Archived News:
The Adrenaline Vault
has posted an MDK2 development update giving the latest goings-on in the
development of this upcoming sequel to the quirky third-person action game
straight from BioWare's Dr. Greg Zeschuk. In addition to the new details, the
update also includes five new screenshots. MDK, of course, stands for Moshe
Dayan's Kishkas.
Also on The Adrenaline Vault
is a Picassio update giving some more details about this upcoming stealthy game
where you get to have your own Thomas Crown Affair by visiting the great art
museums of the world, and robbing them.
The Gloom News page
has the recently released version 1.2 of the Gloom teamplay mod for Quake II.
The update, from a couple of days ago, refers to work in progress on a full
installer, but for the moment, the only file available is an update from
previous versions. Thanks Elliot.
There's a new image on Soldier of Fortune Center
showing five different characters in "The December Brigade," one of the
teams in the Team Deathmatch mode in Raven's upcoming gritty shooter. As fits
the team's name, the crew looks more suited to battle in the arctic (or the
frozen tundra of Lambeau field), than the tropics.
There's a new Giants
image on PlanetMoon Central from Giants, PlanetMoon's upcoming third-person
action game, that "depicts the different kinds of Smarties that will be
seen in Giants: Citizen Kabuto. Male, Wife, Timmy and Borjoyzee." I guess
they're smart, what with those opposable thumbs and all, but they look a little
like the happy family from the Ramones' song of the same name to me.
There is a new screenshot of Rogue Spear: Urban Operations on SimHQ.com, showing an indoor scene from Red Storm's upcoming expansion pack to their tactical squad-action game. Thanks SpecForce.
Listed on their screenshots page, oddly enough, the official Planescape: Torment site has a version 1.1
beta patch for Black Isle's isometric role-playing game. The patch is said to "solve the sludge some have experienced while playing as well as some other minor fixes," but being a beta, download at your own risk.
PC.IGN.com has kicked off the first installment of the Summoner Designer Diaries, in which Volition developers will be discussing work on their upcoming 3D role-playing game. This first entry sees assistant producer Anoop Shekar talking about the various camera angles the design went through, and a few screenshots illustrate the results.
Daily Radar has posted a brief preview of Titanium Angels, the upcoming third-person action adventure by Mobius and SCi. While the image links are currently broken (the actual images are familiar from the official site anyway), the article does feature quotes from producer Ben Gunstone.
Also up on PC.IGN.com is the fourth part of the Baldur's Gate II Developer Journal, which has art director Marcia Tofer discussing the process of creating game art for this upcoming sequel to Bioware's acclaimed isometric RPG.
More patch news as well, for Westwood has released version 1.17a patches of Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun for download. There is no word on the changes in this version, but presumably it is also available via the auto-update feature in the game.
Though a formal update is not expected on the Quake 3 Arena
website until Monday morning, the source code for the Quake III Arena game
.dll is now available on id Software's FTP site. Here is a
local copy of the source (1.3 MB), along with the usual list of mirrors of
this code essential to the construction of modifications for the game. A
.plan update by Robert Duffy gives the scoop on what's up: The game
source is out. It should start appearing on mirrors soon. It is in
idstuff\quake3\source and named "Q3AGameSource.exe"
There is a "How to make a mod" text file included which shows the very
basics of building the source for debugging ( Win32, Visual C++ ) and building
the vms for distributing mods. It also shows steps to get your mod to run with
the engine.
PLEASE NOTE: The game source MUST BE INSTALLED in quake3 off of whatever drive
you like. This is so the batch files and the lcc compiler can find all the right
stuff for building vm's.
The tool source and video compressor will be out next week. This will include
source q3data, q3map, q3asm, q3radiant, our version of lcc and the executable
for the video compressor.
Raven's Nathan Albury updated
his .plan with what he modestly describes as a "sad attempt" at
clarifying what he refers to as some of the more controversial issues in Soldier
of Fortune. Here's the poop: It seems like there's still a fair amount of confusion on some of the
more controvertial issues in Soldier of Fortune, so here's my sad attempt to
clear it up a bit.
In regards to enemy spawning and limited saves, these two attributes of the game
are dictated by the difficultly level. HOWEVER, in addition to our 5 preset
difficultly levels, we have a custom difficultly level submenu that will allow
you to adjust the game more to your liking if you aren't pleased with our
defaults. So, for example, if you like smart enemies but can't stand spawning,
you can set up the game to accomodate that. Or, if you are more interested in a
higher intensity, more Doom-style shooter, you can crank up the spawning and
drop the enemy ai down. The game can be played according to your tastes.
With that said, I'm extremely hopeful that once people get a hold of our demo
they'll at least give our vision of the game a chance. We've taken the feedback
we've gotten into account, and honestly we've now had the chance to play the
game a lot more. The amount of tweaks that have occured since our last OEM and
the present demo are quite vast.
In particular, the AI has come a long way since our previous version. It's
finally to the point where playing the game stealthily can be entertaining, if
that's what you're looking for. I'm still of the opinion that maxing out enemy
AI to inhuman levels isn't a good approach to game creation, but I do think that
our guys are reacting in a much more believeable, enjoyable fashion.
As far as the spawning is concerned, we've greatly refined and adjusted the play
mechanics behind it so that it enhances rather than confuses the gameplay.
Probably the most common complaint about spawning is that it invalidates
stealthy play... and I think that's a fair point. In our current system, the
spawning exists in large part to ENHANCE the stealth. There are no more
instances where you can wander around quietly, taking great care to lean around
corners and pick people off, only to get shot in the back by some wandering
punk. If guys are spawning, it's exclusively because you're making a whole lot
of noise and carnage. In fact, our challenging difficultly level (4 out of 5) is
almost impossible if you don't rely on stealth - the enemies are quick enough
and powerful enough that if you draw a crowd, you will fall over. And, once
again, if you really don't like spawning to the point of religiousness, you can
turn it off.
Hopefully (fingers crossed) this will help clear up a few things that seem to be
distressing a lot of you. Well, back to work, I suppose...
GA-RPG interviews Ben Smedstad
of BioWare talking about progress on Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, their
upcoming sequel to Baldur's Gate, the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons RPG in a
lengthy interview that goes into detail about the project.
There are three new Hitman: Codename 47 Screenshots
on GA-Source depicting some of the locations in this upcoming stealthy
strategic shooter from Eidos Interactive that puts you in the lucrative (albeit
dangerous) career path of the hired assassin.
DailyRadar.com
previews Summoner with a look ahead at this upcoming RPG that includes some
Q&A with a few of the folks from Volition to discuss the game. Though the
preview actually primarily focuses on the PlayStation 2 version of the game,
the accompanying screenshots are from the PC version.
An updated version 1.5 of the Hand of Quad
is now available, offering an updated version of this system tray utility that allows
you to join a Quake III Arena server by clicking a link on a webpage. There are
some new features in the new release as well as bug fixes.
The newly-relocated Airquake2
site has a new version 2.0 beta53 of the innovative AirQuake2 flying
modification for Quake II. There are a whole bunch of fixes and new features in
the update, and there is an updater for earlier installations for download in
addition to the full installer.
As yet unviewed here (so I can't offer a thumbs up or down), A
Warriors Life is a new Quake II movie. The film has a very positive review
on Tritin Films, who give
it a 10, and the following description from the filmmaker can serve as a
trailer: "The originality make this movie a
near_revolutionary_masterpiece_of_machinima. You will know Julios, a boy with
determination and hope that fight against his fears and try to win the battle
against a voice inside him that says constantly 'You will fail, you are nothing.'.
In the long and sad quest Julios will try to be free from his demons and find
the answer for the question 'Do I have valor?'."
Version 0.3 of D3DQuake is
now available, offering a version of GLQuake reworked from the publicly
available Quake source code to run on top of Direct3D 7.0, said to use a "fairly
small" (50 function) subset of OpenGL. Thanks Ryan Stotts.
A new version 1.1.0 of the MilkShape 3D
low polygon count modeler, which can import and export file formats for models
in Half-Life, Quake II, Unreal/UT, and Genesis 3D. Thanks Voodoo
Extreme. The new release fixes a few bugs, and word is that Quake III Arena
model support is planned for the future.
A Hotel Reservations for Razer - CPL Event
press release gives details on how you can reserve one of the limited block
of rooms for this $100,000 tournament in April that was recently relocated back
in Dallas. Also, D16-Makaveli
is interviewed on Quake-Arena.de talking about his participation in the
upcoming XSi-Tournament, and the
tourney's website has an analysis
of Fatality and an analysis
of Kane to continue their preview of the event.
Sorry loonyboi fans, no Saturday Morning Fruit of the loon today, the loonster
is taking a well-deserved weekend out and about in that there world we hear so
much about, and, if he's good to his word, actually doesn't even have a computer
with him (which of course will make it difficult to contact online support
groups for his withdrawal symptoms). Here's a quick pool: how many batteries on
his color gameboy do you think he's going to go through before Monday night? I
think I need to ask wise Mr. Owl.
Link of the Day: The Largest known prime number.
Thanks Cosmo3D.
Story of the Day: Faithful find vision of Virgin of Guadalupe in spilled ice cream.
Thanks Dan Chapman.
Image of the Day: The
Demise Cover Art (that's right, game-related!), by none other than legendary
fantasy artist Boris Vallejo. Thanks
Zawash.
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