from the past to the future.
There's a report on Thresh's FiringSquad
giving their impressions of the Quake III Arena Bus Tour after it recently passed
by their offices. The article offers conversation with id Software, a complete
rundown on the new levels, and a whole load of photos.
Monolith's Mike Dussault updated
his .plan with a bit on the latest cool effect the programmers at Monolith
have added to the LithTech engine (along with a comment on how the programmers
at LithTech Licensee Third Law Interactive are adding coolness of their own).
The subject at hand is "lightmap animations," which sound pretty damn
cool, if not downright meniscus: The coolest thing that got in lately is
lightmap animations. Basically, we can now get shadowed effects for a bunch of
things in the environment:
- When doors open, light floods out.
- Flickering lights in the environment cast shadows.
- Keyframed objects and lights cast shadows on things.
- As the sun rotates over the world, the shadows on everything move.
I'll be working on Certain Cool Enhancements to this next week!
There's a new sniper mutator on Unreality
that adds rules applicable to sniper-only combat in addition to the removal of
the other weapons, including "enhancements" as rewards for kills
(represented by "cheesy icons") and on-screen messages detailing what
kind of shot you just made (head, torso...).
Rich's Project Warehouse has
version 0.85 of The Jumbot
for Half-Life. The new release of this AI opponent doesn't offer any new
features, but is a bug fix addressing two problems that could cause version 0.8
to crash.
There's a new version of Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS) for Quake II on the Axis Productions
website. In addition to some bug fixes, the new release of this server-side
modification adds a capturelimit, an id command, autotext, and a rock, paper,
scissors game-within-a-game.
A new version 3.60 of Name Maker Studio
is now available, offering an updated non-beta release of this program that
offers colored and fun name support in games that support extended ASCII
characters. Thanks Jacek Fedoryński (speaking of extended ASCII characters).
Microsoft sends word of a MechWarrior 3 Meltdown Tournament
to be held on the MSN Gaming Zone offering
over $100,000 in prizes(!) including four brand new Harley Davidson Fatboy
motorcycles. Vroom!
Kickass Gaming Network Contests
is giving away of a copy of Microsoft's Close Combat Trilogy in conjunction with
their review
of this wargame series.
Thanks Frans at 3D Action Gamers:
In the fine Brazilian tradition of complications having complications, a couple
of follow-ups on follow-ups: I briefly posted a follow-up yesterday about the Doom GPL release ( story)
theorizing that the original story was inaccurate in saying that it would now
be possible to sell games based on the Doom source
under the GNU General Public License,
but it turns out this is indeed the case, so the correction was incorrect. Tim Aidley pointed this out so quickly
I just yoiked the follow-up, but I wanted to note it here in case you saw it in
the brief time it was up. Also, A whole load of Tom Clancy fans wrote in saying
they do not believe the Rainbow Six novel was based on the game, but no one seems
to have concrete proof, so lets just say tie goes to the runner or something.
The important thing is to keep the darn terrorists from winning (to complete
this bizarro follow up with another Brazil reference, it can be pointed out that terrorism is
due to "bad sportsmanship").
Another follow-up I should have mentioned yesterday is that I
replaced Sunday's Link of the Day when I was reminded that it was posted
previously by loony. I actually cooked up a simple LoD archive listing a while back, and have somehow lost the HTML (doh!), which
could be helpful in detecting these dupes before they happen, but I
should just run those bad-boys through the "Search!" box to
double-check, since it can locate URLs just as easily as text (a little Blammo
tip of the day for you). Anyway, sorry about the dupe. A full compliment, complete with
a bonus, to help make up for it today: Link of the Day: Return to the
Planet of the Quakes a PlanetQuake/Planet of the Apes comic strip. What I'm
supposed to have to do with the PlanetYada dealie is a mystery to me, but I guess it's artistic
license.
Story of the Day: Robber Uses Clear Plastic Bag As Mask.
Thanks DarkStar17 and Robert Kee.
Bonus Story: UT
Players Cleared Of Fraud Charges. Nope, if it was really Unreal Tourney, it
would be posted somewhere in the news above. Thanks Lorien at Gamer's Alliance.
The official site for American McGee's Alice
has been updated again, and now contains a new riddle, as well as the answer
to last week's (which states the already public fact that the game is played
from a third person perspective). Thanks beachbum.
Stomped has posted a brief e-mail they
received from John Carmack regarding what things you'll be able to use the new
voting feature on in Quake III: Arena (see his worklog below). According to
John, as of right now it's just the specific map, the ability to restart the
map, and the ability to kick someone, although he says he can easily add other
things if necessary.
John Carmack updated his
.plan this evening with another installment of his worklog. Here's the scoop: *
allow cg_thirdPerson and cg_thirdPersonRange in games
* added execed .cfg files to journal file
* single pass plasma explosion effect to save overdraw
* rescaled and sized gib and mark blood to save a lot of overdraw
* fixed cg.time < snapshot time on vid_restart
* cl_showSend network debugging tool
* back to requiring a before commands on the console to distinguish them from
chat messages. Tab completion automatically adds the slash.
* new tab command completion with complete to longest common, multiple match
listing, complete first token, etc
* separate version check for game/cgame in addition to system
* show r_finish in gfxinfo
* never show self as attacker icon
* callvote vote
Caller automatically votes yes
vote has a 30 second timeout
each client can only call 3 votes a level
vote is displayed on screen with totals
* renamed cg_gun to cg_drawGun
* box cull triangle soup models
Epic's Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart updated his .plan with
word on why server operators running the Unreal Tournament Demo should not set
the player limit higher than 32, at least using the current release. Here's the
poop: I saw a CTF server running with a 50 playerlimit. Running servers
with more than 32 players is a no-no because there are hardcoded assumptions
about the max playerlimit. Maybe I'll talk with Steve about increasing it to 64.
(I guess there isn't really any reason to choose programmer numbers like 32 and
64 for something like this.) I seem to recall at one point there being a very
good reason for us keeping it at 32. Certainly server performance would
be...ah...highly questionable at 64 players :) Anyway, running with more than 32
in the current demo will probably cause a lot of odd error messages to get
logged when the 33rd person joins.
ION Storm's Daily
Informant has posted an update regarding this weekend's press reception
at their offices. There's a couple of pictures from the event, as well as one
new screenshot from each of ION's upcoming games (Deus Ex, Daikatana, and Anachronox).
Zombie's official SpecOps
II site has two new additions...first up is a new shot of all the weapons,
as well as a caption that reads, "SpecOps 2 is due to ship in Nov."
on their news page.
Up until now, Q4 1999 was the only public date mentioned. Also new are two new
shots on their Mission
Briefing page, showing off their North Korea and Thailand missions. Thanks
to Frans at 3DGamers for the tip.
VideoGames.com
has posted a preview with five images (the first to the best of my knowledge)
from Oddworld Inhabitants' Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee. The game at one point
was being developed using the Unreal engine, but they switched in favor of their
own, in-house technology, and is being made for the PlayStation 2 and "PCs
that don't exist yet."
Sierra has announced a new RPG called Arcanum, that's in development by Troika
Games. The title is an RPG in the pure sense, and Gamecenter
has posted an interview with one of the game's developers, as well as the first
batch of images from the game (early concept work for the most part) and even
a bit of the backstory.
E-tailer Checkout.com
has posted an interview with Rod Fung, producer of Sierra's SWAT 3. The inevitable
similarities to Rainbow Six are discussed, as is the oddball history of the
SWAT series (from adventure to RTS to FPS).
GameSpot
UK has posted their preview of Bungie's Halo (which is so high on my list
of anticipated games that it's got its own designated driver). The preview is
fairly skimpy, but its loaded with images, including a bunch of concept art
(that looks new to me), and a bunch of new, if somewhat odd (the gamma appears
to be funky) screenshots. There are 19 images in all, and naturally they're highly
recommended.
According to this
bit of news on AVault, Intel has officially announced the name of their
upcoming high-end processor that was previously code-named Merced. The new processor
is officially called the Itanium, and is on schedule for a mid-2000 release.
TSR (which was recently acquired by Hasbro) has posted the
first bit of details about their two upcoming pen and paper RPGs based on
the world of Diablo II, including descriptions, monster artwork, and more. Thanks
DiabloII.net.
GA-Source
has posted a brief Q&A with Vince Farquharson of Computer Artworks, the
developers of the title Evolva, which is one of the first games to fully support
NVIDIA's GeForce 256 chipset. The Q&A is the first place I've seen word
that a special version of the game (titled Evolva: Scout) has been developed
for OEMs, and will be bundled with the Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihiliator.
Two big hardware announcements took place this morning. First up, is Creative
Labs, who announced two boards based on NVIDIA's GeForce 256 chipset, the 3D
Blaster Annihilator and Annihilator Pro (press release at 3DGPU).
The Annihilator Pro is the same as the standard board, only with 32MB of double
data rate RAM on board. Also announced this morning is Diamond's new MX400 sound
card, which suprisingly enough is not powered by an Aureal chip like its predecessors,
but instead the ESS Technology Canyon3D chip. A press release is up on GA-Source,
and a full preview of the hardware is up on Thresh's
Firing Squad.
CaveNews
has posted a Q&A with Cavedog's Greg MacMartin, talking about their recent
decision to let go a large portion of their design team (thanks VE). Here's
an excerpt which sheds some light on this decision: ...what it came down
to was this: The company decided that finishing the engine as soon as possible
was VITAL....and because of this, they wanted to do whatever it took to achieve
that. It was an extremely difficult decision for management to make, but it
was decided that without an entire design team on board it could allow the programmers
to finish the technology in the most efficient way possible.
A new Adrenaline Vault Editorial
written by Jane Jensen is titled A Love Letter, To: Sierra, From: The last
dinosaur on the block. The article, by this designer on Gabriel Knight 3,
attempts to answer "the question of the moment" on the heels of the
recent cuts and reorganization at Sierra: Are adventure games dead? Here's a
bit: Does that mean there’s no room for good, in-depth story-telling in
this business? No. Though I do think the gaming industry faces a serious,
serious challenge: to reach out to the kinds of players who would prefer
exploration and story over twitch and violence. Let’s face it -- we (and now I
presume to speak for adventure devotees everywhere) are not going to get some
joystick jockey’s heart and soul. Let him go. Send him positive thoughts. But
our very own audience does exist.
There's a new Giants movie on
PC.IGN.COM with new gameplay footage from Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Interplay
and PlanetMoon Studios' upcoming third-person action game. The new movie is 14
MB, and Fredrik from Kabuto.net, who was
kind enough to send along this news, also sends along his description of the
movie, that offers: "some very cool scenes of the Reaper Sea Dragon
attacking a bridge, lots of new shots of new monsters and the suave effects in
Giants and much more."
PlanetBattlezone has posted
what's described as an "unofficial" patch for Pandemic studio's
recently released demo for BattleZone 2. The unofficial Battlezone II demo patch
collects many of the established work-arounds for problems with the demo, and
provides changes to pilot handling, joystick support, and the demos included
editor.
There are a few new Nocturne
Screenshots on GameSpy.com showing off the later episodes of TRI's upcoming
action/horror game.
Optimizers has posted a
collection of no less than 80 new maps for Kingpin: Life of Crime, Xatrix'
gangsta-extravaganza. The maps are meant to be a resource to other authors, as
many represent experiments and works in progress, and the whole shebang also
includes a 9 MB texture file.
Synchroplay has posted a new skin pack
for Starsiege TRIBES that offers more than a gross of skins (146 to be exact)
for Dynamix' mutiplayer teamplay first-person shooter.
Beta Bites has had a redesign, and to
celebrate they are giving away a bunch of goodies all week long. The prizes will
be changing all through the week.
Thanks Frans at 3D Action Gamers
for help with what turns out to be a large list for a Monday morning:
Turns out a comment yesterday ( story)
about Tom Clancy's
Rainbow Six that I've made many times in the past is incorrect, it turns out the book is actually based on the
game, not the reverse.
Thanks Rogue Spear Retreat for
the clarification.
Wow, there were an awful lot of folks on the ball with the font sizing issue I
raised yesterday (I should have asked sooner, it's been driving me crazy).
Thanks to the many who wrote in pointing out that using the Eudora (yes Eudora
is the culprit again) with the "Use Microsoft's Viewer" option checked
will cause the font size setting in Eudora to override MSIE, so to avoid having
Eudora change your default browser font size, you either have to switch off the
MS viewer, or ensure you are using the same font size setting in MSIE and under
the Eudora's Font menu.
Get well soon wishes to my pal MrCoffee who is recuperating after being hit
by a car this weekend. Sounds like everything will eventually be fine
("luckily" he got away with just some nastily broken bones), but he's
offline for a while, so I guess those used to seeing the two of us pop into
servers together will just have me to contend with me alone for a while now
(though my brother, WalterEgo, has been playing some UT, so maybe I'll manage to
team up with him some).
Link of the Day: Official FoxTrot Web Site,
which finally has the Quake-related strip that recently ran in papers (the Sept.
20 strip if it's moved when you read this). Thanks Andy.
Story of the Day: Coke Employee Fired For Taking Pepsi Challenge
Thanks DNapalm.
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