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Wednesday, Jan 26, 2000 Happy Australia Day, Mate

  

Tim Sweeney Interview

3DGPU has posted an interview with Epic's Tim Sweeney, talking to him about his background, his thoughts on various hardware issues, and even what graphics technology he feels will impact the gaming scene the most (surprise: it's the Playstation 2).

Thief 2 Shots

InciteGames has posted some new screenshots from Looking Glass Studios' Thief 2: the Metal Age, taken from an Alpha version of the game they received.

Klingon Academy Shots

Also up on Incite are two new shots from Klingon Academy, an upcoming space combat sim set in the Star Trek universe. Word on their site is that a demo should be appearing "quite soon."

Vampire Interview

Up Close with Vampire: The Masquerade is an interview on GameSpot with Activision producer Chris Hewish, bringing us up-to-date on the latest happenings with Nihilistic's upcoming 3D action RPG. There is also a hint at a possible sequel.

Ultima IX Patch

Origin has released a new version 1.18F patch for Ultima IX: Ascension, fixing a long list of problems listed here, including many gameplay problems, plot-stoppers and crashes, as well as adding GeForce support, Direct3D improvements, and more. Thanks Stratos Group. Update: Matthew Rorie of Stratos Group sends a warning that the patch breaks the game or causes other problems, as messages on the Ultima IX Technical Support messageboard are reporting (registration required), so you may want hold off installing the patch until this is resolved.

MechWarrior 3 Multiplayer Maps

MicroProse has released a set of multiplayer maps for MechWarrior 3. The 10 MB download includes 5 maps that can be installed individually, called Batchall, MechFactory, LavaPit, Snowfield, and Underground. As the ftp server appears to be rather slow, a mirror is online at 3D Action Gamers.

Thief II Interview

There is a new Thief II: the Metal Age interview on Vault Network, talking to project director Steve Pearsall to divulge more details about Looking Glass upcoming game, that puts you into the shoes of a thief called Garrett.

On Daikatana Deathmatch

More map news, as PlanetDaikatana sends word of a post on the Daikatana forums, where ION Storm level designer Luke "weasl" Whiteside lists the maps that have been finished for the retail version of Daikatana. The lineup consists of 10 deathmatch maps, 4 CTF maps, and one deathtag and Blade-match map each.

Battlecruiser Millenium Shots

The official Battlecruiser 3000 AD site has been updated with 12 new shots featuring the engine's new environment-bump mapping (on Matrox G400 cards) as well as 4 new shots (non-bump-mapped) of a "Type 2" station from Battlecruiser Millenium, the upcoming sequel to BC3K.

Team Fortress 2 Interview

PlanetFortress has posted an interview with Valve's Robin Walker, talking to him about all things TeamFortress 2. There isn't much in the way of new information, but he does say that they're likely to roll the new networking code into Half-Life to test before TF2 ships, and that the game's combat lies somewhere between Team Fortress Classic and CounterStrike.

Black & White Movie

German site Nonstuff has posted a gameplay movie of Black & White. Shot from a computer screen, the image quality leaves a bit to be desired, but it shows two of the creatures in Lionhead's strategy/god-game in a fight. The 44 second movie requires Quicktime 4.

id Interview

PlayNOW! has posted an interview with id developers Paul Steed and Tim Willits, conducted during their tour of Australia last month. The freely roaming talk covers all sorts of topics, such as working at id, Quake III Arena as well as id's previous games, their gaming influences, and much more. Here is a quote:

Simon: In the short time since its release, Quake III Arena has been hailed by players as the ultimate deathmatch game bar none. You have each commented very publicly that "There will be no Quake IV". Where does the future of multiplayer lie?

Tim: Quake III is probably id's last "I am a one man army with no control or power over the environment around me" game. I think that in the future multiplayer will revolve around more team games, more role-specific type deathmatch where maybe you're the guy who has to guard something for X number of minutes, or maybe you're the squad leader of a team of bots given some mission, or maybe you're a mercenary hired out to some clan or something. I think with Quake III we've nailed down the pure, classic deathmatch style. In the future we can develop new game types or new variants of that, which will be pretty exciting.

Hidden & Dangerous: Devil's Bridge Gold

Adrenaline Vault reports that Hidden & Dangerous: Devil's Bridge has gone gold, and should appear on store shelves by February 4. Devil's Bridge is the expansion pack to Illusion Softworks and TalonSoft's tactical squad-action game, and is already available in Europe under the title Fight for Freedom.

Thief II Movie

Eidos has released a new movie of Thief II: the Metal Age for download (13.4 MB), showing off a minute of gameplay and rendered sequences from Looking Glass' covert action game, with a soundtrack by Everclear. Thanks FilePlanet, who has a mirror here.

OpenGL Open Sourced

Slashdot points the way to this Silicon Graphics press release that announces their release of the OpenGL Sample Implementation as Open Source. The Sample Implementation forms the basis of the OpenGL graphics acceleration in most of today's 3D video cards, and this release "clears the way for the emergence of high-quality OpenGL drivers for the Linux platform." The download is available from their OpenGL Sample Implementation page, along with further details and a FAQ.

James Bond Game Announced

After months of speculation, Electronic Arts has finally announced that The World is Not Enough, a game based on the recent James Bond movie of the same name, is currently in development using the Quake III Arena engine. Today they issued a press release stating that they had licensed the engine for the previously announced American McGee's Alice, TWINE, and also additional games, "that wiill be announced at a later date." Here's an excerpt from the full press release with info on James Bond:

About Bond, James Bond... The World is Not Enough

EA previously announced it secured an exclusive long-term licensing agreement with MGM Interactive and Danjaq, LLC to bring Secret Agent James Bond to the interactive entertainment market. The first Bond title to come out of this deal will be based on the 1999 blockbuster film, The World is Not Enough. The game will deliver an action-packed, spy-inspired adventure true to the James Bond legacy, when it is released in late 2000. More information on the movie can be found on the official James Bond web site from MGM (NYSE: MGM) at http://www.jamesbond.com.

More Soldier of Fortune Help

Raven's Chia Chin Lee updated his .plan with some quick tips for users having problems with the sound effects in the Soldier of Fortune demo. Also, Raven's John Scott updated his .plan with a full rundown of all the various scalibility options in the demo (as well as some links to comics featuring the game).

Q3A Wireframe Files Released

Rorshach, everyone's favorite Watchmen psychopath, has released the wireframe files for Quake III Arena on his site. These wireframes will allow artists to test their skins with ease, and are under 1.5 meg.

New wHeretic

Robin McLeod has released a new version 0.5a build 6 of wHeretic, his Win32 port of Raven's venerable Heretic. This release has a new sound engine, faster video handling, fixed Win9X keyboard code, and other improvements.

Mail Bag

For the third week in a row (which has got to be a record) here's a new edition of the Blue's News Mail Bag! In today's edition: DSL vs. Cable Modems, the real creator of InstaGib, two different views of Kingpin, an Unreal tech support nightmare, the translation to last week's mystery e-mail, and lots more. Pull up a chair and take a read.

Call of Cthulhu Preview

Cthulhu keeps calling, as Daily Radar has posted a brief preview of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. The article features quotes from Headfirst designer Andrew Brazier, such as this design choice they made to increase the game's immersion: "By dropping the onscreen interface entirely, gamers will be kept within the game world. All there will be on screen is what your character can see."

Ground Control Movie

Hot on the heels of their galleries (see below), GameSpot UK has also posted a new movie of Ground Control, showing off over a minute of in-game footage from Massive's 3D real-time strategy game.

Nox Preview

Adrenaline Vault has posted a hands-on preview of Nox, looking at Westwood's isometric action-RPG that went gold yesterday (story).

Ground Control Screenshots

Massive Entertainment's 3D RTS is making the rounds today, as there are new screenshots and some hi-res model images of Ground Control on GameSpot UK (although a couple shots are already familiar), a pair of new screenshots on GCCenter, and three more on VoodooExtreme.

Blair Witch Project Details

PC.IGN has posted some new details on the trillogy of Blair Witch Project games, including word that the mystery third title is being developed by none other than Ritual Entertainment. Here's the scoop:

The Blair Witch Project: The Nocturne Chronicles: Rustin Parr, which is due in the Summer and wins the award for most colons in a title, has the Stranger investigating a mystery in the Blair woods in 1941. TBWP:TNC:RP (that's not some sort of morse code) is currently under development by Terminal Reality.

Human Head in the meantime is working on the second game, which will take place in 1886 -- we're assuming the Stranger won't have a part in this adventure, though you never know… time travel? The third in the series, taking place way back in the witch-tastic days of 1785, is under development by Ritual, a company busy at work on another movie-based game, F.A.K.K. 2. According to USA Today, the other titles will release in September and October, respectively.

Nocturne Patch & Models

Word from Dark Mistress Kazi Wren of the Spookhouse is that a new Nocturne patch is now available, as well as some models for the Nocturne mission editor, including crane, cargo ship, and tug boat models by TRI's Terry Simmons, with other models by TRI's Mike Porter. Here is a local copy of the Nocturne Patch (3.4 MB), along with a list of mirrors, and here's word on what it does from the Spookhouse:

WARNING!!!!! Some current saved games in Nocturne may be "invalidated" by this patch. You can load your saved game, but if Nocturne gives a warning, you SHOULD NOT use that saved game. This will not invalidate all saved games, but if you have a saved game from a part of Nocturne that got patched, that saved game may no longer work. Everyone needs to know this before downloading the patch.

1. This version fixes problems with hardware mixing and SoundBlaster Live cards.
2. It allows 2MB ATI 3D Expression cards to start Nocturne.
3. This version fixes various script anomalies that could prevent Nocturne from operating correctly under unusual circumstances. An example is little Tommy will start his dialog in the church even if he has somehow gotten stuck on a pew.
4. The ambient sound for Act 1 will now play, but only if you have done a complete install. 5. This patch version includes a fix that allows Voodoo3 cards running the 1.03.00 drivers (or later) from 3Dfx to run at full speed with hardware acceleration.

Unzip this file to any temporary directory of your choice. When you run nocpatch2.exe, the patch file will locate your installed version of Nocturne. Please, keep this patch file. If you reinstall Nocturne, or if you have done a selective or minimal install, when you install a new Act in Nocturne, this patch must be applied each time AFTER you have installed a new Act.

Tim Sweeney Interview

Unreal Universe "Interviews The Father of the Unreal Engine" also known as Tim Sweeney, lead programmer at Epic Games. The Q&A covers a wide range of topics, including Unreal (1) updates (and the possibility of an Unreal source-code release), UT mods, Unreal 2, and more.

Zoid Interview

There's a new Zoid Interview on the Mean Arena talking with the father of ThreeWave CTF (I figured I'd keep with the paternal theme) about his work as a contract programmer for id Software, talking about his Capture the Flag work from its beginnings as a Quake mod, through its present Q3A incarnation.

Half-Life Browser Bug

WON Director of Technology Stuart Seelye sends word of a workaround they've implemented to overcome a problem that's been plaguing the in-game Half-Life server browser, as well as news that this is just a temporary measure that will be addressed in a future Half-Life update. Here's the deal:

The Half-Life server browser problem that a lot of people have been experiencing - the one with about seventy message boxes saying something like "Expecting '{', got 'CS'" - is due to a bug in the Half-Life client that is invoked by a particular misconfigured game server. The bug in the client will be fixed in the upcoming Half-Life update. In the meantime though, I got the master server code from Yahn at Valve and implemented an ip banning feature. The game server that was causing the problem is now banned. This is only a temporary fix until the update comes out.

The master server solution will prevent the problem from occurring again, but users still need to delete the favsvrs.dat file in their half-life directory if they get the error messages. Or they can just hit the update button in the server browser. Either method will work to blow out the favsvrs cache.

Tech Bits

Yet More Call of Cthulhu

GA-Source's Call of Cthulhu - Dark Corners of The Earth interview is the latest in a flood of interviews about Headfirst Productions' upcoming Lovecraftian adventure, talking with Andrew "18 Hour" Brazier about progress on the PC version of the pen and paper RPG developed by Chaosium that Andrew describes as the "second biggest RPG of all time, after Dungeons and Dragons" (though it seems this isn't the only pen and paper RPG I've seen described that way). Included with the interview are shots of wireframes of a Shoggoth creature and a revolver being built in 3D Studio Max.

On SoF Demo & 3dfx

Though new 3dfx drivers (story) were released since the mention of problems with 3dfx hardware and the Soldier of Fortune Demo in Rick Johnson's .plan (story), a subsequent message from 3dfx Interactive's Developer Relations Manager Keith Galocy gives word there are still some known issues (so it's not just you). Here's the skinny:

3dfx has been working with Raven to fix a bug found in our OpenGL ICD. We didn't get the problems fixed in time for the driver release that went up today but we will have an update soon. Please post the following message so 3dfx users recognize that any anomalies they see in the demo are going to be fixed and are not Raven's fault:

"Some users may experience graphical glitches using a 3dfx card with the Soldier of Fortune demo. 3dfx is aware of the problem and we are working closely with Raven Software to correct the issue. We expect to have a fixed driver shortly. We are sorry for this inconvenience and would like to thank Raven Software for their patience and cooperation."

Q3A Excessive Overkill

The first release of Mr. Pants' Excessive Overkill for Quake III Arena is now available. Here's the concise description from the website: "Excessive is basically a standard deathmatch mod with enhancements to the standard Quake III weapons. Most of the weapons have been changed to increase their speed and death-dealing power, resulting in mass mayhem anytime you join a server. Self-damage is turned off, and you start off with all of the super-charged weapons, so the hurting can start as soon as you enter!"

Editing

Competitions

XSreality.com now has all the demos from this weekend's international tournament in Sweden for download. The winner was Fatality, who beat Makaveli in the finals, and was undefeated in 18 games through the tourney. Quake-arena.de interviews Fatality about his victory. Also, Finals Frag Fest 2K on Siliconews is a recap of a very small LAN event, which can hopefully inspire some to give it a tumble themselves.

Reviews

etc.

Out of the Blue

The History Channel (AKA the War Channel) had a show on this evening about the Monitor versus the Virginia (Merrimack), the first clash of ironclad steamships, fought to what amounts to a draw back during the American Civil War. It turns out an advantage the Monitor had over the Virginia was that her turret could rotate, allowing her to bring guns to bear on a target regardless of her heading, while the Virginia needed to point the entire ship in the proper direction to properly aim her cannons. As I watched this it struck me that after spending years searching for an easy way to explain to people why the mouse was a more desirable controller for first person shooters than the keyboard, that it is perfectly illustrated in this naval engagement from 1862. I imagine there are other similar examples from previous generations of other forms of combat, as this all smacks of "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana).

Link of the Day: Ray's List of Weird and Disgusting Foods. It's fascinating, and more educational than the title suggests, and though it's clinical, it is disgusting, so it's probably best to avoid this at mealtimes. Thanks Ant.
Story of the Day: Teen arrested in connection with DVD cracking tool. Thanks Jeff Magill.
Bonus Story: Mbare man loses his private parts. Apparently a prostitute cast a spell that made his bits depart, and then cast another to return them when she was paid. According to the story this whole affair is confirmed by the local police. Thanks Lynsey.
Image of the Day: The Game Cook: Ubiquitous!

Tuesday, Jan 25, 2000

New Mac Voodoo Drivers

3dfx has released new MacOS drivers for their Voodoo 2 and Voodoo 3 based cards. These new drivers fix problems with Rainbow Six and Quake III Arena.

MDK 2 Shots

GameFan has posted six new screenshots from BioWare's MDK 2, taken from a beta build of the PC version of the game. MDK, as everyone knows, stands for Missiles Don't Kill (otherwise known as Famous Last Words).

Thief II Preview

Although labelled as a review, Jumbo Games has posted a brief preview of Thief II: the Metal Age, Looking Glass' upcoming stealthy action game (thanks Vault Network). The article includes a Q&A with the development team and several new screenshots from the full version of the game.

Nox Gold

Westwood sent along the announcement that Nox has gone gold and should be in stores by February 15 in North America, and February 18 around the world. Nox is their isometric action-RPG in a fantasy setting with a single-player game and several multiplayer options.

Soldier of Fortune Demo FAQ #2

HQH51, also the headquarters of the unofficial Half-Life FAQ, has posted an unofficial Soldier of Fortune FAQ as a zipped HTML file, providing detailed info on the game and its demo, as well as troubleshooting and performance tips.

Newer Jumbot

Just when the version 1.0 release earlier today was described as "probably the last in a long time" (story), here comes version 1.1 of the Jumbot for Half-Life at Rich's Project Warehouse. Thanks Fulgore. This versions fixes the "gauss fire-through-wall code" that was disabled in the 1.0 release, and tweaks the tripmine avoidance code.

On Soldier of Fortune Configs & Speeds

Raven's John Scott updated his .plan again on some issues and changes with Soldier of Fortune configs, and a request for feedback. Here's the deal:

A common issue that people seem to have is that there are too many keys. We have only really added two (the zoom in and out), which are not necessary (you can hold down the alternate fire to zoom in).

We will be putting in several predefined configs and I am pushing for 2 new keys that emulate the use and strafe left/right functionality in one keypress.

There has been much discussion internally, but what other ideas do you netizens have ?

Email: sof-demo@ravensoft.com

In related SoF news, Rick Johnson updated his .plan to mention three demo servers that are running at different player speeds, as promised earlier today (story):

I set up 3 servers here.
Raven-Speed-0.60 - player speed set at 60%
Raven-Speed-0.70 - player speed set at 70%
Raven-Speed-0.75 - player speed set at 75%

This is completely setable by the server operator, so in the end, you can pick whatever speed you desire...

Summoner Update

The weekly update to the official Summoner site brings the opening of a character gallery, where the Brass Golem character can be viewed as a traditional image, or in its 3D modelled glory using the MetaStream plugin. Also on offer is a fresh screenshot of the week.

SWAT 3 Patch Issues

The version 1.1 patch for SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle that was released last week (story) turns out not to be meant for public distribution, as this post on the SWAT 3 message board explains, and a new version 1.2 patch should be released soon. Thanks Hastur.

Deus Ex Update

ION Storm lead designer Harvey Smith updated his Witchboy's Cauldron site with the current status of the development of Deus Ex, their upcoming 3D action RPG (thanks Vault Network). Summarized as "fixing bugs and tuning game-play," there's a rundown of the current tasks of programmers, artists, designers and writers on the team, and a bit about the overall feel of the game.

X-COM: Alliance Shots

Telefragged has posted three in-game, and three conceptual images from X-COM: Alliance, the Unreal-engine title in the X-COM universe. The concept images show off a character, a location, and a weapon, while the in-game images show some of the game's teammate interaction.

Voodoo3 2000/3000 Drivers

3dfx' Jason Wong sent along word that new Voodoo3 2000/3000 WHQL Win9x Retail Drivers v1.04.00 have been released. The 6.8 MB download includes updated Glide and OpenGL ICD's, as well as various bug fixes.

TRIBES 2 Q&A

TRIBES Skinners Anonymous has posted a Q&A with Barry Drew, the lead 3D artist on Dynamix' TRIBES team, talking mostly about the artistic side of the game's development, including some details on their usage of the PNG format for the skin files in TRIBES 2, and other techie stuff.

Soldier of Fortune Demo FAQ

Today's barrage of Soldier of Fortune news continues, as Raven has released a demo FAQ on their Soldier of Fortune support site, offering help with video and driver issues, the use of the console, a collection of past .plan updates, and other tips.

Cthulhu Interview

Another Call of Cthulhu interview has popped up, this time at the German Vampire: The Masquerade site Lair of the Vampire. The interview is with Headfirst's Simon Woodroffe, and covers the company's background as well as their upcoming Lovecraft-inspired first person title.

On SoF Movement Speeds

Raven's Rick Johnson updated his .plan with a reaction to feedback they've apparently been receiving about player movement speeds in the just-released Soldier of Fortune Demo. Word is a new cvar to govern these speeds will be created, which sounds like it can be run on the server side, as he mentions plans to demonstrate this on a server, possibly as early as this evening:

Whomever said we don't listen...

Based upon feedback of the DM players, we are going to add a cvar which controls (on the server) how fast movement rates are. So you can scale down the movement rates to whatever rate you desire. Few other things we are going to add: cvar to allow you to set a frag penality if you kill yourself and a dm flag to say that you only want bullet weapons in a level.

Sometime this evening, I'll bring up a demo server with the slower movement rates, so that you can judge it for yourself.

Soldier of Fortune Config File

Raven's John Scott updated his .plan with a config file that Soldier of Fortune dedicated server admins can modify. Here's the scoop:

Here is the config file that runs when a dedicated server is started.

http://www2.ravensoft.com/users/jscott/sof/dedicated.cfg

Just slip it in your user folder and edit to your liking. It will override the one in the pak file. It is heavily commented and about 300 bytes.

To get a list of dm flag bits, run the game with a console, set deathmatch to 1 and type list_dmflags (setting deathmatch to 1 is required for this).

I ran a cable server at home last night, it filled up in about 30 seconds! Have fun fragging!

FAKK2 Update

FAKK You! has posted an update from Ritual's Robert Atkins, regarding their third person Quake III Arena engine title, Heavy Metal: FAKK2. The update is fairly long, but contains the news that they've redone the Julie model yet again ("third time's the charm" says Atkins) and that she'll be able to wield two weapons simultaneously in the game.

Final Fantasy VIII Interview

AGN3D has posted a brief interview with SquareSoft's Kenji Mimura, talking about their Playstation (and now PC) RPG Final Fantasy VIII. Since the game has been out for so long, there's no new information in this interview, but it's still interesting if you're unfamiliar with the game. Like yesterday's Voyager interview, this was transcribed from one of their shows, which you can catch in their archives.

Call of Cthulhu Interview

GamersCentral has posted an interview with HeadFirst's Andrew Brazier, talking to the developer about their first person title Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. The interview deals with several gameplay issues, as well as how the developers plan to tie the game into the pen and paper RPG. Here's a brief excerpt:

One of the key features we will be keeping from the RPG is the element of the character's Sanity (and the loss of it!). This will take an important part of gameplay. We won't be incorporating all the stats from the RPG, but will be keeping parts of them.

Misc. Screenshots

GASource has posted a new screenshot from 4D Ruler's upcoming first person shooter Gore, as well as a quote from the game's lead developer regarding their technology and how it stacks up to the competition. Also, Voodoo Extreme has posted a new shot from Monolith's LithTech 2 engine, presumably from a demonstration level, as no game is named.

More on the Soldier of Fortune Demo

Raven programmer Marcus Whitlock updated his .plan with some comments on the Soldier of Fortune demo that's sucking up bandwidth across the globe:

Just like to say a couple of things about the Soldier of Fortune DEMO and in particular, the predicted view-weapons in Soldier of Fortune:

1) Though we're very pleased with how it turned out, the DEMO is at the end of the say, a snapshot of work in progress. So the final, retail version of SoF will contain many enhancements over what you're playing with now. In line with what I'm working on currently, the predicted view-weapons will be further refined.

2) A couple of things to note about how the prediction works. The server instructs the client to change weapons (e.g. in response to seeing that you pressed a weapon selection key). The server also instructs the client to reload your weapon's clip (either 'cos you hit the reload key or your clip ran out). And of course, the actual missile / projectile / bullet tracing / hitting something code is also done on the server. Everything else tho' is predicted.

Alice Update

After a month-long hiatus, a new update to the official American McGee's Alice site shows off a new enemy character, the Card Guard, which, according to the description, shouldn't be underestimated just because he appears to be limping along.

Sweeney on Programming Languages

Epic's Tim Sweeney has written an article for GameSpy.com, discussing the issue of programming languages in games, looking at the evolution of them from low-level assembly to C++ and Java.

Half-Life Jumbot

Rich's Project Warehouse has the release of version 1.0 of the Jumbot for Half-Life. This is described as "probably the last (new release) in a long time," and is also called "biggest release in a long time." The new version of this AI opponent for Half-Life fixes a bunch of bugs and other problems including trip mine avoidance and visibility checking, and adds new global waypoint code (replacing the old entity-based system), as well as other enhancements and fixes.

Soldier of Fortune Console Commands

There's a list of Soldier Of Fortune Console Commands on Gameaholic dot Com detailing known console commands in Raven's just-released Soldier of Fortune Demo (story). Starting with how to enable the console in the first place, the page offers a list of cheat codes, controls, WON commands, other multiplayer commands, and more.

New XQF

A new version 0.9.3 of the XQF Quake server browser and launcher for Unix/X11 is now available. XQF can help you find Quake, QuakeWorld, Quake II, and Quake III Arena servers, serving as a front-end to Steve Jankowski's QStat. Described as a "New stable version," this release offers new autoconf support, rewritten master list handling code, Debian/Linux support, and bug fixes. Thanks Jacek Fedoryñski.

SoF Demo Feedback & Troubleshooting

Raven's John Scott added a fourth installment to his string of .plan updates about troubleshooting the just-released Soldier of Fortune Demo with a tip on how to sort the server list produced by the demo's in-game browser. Also, Raven's Rick Johnson added a note to his .plan in case it was necessary to point out they are eager for feedback on the new demo:

With the demo being out now, we would love to hear your Comments. Either Positive or Negative, just be descriptive, as one line comments don't really help us too much. For general questions, comments, etc, go to the SoF Message Board on that page.

Starlancer Screenshots

There are a pair of new Starlancer screenshots on Active Windows showing off the upcoming space combat game from Digital Anvil. In addition to the in-game shots, they've also got a shot up of the box art, and a list of key features planned for the game.

Arcanum Screenshots

The World of Arcanum (this is the English version of the native German site) has updated their gallery with more new screenshots showing off the isometric role-playing offered in Arcanum, currently under construction at Troika Games. Many of these are full-sized version of shots previously only available as thumbnails.

Tech Bits

Q3A Gibstats Support

An update to the unofficial Gibstats Quake III Arena support is available on Fuzzy's Logic. The new feature in the small download is the addition of Q3A CTF support, and there are also a few more new fixes (grenade suicides weren't showing up in the Grenade Launcher stats, BFG kills weren't being displayed correctly) to the full Q3A support for the Gibstats logfile parsing utility that currently officially only supports the Q3A Demo/Test releases.

Reviews

etc.

  • I.am/TFC has posted a collection of "a few dozen of the best recorded videos of tips, tricks, secrets, and techniques that are essential to keeping your team one step ahead of the enemy in Team Fortress Classic."...
  • Pixel Obscura on loonygames looks at The Wheel of Time and Unreal Tournament cinematics, through the eyes of their resident film critic...
  • Word from the folks at Game Commander is that an SE version their voice command and control software for games will be included in the bundle with Soundblaster Live! Platinum sound card...
  • Authors interested in the source code for the Jumbot for Half-Life should head over to Rich's Project Warehouse, where there's a deadline of February 5, after which requests for the source will no longer be honored...
  • 3D Realms Entertainment Web Site has a new table for download for Balls of Steel, their provocatively-named 3D pinball game. On a barely-related note, an updated version of the Crazy Marbles freeware OpenGL accelerated homage to Marble Madness is now available...

Out of the Blue

Hey, look at that... as I write these words, my SoF demo download completed! After over nine hours of downloading, Windows popped up a dialog box in the middle of my screen saying the file was being "copied" to my drive for the next 15 seconds or so, with a nice healthy "cancel" button in the middle. I can't imagine how unhappy I would have been had I been typing away at that moment and managed to cancel that process, but luckily that didn't happen (still gives me shivers to think about it). Is that ever a "feature" that could backfire! I seem to have stirred up some activity with that mention of RGB3, from what I've seen, some of the key players will be telling their tales in that article mentioned yesterday, and The Clan Rangers News reports: "The Rangers are proud to announce that we are finally releasing a high quality demo version of the highly anticipated Ranger Gone Bad 3. We are looking to release this innovative production sometime this weekend." Go figure!

Link of the Day: Y5B - The Year 5 Billion Problem. Hey, it's real, and pretending it isn't will not make it go away. Thanks David "D:)Man" Van Meter.
Story of the Day: Goat to Be Hurled From Belfry Is Spared. We like to avoid "oddly enough" and other categorized-as-odd news, but as I said when posting the original to which this is a follow-up, we'll go for any story about goat-tossing. And this one has a happy ending too.
Image of the Day: Womb Raider. It's taken that long to get around to Lara satires that don't include nudity. Thanks Ant.



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