Archived News:
Edited chat logs of yesterday's multi-developer space sim chat are now online in HTML
format and in plain
text, with the HTML version color-coded to make for easier reading. Games
covered in the chat are Deep Space Nine, Klingon Academy, Millennium 3, Parsec,
Silent Space, Starlancer, and Terminus.
Strength of Character
on GameSpy.com is an essay by Valve Designer Marc Laidlaw to wrap-up their
Developer Week. The article talks about character creation in games, going into some of what's behind Half-Life's Gordon Freeman, at one point paraphrasing F. Scott
Fitzgerald on the difficulty in creating a character (I'm
guessing game designers usually just use Fitzgerald as an inspiration at the
bar): F. Scott Fitzgerald
said something to the effect that if you try to create a "real"
person, you'll be lucky to end up with a character. But if you try only to
create a character, you'll end up with a caricature…something two-dimensional
at best. We must aim high. It's a challenge that many of us take seriously.
There's a 16 page Quake
III Arena strategy guide on GNN offering separate sections on general
deathmatch strategies, one-on-one strategies, and weapon strategies. Also, GameSurge's
Quake III Arena weapons guide is up, just concentrating on the work of Q
Branch. Finally, One
Sick Team's TimeDemo Tutorial shows how to benchmark your system using
Unreal Tournament.
Much to the consternation of some U9 fans, a post to the Ultima IX Ascension Discussion Forums
announces Origin "will be closing the Official Ultima Ascension Boards,
leaving the Technical Solutions forum, the Technical Issues forum, and the
Spoilers and Hints forum open as read-only for those who can benefit from the
information there." This move came just two days after the release of the
most recent patch for the game, though they say they "will be providing
solutions in (their) Technical Solutions forum" for software and driver
incompatibilities.
The Digital Paint
page has a new version 1.6 client update for Digital Paint's Paintball mod
for Quake II. The new release doesn't really alter gameplay, but rather adds
several new maps, one of which, Psychosity, has its own disclaimer warning about
side-effects.
ShellShock's Crater has a new
version of the Q3Offline utility that enables offline games of Quake III Arena
to be quickly set up with fully configurable map rotation and bots. The new
release adds a "bot editor" for creating new bots from existing models
and skins.
A new version 0.96B of Beryllium
for Quake III Arena is now available. This is a highly configurable server-side
modification that is described as "basically lots of mods rolled into one."
The new version includes an off-hand grappling hook, and various options allow
the flexibility to make it "an Instagib mod, a LowAmmo mod, or just plain
old Q3 without the campers."
Enough stuff to require a Stuff Accelerator™:
- Part II Of the FvF World
Q3A Programming Tutorial teaches how to modify the Plasma Gun to return
the planned FlameThrower to Quake III Arena.
- Calrathan's Quake3 Ladder Code
shows how to add a ladder to any Quake III Arena mod.
- A new version 1.31 of the AntiElvis' Half-Life Compilation Controller is
available on GracelessLand
and the Half-Life Editing Resource Center.
"The HLCC is of course that baby-butt smooth, but grandmotherly wise
map compiling front-end for Half-Life."
- Also on GracelessLand is
Mission Control Panel v0.1b, offering an update to this
Half-Life/Quake III Arena Development IDE that offers 24 different file
types for each game, allows mappers to use their favorite tools, and
provides drag-and-drop version control.
- A new version 0.7 of Nightrunner's Quake3 Animation Helper is now
available on the NightRunner for Quake3 Downloads
page. This is a plug-in for 3D Studio Max to speed up the process of Quake
III Arena character animation by switching between the animation sequences
in a model's animation.cfg file.
- TABUN SoftWare has some new
tutorials on Quake III Arena skinning.
The Man Or Mouse Tournaments has expanded to
most of Europe with ladders in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, UK, Netherlands,
Germany, France, with plans to introduce a Clanwar section later this week with
ladders, leagues and tournaments.
Today is Super Bowl Sunday, the Sabbath of marketing here in the US, a day when
fans and non-fans of American football subject themselves to what seems like a
12-hour broadcast. Amid star-studded song-and-dance routines and
multi-million-dollar ad campaign launches, they will manage to squeeze in the
NFL championship game. It's an interesting occasion: loonyboi is not a football
fan, and he tells me he will be attending a Super Bowl party that will be
completely populated by others likewise indifferent to the game, a fairly common
occurrence. And while TV viewers usually complain about commercials, the
broadcast of the big game is considered to be a showcase to debut new ad
campaigns, and in keeping with the bizarre nature of the whole event, newspaper reviews of
those ads are an
expected part of the annual event's recap. It was during the 1984 Super Bowl
that the famous "Big Brother" Macintosh ad aired, a one time showing,
that I won't say actually overshadowed the game, but I do wonder how many folks
who remember seeing that famed single commercial actually remember what teams played in the
game surrounding it.
Link of the Day: Live
Forever: Uploading the Human Brain, on Psychology Today Online. Thanks Ant.
Story of the Day: Ignorant
or lazy? You make the call. Related to yesterday's bank robber who wrote his
stick-up note on his personal check. Thanks willde.
Ok, it's a heli-sim, but it's free :-) Though not yet listed on the official site, GT Interactive has released a playable demo of KA-52 Team Alligator for download (86.9 MB), a simulation of the Russian assault helicopter developed by Simis. The demo contains several combat missions from the full game, and requires DirectX 7.0.
Raven's official Soldier of Fortune support FAQ has been restructured into a new format to put related information snugly into chapters, and it has also been updated with more tips and tricks for the recently released demo, as well as some general info on the game.
Sega to Publish Quake 3 for Dreamcast
on dreamcast.ign.com is a report that quotes Sega PR as confirming plans to
do a port of Quake III Arena for the Dreamcast. Thanks Jeremy Morgan. Here's a
little of what's known and a bit of speculation from the report: Additionally,
we're told that you can count on Q3A to feature Online multi-player as
one of the Dreamcast Network's flagship gaming titles. No information was
available as to who will be developing the game, but rumor has it it will be
handled by id themselves.
The Tectonic page has a new version
0.7 of the TecArena front-end for Quake III Arena offering a
new map cycle feature, and "enable cheats" option, an "enable
bots" option, as well as smaller changes and bug-fixes. In addition to the
new TecArena, a new version 0.8 of the BotPlugin for TecArena is also now
available.
There are some new The Rift screenshots on Gamer's Alliance Strategy
showing off gameplay from ThrushWave's upcoming 3D space RTS, accompanied by a
development update giving a few details about progress on the game.
On the occasion of today's fourth birthday of Duke Nukem 3D ( story), newly opened PlanetDuke has posted an interview with George Broussard, top-Duke at 3D Realms. George recalls his memories of the shareware release and how things took off from there, and looks ahead at the fourth installment in the series, Duke Nukem Forever. Here is a quote on the latter topic:
There are a ton of folks that are worried that Duke won't be Duke because you went to an engine that had no embedded ability to play with stuff. Give us some hints about interactivity -- can we play games within games? Pick stuff up? Move stuff around??
We spent most of our early programming efforts modifying and extending Unreal so it can handle an interactive game like Duke Forever. I can say with relative certainty that Duke Forever will be the most interactive FPS to date. Bar none. If something exists in the world you will be able to do something with it in some way. The game will reward the player for using items and exploring. Without going into too much specific detail, let's just say that the stuff you mentioned above could be the tip of the iceberg.
There is a brief interview with Blizzard on Computer Games Online, talking to some of the people behind the Warcraft and Diablo series. Topics discussed are their design philosophy, technology versus gameplay, and similar general issues.
Gamers Central has posted a hands-on preview of The Rift, a space-combat RTS currently being scaffolded at ThrushWave Technology. In similar mold, but set in the Star Trek: The Next Generation universe, is Star Trek: Armada of which Gamecenter has posted a bunch of new screenshots and design sketches.
The official version of the Final Fantasy VIII demo has been released in the downloads section of the Final Fantasy VIII site ( Flash required). Thanks Shadowdane. The demo comes in two formats, a 27.5 MB standard version and a 68.6 MB full version with FMV sequences.
GameFan has posted a
new, hands-on preview of BioWare's MDK 2, which is based on a full build
of the game. Along with the preview are 27 new screenshots in case you need
some visual aids. MDK, as everyone knows, stands for Mysterious Dog Kidnappings.
GameSpot News has posted 9
new screenshots from Looking Glass Studios' upcoming game of sneaking, snooping
and skullduggery, Thief 2: The Metal Age.
PC.IGN has updated their Baldur's
Gate II Journal with part five of this ongoing look at the development of
the game. In this installment, Douglas Aver, the assistant producer explains
just what he does, including planning their QA phase, working on the buglist,
and all his other exciting duties. There's also some new screenshots if you
just want the visuals.
Also new at PC.IGN this morning is a
preview of Codename: Eagle, a new historical FPS title from Refraction Games
and TalonSoft, which aims to expand the genre by allowing you to commandeer
different vehicles, including tanks, motorcycles, and even biplanes.
The first beta release of Equilibrium,
a new point-based mod for Quake III Arena has been released, and is available
for download on
its official site, and features the first two gameplay modes, team deathmatch
and CTF, with two more to come in future releases.
Gamecenter has posted a
preview of Microsoft's massively multiplayer space opera Allegiance, which
is just chock full of new screenshots, as well as quotes from the game's developers.
Game-Interviews has posted an
interview with Jamie McNeely, the producer of O.R.B. at Strategy First,
featuring some new shots from the game as well. O.R.B. is an upcoming 3D real
time strategy game in the vein of Homeworld.
As reflected in Joe
Siegler's .plan update, today marks the fourth anniversary of the Duke
Nukem 3D shareware. Boy, is that strange to me. It feels like just yesterday
that my whole dorm floor went nuts over the game back in college. For the next few weeks you
could always hear "come get some" or any number of "Dukeisms"
coming out of somebody's room. Duke 3D was one of the last games of its type
that had a full shareware episode, and boy did we play the heck out of it. It
was a bit of a large download back then, but man did you get a lot from it.
It's a miracle I managed to graduate at all.
To celebrate Duke's anniversary, here are some Duke-related links of the day.
Enjoy!
Link of the Day: LameDuke.
A real piece of history here, the version of Duke that never was (originally
released on the first anniversary of the shareware release).
Bonus Link: The
Duke Nukem (PSX) Outtakes. A personal favorite from way back when.
Bonus Link 2: Duke
Nukem: Time to Grill. Hail to the chef, baby.
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