Archived News:
As promised earlier tonight, the Mac version of the final Quake III Arena demo has been released on the official site.
Here is a local copy of the demo (45.8 MB) with a couple of mirrors.
id Software Designer Graeme Devine updated
his .plan with good news for eager Macintosh owners: Mac demo will be
out tonight. Mac full version is also complete.
Future
of Teamplay on GameProWorld is a four-page feature that examines teamplay,
starting with a bit of history, examining some variants, and as the title
suggests, casting an eye towards teamplay's future. It's an interesting piece,
quoting Valve's Gabe Newell and 3D Realms' George Broussard, though a couple of
facts are a little garbled, perhaps due to a time lag between when the article
was written and published, as it refers to Unreal Tournament as a future
release, expects TF2 by the end of the year, and talks of plans for TRIBES
Extreme, even though it has been announced the game has been cancelled.
The Adrenaline Vault News
reports that Daikatana will not make it out in time for Christmas, quoting ION
Storm's John Kavanagh as saying: "After much effort, we finally have Daikatana
to the point where we can say we have a great game on our hands. Unfortunately,
we are too late for Christmas, but as always, we have put quality first. I
realize this is frustrating to anyone supporting this title, but I'm sure you
will agree it is imperative that we begin building the reputation of Ion Storm
as a premier quality developer."
20 Questions For
Darrin Hart on the Mushroom, is a legitimate interview of the sort
they occasionally run on this usually satirical website. Darrin creates
animations for the lead character and other supporting characters for F.A.K.K.2,
Ritual Entertainment's upcoming Quake III-engine action/adventure game. The
Q&A was conducted in July, but is not very time sensitive, and so does not
really seem dated.
Star Trek: Creative has posted an interview with Eric Dallaire of Presto Studios, writer and game designer on their recently completed 3D adventure Star Trek: Hidden Evil. The article looks back at how the game turned out, the public's feedback, and briefly examines Presto's future plans.
In anticipation of their Daikatana chat tonight ( story), CheckOut.com has posted a brief interview with John Romero, covering his imminent game Daikatana, as well as a few other topics. Thanks Daikatana HQ.
The appropriately named DarkStoneNews.com has some news about the 3D role-playing game, reporting that instead of developing an expansion pack, Delphine will be releasing a new set of quests and their quest editor for DarkStone around the turn of the year. There are a couple of screenshots to show off the editor.
id Software's Robert Duffy updated his
.plan with word that he'll be releasing a patch for QERadiant soon addressing
some common problems (as well as adding an ASE to MD3 converter). Here's the
scoop: I should be releasing an update to the editor soon. There are a
few outright crashes I have fixed and I am looking into some other issues. If
you are seeing stability problems, it is more than likely a driver issue. I
am doing what I can to get these resolved.
We are seeing quite a few reports of fullbright levels when you preview new
levels in the game. If you are having this problem can you drop an e-mail to
tools@idsoftware.com along with your
video configuration and whether or not bringing the console down solves the
problem ( press ~ to bring down the console and see if the level lights ).
We will also be re-releasing the .shader files soon. The .shader files in the
shipping PK3 and the ones I included in baseq3/scripts include a lot of unused
( and in many cases non-functional ) shaders that are left over from the entire
project. We are going to trim that down to the actual shaders used in the game.
'q3data.exe' will also be in the update which will allow you to convert ASE's
to MD3's. This should help getting new player and map models in the mods.
A couple of items that slipped through the cracks in the newsdesk earlier today (anyone got some virtual kit to seal up this virtual desk we have here? err... nevermind :-) PC.IGN has posted an interview on Anarchy Online, talking to lead programmer Martin Amor about Funcom's upcoming online 3D sci-fi RPG. The sci-fi setting means that the traditional magic system has been replaced by something called nano-technology, as this quote describes:
It is true that AO will not have a true magic system but we have tried
to keep the magic element by using nano technology. Players can develop
skills in learning and using nano formulas that control a swarm of small
nano-bots which are everywhere in the environment. Highly skilled players
will have a bigger swarm of nano-bots around them at all times which they
can use to produce direct damage, shields or order them to create items,
etc. The nano-bots can also be used to enhance certain weapons or invade
other players like a virus or parasite.
There's a triplet of new RUNE screenshots on 3D-Unlimited, showing off some (dark) scenes from Human Head's game of third-person Viking combat.
Another RPG interview, as GA-RPG has a talk with Neverwinter Nights producer Trent Oster about the AD&D based role-playing game, which is being developed by BioWare and Black Isle Studios.
More screenshots too, as GA-Source has posted a square nine screenshots of Evolva, the colorful action/strategy game in development by Computer Artworks.
Just in time to perk up a slow afternoon comes this
week's edition of the Blue's News Mail Bag! In this edition are some truly
tasteless (but very funny) letters, as well as the meaning of Bleem, some Blue's
News (and GameSpy) history, and lots more. Hop
on by and take a gander.
The Vault Network has posted a
profile of Chris Taylor, featuring a brief Q&A with the Dungeon Siege
designer and Total Annihilation Creator. As no real information has been announced
about their game as of yet, the questions are all about his background in the
industry.
Q-Workshop-3 has posted an
interview with Paul Jaquays, talking to the level designer about his work
on Quake III Arena, including some specific questions about level design, and
some comparison questions to previous games he's worked on.
During their "tour" of Australia, id Software's Paul Steed and Tim Willits stopped by GameSpot AU for an interview, a somewhat free-form chat about all things Quake III Arena. Among the topics discussed are talking to the bots, features that got chopped, copy protection, the female characters, the inanity of "Trinity", and much more. Here's one intriguing quote about the Bones character:
Tim Willits: The secret character in the game, the one no-one has found
yet, is, well, you know how you can play Bones, well there's the
Fem-bot. That's on this side.
Ed Dawson: Yeah? How do you unlock it?
Tim Willits: Well, it's a secret.
Paul Steed: Yeah we'll put all that out.
CheckOut SpeakOut! is holding a
live chat session with ION Storm's John Romero and Stevie "KillCreek"
Case today at 8:00 PM EST (7:00 CST). The session is referred to as a Daikatana
pre-release chat, and obviously enough, will focus on ION's imminent
era-spanning Quake II-engine shooter.
id Software's Tim Willits and Paul Steed participated in another
spontaneous IRC session that occurred after the Australian launch event the
other day, and Multiplayer United Sydney Australia LAN
Gamers has posted a log of the informal unmoderated chat. One tidbit
mentioned along the way is word that Q2DM1 (The Edge) will be ported to Q3A.
The OnTheWay Quake 2 server utility
page has the release of version 1.00 of the Quake III Arena version of this
front-end that makes it easier for a server operator to set up a Q3A server,
offering automatic level rotation, easy configuration of gameplay and server
options, the ability to save multiple server profiles, and more. The new version
includes a level preview window.
Black Hand of MPU is home of the BH Q3A
Demo Helper, a simple system tray utility to assist in the recording of demos in
Quake III Arena by assigning demos unique names automatically as part of its
one-touch operation.
Q3Logger Homepage
has the debut release (beta 1) of Q3Logger, a freeware utility to parse Quake
III Arena game logs and create several pages of HTML output offering statistical
analysis of the logged games. There is some sample
output from the program here.
The ClanRing Mod Development Home
has the release of CRMod++ 5.1. The new release of this competition modification
for Quake offers some new features like support for up to 10
admin codes (so that you can give different codes to different people, and if a
code leaks you know who leaked it). Included with version 5.1 is DeQuake,
a utility for converting files with extended characters to normal text files (so that you can actually read player "fun" names in the log).
The Webdog page has been updated with the
news that the glitch in the new release mentioned yesterday ( story)
has been cleared up, and that a fixed new version of this website watchdog
utility is now available.
MPU Tournament Registrations
are underway, offering Australian Quake players a chance to compete in a four on
four team tournament this weekend. In more competition-related news, The Online Gamers Association
(OGA) is now accepting entrants from outside of Europe.
Epic's Brandon "BlueMarine" was in New York yesterday appearing on the
Pseudo Online Network, so loonyboi and I
managed to hook up with him for dinner last night to catch up on what he's up
to. It's not really worth sharing how we got to this moment, but at one point in
the conversation, loony made up an example off the top of his head suggesting that yesterday was the eighth anniversary of the release of the
first Commander Keen game by id Software. This struck a familiar chord in me, as
I've been poking through the year-old archives recently for various reasons.
Sure enough, after looking it up, I can verify that yesterday really was the
eighth anniversary of the release of a Commander Keen game (actually the second in the series). loony swears
he didn't know, making that one freaky episode of psychic phenomenon/weird coincidence,
or whatever you want to call it.
Link of the Day: Just Who
is That Rotund Man in the Red Suit? On the lookout for unsavory Santas. Hey,
this is not a horror of these modern times... remember the first Santa in
Miracle on 34th Street was a drunk. Thanks Jim.
Story of the Day: Catholics go modern to revive the traditional.
"...the Archdiocese of Newark is going to announce today a modern
promotional campaign that will include a major billboard campaign and, of all
things, a toll-free number that will be answered by a priest." Thanks
BrainDead.
Bonus Story: Bank
Robber Botches Own Getaway, the story of "...a bank robber who botched
his own getaway by locking his keys inside his running car..."
Here are local copies of the ThreeWave CTF maps for Quake III Arena mentioned
below. Here's a local
copy of the zipped version (7.8 MB), and a
local copy of the Win32 executable installer (8.0 MB), each page with a list
of mirrors.
As promised earlier today, the Threewave CTF maps for Quake III Arena by Dave "Zoid" Kirsch have been released, as a Win32 installer and a zip-file for Linux users (about 8 MB each). Zoid's post on the Quake3World forums has more word on the three maps, including a brief description of each.
As promised last week ( story), Westwood has released downloadable patches of their version 1.17 update for Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun in four languages, which should be helpful when the auto-update feature in the game does not work for you, or if you prefer to do your patching manually. As mentioned, this update features mainly multiplayer improvements, including improvements to the interface and fixes for latency issues in addition to bug fixes and gameplay tweaks.
There's a Q&A with id
Software CEO Todd Hollenshead on loonygames, the next installment in Game,
Set, Match!, their professional gaming column. The interview talks with the id
Software CEO about id Software's feelings about Quake and its variants being the
primary shooters used in most professional gaming leagues and tournaments. The
Q&A caps with a revelation of who won an internal deathmatch tournament at id
Software (the answer may surprise you).
The official Tread Marks site has been updated with word that the game is code complete and should go gold soon. The full version of this tank racing (and shooting, of course) game, which will be sold through the Internet, will then be available early next year.
Like the Descent source code almost two years ago, Outrage has released the source code for Descent II, their venerable 3D action shooter. The package does not include some low-level sound and modem code, so it will need some massaging to compile, but otherwise includes everything you need to rebuild Descent II, version 1.2, if supplied with the data files from that retail version of the game.
Redwood sends word that he's posted nine
screenshots on Stomped showing off three levels from Zoid's upcoming Q3A Threewave
CTF maps that should be released soon. If you're confused, Zoid did work on
the retail version of Q3A CTF, but he didn't make any of the included maps - the
Threewave ones are his own.
There is a new patch for Driver on GTI's support site, which adds or improves various control options, in addition to other changes, in the US version of their action racing game.
The following open letter was posted to the official Ultima IX: Ascension site,
promising a new first CD to registered owners of the current version of the
game (thanks X-Zone): Dear Ultima fans and U9 customers,
Three weeks ago, we shipped Ultima IX: Ascension. In the time since its
release, we have heard from many of you who are enjoying the game and are getting
the full immersive experience that U9 offers. Unfortunately, we have also heard
feedback from users who are expressing concerns about the game. This does not
satisfy us here at Origin. We believe U9 is a great game, and we are committed
to making sure that you have the opportunity to experience it.
The U9 development and quality assurance teams continue to work around the clock
to address the concerns expressed by some of our customers, such as D3D compatibility.
We urge you to keep checking our official website at www.ultima9.com
for more news and patches as they become available.
We also believe that every single one of you who have purchased and registered
a copy of Ascension should have easy access to these changes. To that end, Origin
has committed to send out new copies of the Ultima IX: Ascension install CD
(CD #1 in the box you purchased) to all officially registered customers as soon
as development and testing on the patches are complete and we are satisfied
with the results. Please note that the only way we can get this updated CD into
your hands is if you register. You can find detailed information about how to
register your game on the U9 website here.
This offer to receive a copy of the new installation CD is good until March
31st, 2000. Future builds of the product will include the latest version of
the software.
Thank you for your concern and your feedback. We hope this course of action
will maximize your play experience.
Sincerely,
Jack Heistand, General Manager
Origin Systems, Inc.
Ritual's Tom Mustaine actually sent his Quake III Arena maps mentioned
below over here as well, so I've posted a
local copy of Tom's Q3A maps (1.5 MB), along with a mirror list.
Stomped has posted two maps for Quake
III Arena created by Tom "ParadoX" Mustaine, a level designer at Ritual
Entertainment. One of the maps is a 4-6 player deathmatch arena, while the other
is the same thing without powerups (intended for one-on-one matches). Go grab
'em from Stomped.
Jim Molinets updated his
.plan with some thoughts on Rogue's five-year anniversary (which was yesterday).
The ever-astute Redwood noticed that among the list of "people who are
here now" that he thanks is Brandon James, a former level designer at id
Software.
Raven's Rick Johnson updated his
.plan with word that Soldier of Fortune will be supporting IPX (he did a
quick survey to see if people still wanted it or not). Here's the scoop: Well,
I got a whole ton of responses over the IPX. About 65% of the people said to
drop IPX. People who wanted IPX in were mainly those who run LAN parties a lot
and find IPX easier to configure and get going. So with that, SoF will support
IPX. I brought over the bug fixes I did for Heretic2 and we'll do some testing
on it to make sure it works. So once the demo is released, please let me know
if there are any issues with IPX that need to be addressed for the final game...
There's no announced date yet for the demo (learned that lesson from the past...)
but once we complete it and get it QA'd, we'll pick a date for it to be released...
Microsoft
has announced that Windows 2000, their long-awaited new OS, has gone gold
and is off to manufacturing (thanks Cassini). Don't get too excited yet - it
won't be available until February 17th.
The Mesa 3D Graphics Library page has a new
version 3.1 of the Mesa library that allows some OpenGL applications and
games to run under all manner of operating systems including Amiga, Apple
Macintosh, BeOS, NeXT, OS/2, MS-DOS, VMS, and Windows 9x/NT, though its
original (and still best supported) platform is Unix/X11. Thanks Jacek Fedoryński.
The new version is available as Unix compressed tar files, Unix gzip tar files,
and .zip files.
Shadar Logoth (a place of tainted ground - don't go there unaccompanied) has
posted a strategy
guide for Wheel of Time's Arena (deathmatch) mode. This first part covers
the different offensive and defensive Ter'angreal, featuring in-depth tips for
each, including this one for the Air Pulse: "If this is all you have you
are cannon fodder."
IMG Magazine has posted word
that the Macintosh version of Unreal Tournament has gone gold, and will be shipping
in "early January". This should come as good news indeed for those
Mac owners out there who can't wait to get their hands on the full game.
id Software's John Carmack updated
his .plan (the .plans are actually working, it's just the list above that's broken) with
word on what's up with Anna Kang, referred to in the recent GameSpot Q3A
article ( story)
as "id's former director of business development." This turns out to
be the case, as Anna has left id, though it turns out, John will still be
keeping in touch, as he's announced that they are getting married
(congratulations!). Here's the deal, which also announces the winner of the Doom
chess set competition: Anna Kang left Id a couple weeks ago to found her
own company - Fountainhead Entertainment.
It wasn't generally discussed during her time at Id, but we had been going out
when she joined the company, and we were engaged earlier this year. We are
getting married next month, and honeymooning in Hawaii. At her thoughtful
suggestion, we are shipping a workstation out with us, so I don't fall into some
programming-deprivation state. How great is that? :-)
Now that Q3A has shipped, the official winner of her Id Software figurine chess
set contest is Rowan Crawford for his prose and art.
An honorable mention goes to Reine Hogberg and Peder Hardings for their Q3A
Blair Witch Project. They will receive silver Q3A medallions.
The one thing that broke when everything else got fixed (yeesh!) is the
.plan tracker, but it turns out that Robert Duffy updated
his .plan with more on the just-released Quake III Arena tools ( story).
Here's the deal: A small update. To build a map, q3map requires that
'quake' exists somewhere in the path. It uses this to derive the base path to
figure out where to find things. What this means is that if you installed Quake
III Arena ( and the tools ) to 'c:\q3' then q3map will fail with a <
SetQdirFromPath: no 'quake' in C:/Q3/baseq3/maps/unnamed.map > error. I
realize this can be somewhat of a pain but it is the way the tools work ( it is
also the way the tools have always worked ).
If you installed the game and the tools to the default or the name you chose has
quake in it then this will not apply to you. If you installed to a path that
does NOT have 'quake' in the name you will need to rename it to get q3map to
work properly.
Hyperion Software
has announced that they have acquired the rights to port Volition's Descent:
Freespace - The Great War to the Amiga platform (thanks TB). Details are available
on their site, including projected system requirements.
GASource has posted a
hands-on preview of Evolva, Computer Artworks' 3D action game, based on
a full beta build of the game that was sent to them by Virgin Interactive.
With development slowly finishing up on Messiah, it's time for the folks at
Shiny to start promoting their next title (which naturally won't be out anytime
soon). Sacrifice is the follow-up to Messiah, and it uses the same engine, but
for a dramatically different game. While information is pretty scarce for the
time being, Games Domain Review has posted a
brief preview based on a demonstration of the game and a conversation with
Shiny frontman Dave Perry. Here's an excerpt, describing the gameplay: On
the screen was a view of a tall gent, wearing a horned helmet and flowing cloak,
standing on a small hill, surveying what looked like everyone's idea of paradise.
The sun streamed through gaps in the clouds, picking out strange-looking stone
structures on the grass ahead. In the distance, sweeping foothills could be
seen, silhouetted in the light. And as Dave moved his character up to one of
the stone outcroppings, the world spun around him convincingly - clearly the
engine is well up to the task of creating Shiny's imaginary world. Picture the
fantastic looking Ultima Ascension, with a reasonable frame rate - oh, and a
good deal more style - and you'll be close.
He described Sacrifice as being played a bit like chess. Your altar is the
link to your god and, like your king, must be protected at all times. If you
lose it, you die. Your character, the wizard - the gent in the helmet and cloak
- is the most powerful piece on the board, like the queen. The ultimate aim
is to sacrifice another creature on your enemy's altar, thus convincing their
god to change to your side. At this point, you start receiving new, different
spells from them. And, before you ask, you will be able to take on your friends.
Sacrifice will be Shiny's first game to include multiplayer action.
Games Domain has posted the first installment of their C&C Renegade Designer Diary, in which producer Louis Castle talks about how they came up with the concept of creating an action game in the Command & Conquer universe.
The official Messiah site has confirmation of a rumor that was going around after the U.K. release was delayed until next year ( story), in that the game will not be out anywhere before Christmas due to the need for "some extra time to polish the game."
The Pit has posted an
interview with David Farmer, the designer of the spells and spell movies
in the recently released RPG Planescape Torment. In addition to PT, he's worked
on such games as Descent 3 and Fallout 2, and he's got a fairly extensive film
background as well, having worked on both Mortal Kombat movies and The Mask
in addition to others.
David "crt" Wright has announced that work has begun on Rocket Arena
for Unreal Tournament. This version is being developed by c0mp1e of the Unloaded
TC for Unreal and Epic's own Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart, and they
will be looking for user-submitted maps. Details are available on the
new UT Rocket Arena site.
The Quake 3 Arena news page
has been updated with the first release of the editing tools for Quake III
Arena. As is always the case with the tools that should help get folks started
making levels, modifications and other goodies, the Q3A tools are an unsupported
release. Here is a
local copy of the Q3A Tools (4.5 MB) along with a list of mirrors.
The Quake 3 Arena demo page
has been updated with the final version of the Quake III Arena demo for Linux (thanks
Patrick Schwarz). Here is a
local copy of the final Q3A demo for Linux (47 MB), along with a list of
mirrors.
There's a New Ragnar Screenshot
on GA-Source showing off another shot of Ragnar, the Viking hero of Rune,
Human Head's upcoming Unreal-engine game inspired by tales of Norse mythology.
Rorshach, our favorite Watchman, has updated Rorshachs Journal
with a bunch of stuff related to making skins for Quake III Arena models. Among
the new goodies are 20 new original Q3A skins for download,
Wireframes for
Q3A made by id Software's Kenneth Scott, the release of Npherno's GL
Viewer for Q3A, Quake1,
Quake2
and Quake3
custom texture paks (60+ textures), a Clan PMS
skin from Paul Steed's PMS Model, and even a Pointilism
MessageBoard for skinners and texture artists.
The SpoonBot homepage has a new version
0.5g of the SpoonBot for Starsiege TRIBES. While much improved, the new release
still has flaws, and is therefore described as a development version.
Bagpuss sends word that the new release of Webdog
has been causing some mysterious problems for some folks, so in addition to
warning that until this is pinned down the new release should probably be
avoided, he is also requesting help from any programmers with any ideas on why installing a Visual Basic 6 program can cause Explorer.exe to
produce an invalid page fault as soon as it boots up (one user even found that the explorer.exe on
a machine so impacted was 8 KB smaller than the one on his good machine!). If
you can offer any help, please email Bagpuss.
- The 41st Diablo II Screenshot of the Week
is up, titled: "Paladin invades the Temple." Thanks Diabloii.net.
No word on if the 52nd one will be the screenshot of the year...
- It's No Game
is a Fox News article on state-of-the-art console systems. Thanks
theAntiELVIS...
- Word from Electronic Arts is that Jane's F/A-18 has gone gold, and is off
to manufacturing...
Argh. The DNS switch was screwed up last night, so for a good time
in the wee hours this morning, this site was producing an error. The good news
is that Kevin at Pair networks apparently works the kind of Vampire hours I do,
so we were actually able to straighten this out as the farmers were just getting
to their cow milking. The even better news is that now that the DNS glitch has
been smoothed out we should be past the problems resulting from our move, but I've been wrong before (as my Nana, Nana Rosanadanna used to
say...). So (hopefully) for the final time in this go-round of technical difficulties,
your patience is appreciated. BTW, the DNS screw-up also caused a lot of mail to
go away, so if you wrote someone on the site last night,
there's a good possibility that your missive ended up in the bit bucket. Other
than that, as of now, cookies and messageboard preferences should work again, so
if there is anything on the site that isn't back to the way it was prior to the
move, please feel free to drop a line and complain to us about it, because we're
not aware of any remaining issues.
Link of the Day: Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division.
Apparently the original source of much of the material in yesterday's LoD.
Thanks Sir Asi9.
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