Archived News:
Breaking the almost eerie New Year's silence, The Kung Fu Grip
on Unreal Universe is an interview with Alex "Cybermind" Redman of
ZenTao Interactive about their
upcoming Extreme Wing Chun VR, a Kung Fu simulator that will use the Unreal
engine to show you how to wax and wax off with the best of them, even when Mr.
Miyagi is unavailable.
The tireless Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart made another update
to his .plan with word on the release of the OpenSource stuff for Unreal
Tournament that should facilitate extended mods. Here's the poop: Well, I
was hoping for a nuclear blast or something. Boooring.
I've released the open source archive at the sourceforge page. You can get there
from openut.sourceforge.net.
The file is available in tar/gz and zip formats. The archive includes stuff for
win32 and Linux. All of the public engine headers are included, so you can start
working on extended mods and stuff.
Feel free to participate in the message boards and bug tracking system on the
Source Forge page.
The next task is to get CVS up and running, but I'll probably put that off to
the side for a few days and do some work on my other projects.
I've got a huge list of crap to do for the next UT patch.
Now that's a slow morning, when there's but one bit:
More fun with fun names as the Game Name Builder Official Homepage
has a new version 1.82 of this program that can add colored and/or animated
player names to Quake (1), QuakeWorld, Quake II, Hexen II, HexenWorld, NetStorm,
and any other game which uses ASCII characters. The new version adds support for
Quake III Arena and the Q3A Demo.
Happy New Year everybody. Obviously enough, the world has not been destroyed by
some glitch, but Y2K references seem so 1990s anyway don't they? If you actually
keep track of these things you know that the Friday night/Saturday morning
update is usually handled by loonyboi, which would make this a Fruit of the
Loon, but the loonster is out partying like it's some sort of Prince song, so
I'll be your designated driver this morning... I'll try to take it easy on the
horn for those of you with hangovers. Let me take the opportunity of the first
update of the year and/or millennium/century/decade (or not, depending on your
interpretation of these things--many say the century and millennium won't turn
for another year) to thank all of you for another year of incredible support. I
know I speak for loony and Frans in saying we can't thank you enough. So there.
Happy New Year!
Link of the Day: Gateway to the Year 3000, only at Y3K.com.
Heavy man. Thanks MooCow.
Story of the Day: School Expels 5 for Being 'Witches'
I wonder if it was TV that influenced them... Bewitched perhaps. Thanks Jacek
Fedoryński.
Undaunted by the impending (in the US, anyway) end of the year, Epic's Brandon Reinhart made a .plan update to announce the release of the 402B patch for the Linux version of Unreal Tournament, as well as giving a general update on the progress of the next Windows patch and the imminent UT open source release, and describing a pair of debugging binaries (which are unsuitable for general use). Here is the entire update:
A new patch for UT Linux is available at openut.sourceforge.net. Follow
the link to the project root page and download from the column on
the right. Feel free to leave bug reports, but please register with
Source Forge first so I can contact you if necessary.
This patch is version 402B and is a Linux patch only. It contains fixes
for two critical Linux issues:
* UT Linux now runs under Enlightenment.
* UT Linux will properly shutdown glide after a critical crash.
It also has a few other fixes and incidentals.
There will be no 402B patch for Windows. The next multiplatform UT
patch will be 403 (we'll probably release the first UT expansion pack
around that time).
I will release the open source archives tonight or tomorrow, depending
on how long it takes to get organized.
The UT open source project page also contains debugging binaries. You
can read about these in the Announcements forum. WEB SITES: Please don't
mirror these, they are 20 megs each and its not necessary for
most users to get them, only programmers will want them. Running the
game with debugging libraries is slow and not a good idea for most
people. Mirroring them on fan sites is probably not appropriate.
There are binary archives for guard and slowguard. You can read
about the difference on the site.
GameSpot's Geoff Keighley
goes Behind The Games with a feature on "Millennium Gaming" as
"20 gaming visionaries usher in the next millennium of gaming." The
article discusses the future of the industry with such noted luminaries as
3DRealms' George Broussard and Scott Miller, Valve's Gabe Newell, Chris Roberts,
Sid Meier, and more. In addition to all the conversation, the piece includes
some never before seen screenshots, including a rare Duke Nukem Forever shot and
three new shots from TeamFortress2. There are 20 Q&A's at several pages
each, so you've got something to do if you're skipping the party scene tonight.
There is a first look of Hitman: Codename 47 up on Computer Games Online. While the article on this third-person "thinker-shooter" by IO Interactive and Eidos is very brief, it does offer two new screenshots of the game.
In their irregular series of Fast Track guides, Gamecenter has posted one such guide for Half-Life: Opposing Force, offering basic but fairly detailed walkthroughs of all of the four levels in Gearbox' expansion pack.
There are four
new Codename Eagle Screenshots on GA-Source showing off gameplay from this
upcoming first and third-person action title from Refraction Games. According to
the latest word posted along with the shots, Codename Eagle is due in the US on
February 25, 2000.
Relic News
interviews Aaron Kambeitz talking with the lead artist on the team that
created Homeworld in a conversation centered mostly on Relic's 3D space RTS.
The Mutation Device has
cooked up an Unreal Tournament Mutator FAQ to answer all those nagging questions
about these gameplay mods for Unreal Tournament. The FAQ is in Help format and
is pretty comprehensive, offering 36 topics in four sections, including and
Introduction, Installation, Mutators Online, and Developing Mutators.
The Name Maker Studio homepage has a new
version 4.27 of NMS, the WYSIWYG FunName creation utility that can help you
create colored and/or animated names for Quake III Arena, QuakeWorld, Unreal
Tournament, StarCraft, ICQ, Quake II, and Hexen II. Thanks Jacek Fedoryński.
Star Wars Duel of the Fates is a
modification for Quake (1) that aims "to simulate the exciting lightsaber
fights and blaster battles from the Star Wars films, while at the same time
making the whole thing as fun and easy to use as possible." The mod offers
new levels, and a chance to fight Darth Maul, though no word on whether you can
get him to give you your Episode One admission back if you win.
Apparently taking the attitude that tonight I'm gonna WAN party like its 1999, Games.Velocity.Net
is holding a Final Frag of the Millennium Quake II WAN party. The shebang kicked
off at 4:30AM EST to complete as of the first Y2K rollover in Tonga, and will
run until it's 2000 all over the world. Head over for details, including the 64
player maps that will be used, and details on the Y2K server-side mod they will
be running.
- The QuakeWorld Revitalization
Project looks to create a pair of closed source programs to authenticate
QW clients to prevent cheating since the release of the source code...
- Aqua's Quake3 Guide
offers Q3A console commands, tweaks, etc.
- GameSpot's
First Look at Thandor is a preview featuring several gameplay movies of
this upcoming 3D RTS under development in Germany...
- A post on LinuxGames
offers the possibility of a Linux port of the Q3Radiant Q3A level editor
using WINE, with the more remote possibility of a Gtk+ port not out of the
question. Thanks Jacek Fedoryński...
- The results of the annual Best Of Loki's Minions CTF
poll are online, with all this year's results (including my favorite
category "Most LMCTF improved player")...
- SNGaming.com's You Ask Maxis
offers the chance to submit questions sort of directly to Maxis for both
TheSims and Sim Theme Park...
Here's the promised follow-up on the Image of the Day from Wednesday. To recap,
this was a screenshot on gXp
showing a smiley face on a Unreal Tournament Flak Shell which a lot of folks
suggested was faked because of it's inclusion of some Q3A-style textures, curved
surfaces, and a jump pad. As it turns out, the map is indeed a real Unreal Tournament
map, a user-made jobbie by Rich "Akuma(matrix)"
Eastwood called DM-Brutality][
(said to be quite fun), with the jump-pads and such an homage to Q3A. Some
correspondence with Alan Willard and GreenMarine at Epic Games confirms the
existence of the smiley on the alt-fired flak shell, certainly an Easter egg
that will almost invariably be the last thing you see should you be
"lucky" enough to get a glimpse of it in a game.
Tonight, of course, is some holiday or another, exactly which one it is
escapes me at the moment (I wish they'd publicize these things more). Remember,
if you are partying, please don't drink and drive. On the Y2K front, we
believe Blammo (our news database) is safe from potential date glitches through
something like 2031, giving us a little time to come up with a workaround, so
provided the missiles don't all fire at midnight (always good to end on a cheery
note), we should be running fine tomorrow ![=]](/miscimages/smiley4.gif) .
Link of the Day: The World Has Not Ended!
A Y2K resource you can check first thing tomorrow. Thanks Mat Ward. "Will
the World end? Has it ended already? This page has all the answers. It is hosted
on a computer in Australia, which is many hours ahead of most of the rest of the
world (and ALL of the important bits). So if the World ends, it will end here
first!"
Bonus Link: QUAKE II ARENA.
Who knew? Thanks Xoo.
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